It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.
Having grown up in an authoritarian country, then having the internet basically force it to liberalize was a great feeling.
Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or "social" cause.
These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube dislike button or manifestv3.
This but much broader. One of the things that really bothers me is the suppression of non-US use of language (or, from the opposite perspective, the incentivisation of US-like language & conformance to US cultural norms).
Take Youtube "content-creators" as an example making a living from ad revenue: Aussie / Scottish other native-English-speaking contributors face "de-monetisation" for presenting their natural selves and instead are asked to present according to US cultural norms in order to use the platform. And this isn't unique to Google/Youtube - the same applies to content-moderation across the internet.
> Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide
Yep. Im wondering when will countries start preventing US tech platforms from enforcing US laws and US morals on the people of those countries.
And it seems these days, all nudity is automatically treated as pornographic. When I was a child, my parents took photos of me - clothed or not, I might be doing something silly or endearing and those photos were created, whether in the backyard or the bathtub, given to some guy in a kiosk to print, and placed in the family photo album.
I wonder if parents do the same these days, and if they share them online like how they used to pass around the family photo album?
> Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide.
The disturbing thing is that the hives of scum and villainy you find there are for the most part no more subversive than reddit in 2010. And they are actually fun which is more than I can say for _anything_ on the regular web.
"Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores."
I somewhat agree, but might characterize it as meeting the tightest western restrictions. I have tons of cookie pop-ups now that GDPR happened, but that doesn't really apply to the US. So the influence isn't fully unilateral. Considering the companies started in and are headquartered in the US, it makes sense they follow US regulations more closely.
>Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores.
Not to US social mores, to some weird averaged out amalgamation of Western social mores. In the US, firearms are very normal and a regular part of life, but try doing a YouTube stream or channel about them and you'll quickly find yourself "sanitized" anyway.
> If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service?
What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).
That's the part people forget about "utilities" and "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely because they know the exact identities, (and even locations), of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves, they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is X connected, (or even connecting), to.
We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.
Perhaps this is true, but this is all the more reason why giving social media sites the right to police free speech/expression is too much. Public discourse today happens online. The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. Telling people who don't like the current state of the mainstream web to find their own platform is like telling people who are unhappy with food prices to simply farm their own crops; it's not technically impossible, but there's more likely to be civil unrest before people start sowing seeds.
It is also very telling that when independent discussion platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat, wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take down their hosting or stop payment processors from working with them.
> You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that.
I used to agree with you, but watching Kiwi Farms get cut off from the internet has been pretty sobering.
You can sell whatever the heck you want for cash IRL regardless of how legal it is. But you have to interact with the banking system somehow regardless of whichever payment option you choose for your website. And that system wants to police what you sell. That's the problem.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.
to take a less extreme example, if you search for “shop-lifting techniques” on google, or any other modern content provider, you’ll - exclusively - find moral anodised stuff about catching criminals. if you go on old internet portals or archives, you’ll find edgy indie websites telling you naughty secrets
It's fairly easy to find instructions on how to make guns, bombs etc online. For example, if you search for "improvised munitions", you will find many copies of this floating around:
Or for something more oldschool, search for "expedient homemade firearms". I got my paperback a few years ago from Amazon, as well (sadly gone now, but some derivative works are still around if you look).
> now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy.
I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves.
Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court.
Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!
A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content.
So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
The reason I don't use Gab isn't "not enough censorship", it's because none of the people I want to talk to are on there.
I use Twitter because the people I like are on there. They often get banned for dumb reasons, and I'd prefer they didn't, but the general network effect of Twitter is strong enough that people will just make new accounts and/or avoid posting stufff that trips the censors.
Plus, as some other comments mention, Gab does not in fact "not delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court", their TOS[0] says they can ban you for posting obscenity. Why would I want to go on a website full of white-christian-nationalists if I can't send them goatse?
>Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!
I don't think this is the reason. I've never used Gab but Reddit 10-15 years ago was a lot more free than it is today and it was great. I'm sure there were some people who were displeased with moderation, but in general, most users enjoyed the freedom and diverse(in the real sense) communities that existed there. The change on Reddit and similar websites came from the top. There is no way to be sure about how they did it, but I'm certain it wasn't freely chosen by the users.
You cannot "show nuts" on Gab, from their ToS you may not:
Be obscene, sexually explicit or pornographic. Note that mere nudity e.g. as a form of protest or for educational/medical reasons will not fall foul of this rule.
I think you're misunderstanding. The problem is that payment processors will not do business with "unsavory" customers. It's not about curation or moderation, it's that any porn-adjacent business is locked out of the economy.
Me scrolling through gab won't make visa more accepting.
Falsely equating showing a harmless boob and hate speech, so typically intellectually dishonest.
This is the most disturbing about US's entendre of free speech...
Hate speech is not speech, banning it is not censorship.
What does sex have in common with the actively and directly harmful Garbage that people go on Gab for? Nothing if you're not a troll.
That is also false. It is a majority that chooses. The majority , also called a mob , has figured out that it's more profitable to weaponize their votes rather than increase human dignity.
Unless you're a Judeo-Bolshevik, of course. If I wanted the Gab experience I could just browse /pol/ (I don't), but at least 4chan has other interesting boards.
I think you are failing to distinguish between three possibilities.
1. Most people like censorship, or at least certain kinds of censorship. They don't use Gab because Gab doesn't censor the things they want censored.
2. Most people don't want to be in a forum that's all crazy evil people all the time. They don't use Gab because they think most of the people on Gab are crazy and/or evil.
3. Most people just want to use whatever social network their friends and family use. Maybe also other people they admire or find interesting and want to follow despite not knowing them. They don't use Gab because hardly anyone they know or admire is on Gab and everyone they know is on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever.
You are claiming it's all about #1. I actually suspect #3 is much the most important effect. The other two may look alike but they are different and I think #2 is much bigger than #1.
A hypothetical version of Gab that didn't censor white supremacists, QAnon groupies, people who think the COVID-19 vaccines will enable Bill Gates to control you with 5G networking, etc., but that somehow wasn't (perceived to be) dominated by those people might actually be pretty attractive. It probably still wouldn't get much use because everyone's on other social networks and no one is on Gab, but it would be in with a chance of success.
But, of course, if everyone else is running full-scale witch hunts and you make a space that doesn't do that, then all the witches will go there, whether or not that was your goal. I think in Gab's case it was actually their goal, though. They may say that they're all about freedom of speech, and maybe they believe that, but I'm pretty sure that what motivated the creation of Gab was wanting freedom for certain particular kinds of speech.
(Note: wanting a space not dominated by X is the same thing as wanting X to be censored, even if it turns out that not censoring X inevitably leads to the space being dominated by X. Someone who leaps off a tall building because he delusionally thinks he can fly doesn't want to fall to the ground and die. Someone who tries to avoid accidental death and fatal diseases doesn't want to suffer gradual decay as a result of aging. Etc.)
Anyway: if you want to argue that Gab's lack of success shows that people want censorship, you need to show some actual evidence that it's #1 rather than #2 and #3 that causes it, and so far you haven't.
The worrying thing is that these companies are not just applying the law but going beyond that and dictating additional rules and decisions that are theirs. Apple does not like adult content. It does not want to be associated with it not because it is illegal but because it makes them look dirty by association, which is bad for business; or so they seem to believe. So, they are being much stricter than is legally necessary.
They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process.
Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be?
The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business.
In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.
No it isn't. Discriminating against certain classes of people is illegal. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against individuals based on their behavior.
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture.
Here are some examples...
1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be.
2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.
3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.
> "About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them."
This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff.
In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.
> 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
Honestly, this was not different in my youth. When we found access to the internet, we of course looked for weird stuff (for those who remember: for example rotten.com; I was rather disturbed by it and learned my lesson that you shouldn't click on every link that you see on websites).
I can tell you how this transformed me: if you have seen the early free spirit of the early web in your formative years, you become deeply suspicious of the political attempts to censor the internet - for example to "protect the children". This is what the authorities really fear: that people don't believe that this is all for their best.
> Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.
Citation needed. Unless you're taking about CSAM shared on the dark web, I seriously doubt that sex slaves account for any significant portion of pornography. The only way I can see this being true is with a very wide definition of "sex slave" that includes someone doing porn to pay for rent.
#3 was no less true in the 2000s - I can attest to that myself.
> 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change.
Why? As a child who grew up either the free Internet of the early 2000s I can tell you it does far less harm than thing like going to school where a teacher dislikes you. If you're worried about kids getting an inaccurate impression from porn that take them aside and show them real sex tapes.
I had unfettered internet access at 10. I picked up programming and hacking by age 12, watched fetish porn at 14, figured out Tor and FreeNet, then got into (learning about!) clandestine drug synthesis by age 16, rhodium and the hive and all that. Very formative years.
Sure, I got myself into sketchy situations, but I wasn't at risk of getting murdered. The worst that would have happened is being emotionally scarred or going to juvy. A good exchange, for me.
For 3 - kids have been on the internet for a while now. If anything there was much more of a moral panic about it in the 90s.
I think point 1 is key - the internet is a bigger place, which also means things get more specialized and separated. You dont stumble across specialized content as much anymore, you have to go looking instead.
Does "female presenting nipples" === porn? It was a SCJ who said, "I'll know it (i.e., porn) when I see it". Also, it's a double-standard to say men can have free-will to present their bodies as they see fit but women can not.
Says who btw. Does that include 3D porn ? AI generated porn? American prudishness is the problem, as well as all the backwards religious societies which are now more dispersed around the world than ever and support it. I think it's important to remember that liberalism is what brought technological progress to the west, not the inward-looking repressive attitudes. And that includes bodily liberalism as well.
The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn.
The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.
Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is torrents as it’s always been.
Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX.
Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
FedNow might be able to provide another avenue, if and when it launches, even though i'm not a big fan of the gov being more involved, but private sector has a monopoly and are being needlessly moralistic and essentially censoring both political and cultural movements through their control.
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we
have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare
Visa and MC are by far the most powerful forces at work here. You can start an online business without the others, but you can't do it without getting paid.
Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards.
It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money.
People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.
I'd tweak it slightly. Either you need MC/Visa or you need ad revenue. Though if your business is one the duopoly won't touch I dunno how many advertisers with real money will touch you.
So why not just up processing fees on those transactions to the point that they're profitable. If Visa/MC made a new processing code that all adult platforms were required to use, and charged a 10% fee, they would make plenty of money. I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration.
“So long as it’s legal” is an interesting caveat to universal service. Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. It seems like a true “utility” internet company would only take down content on receiving a court order.
It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.
>It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
>The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.
Sure, but more of the internet is sanitized compared to 10-15 years ago, which is likely what they meant. More restrictions in place over more domains. Couple that with the fact that more people spend their time on fewer sites these days than they did in 2007, and it's hard to really argue that the internet most people experience isn't more content restricted.
Freedom of choice aside, there is also a shocking lack of awareness that a major factor in the rise of the internet is that it wasn't like traditional media. There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. that would never gain traction with the legacy entertainment industry. There is no point in using youtube or twitter if it's all just clips from mainstream tv or shittakes from established pundits that I can see on repeat on cable all day anyways.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is propaganda and cultural myth.
Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech.
Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1].
Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law.
A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself.
[0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.
[1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
[2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.
Copyright only hurts the small creators it was intended to protect. Hell, I work in a creative field and in order to get employment that isn't soliciting freelance work on a project-by-project basis, most companies heavily push creative people to sign away all rights to the things they make on or off company time. I've only successfully gotten a company to drop onerous IP language once. The other times I've walked away from what are otherwise dream jobs.
> But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
Have they really though? I guess plantiffs might find it easier to get damages out of Facebook or Google, but it still seems to be very easy to get stuff taken down.
I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms have found different providers.
they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now).
Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.
Right - Visa, Mastercard, Apple, and Google are walled gardens and should, in my personal opinion, be held to a somewhat higher standard in terms of free speech (Yes, I know that the first amendment doesn't apply to companies. I'm just saying how I think things ought to be, not how they are). It's unreasonable to expect consumers to get a new credit card or buy a new phone to use your service. But companies routinely choose alternate DNS providers and lots of people buy things that aren't on Amazon.
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy.
5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services.
Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized.
Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies.
Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.
I am a “personal cognitive freedom across contexts should be protected, full stop.” For example, that means opt-in social healthcare should be a thing that resources are provided for. A minority in charge saying “no” to the public “opting in” spending agency on providing free healthcare is living under a police state mindset; forcing poor who have no real choice into illness, empowering death is freedom! It’s a twisted joke to not care as a society and say we individually chose this; individually we’re beholden to the group think, how neighborly of you all. That we should be expected to spend our time only on profitable (a form of political correctness serving official economic policy ) application of agency is authoritarian, and conveniently coupled to maintenance of financiers past investments.
Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference.
Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone?
There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces.
Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.
You really expect the government to pass laws that force companies to allow porn?
Did you miss this part?
> There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
I've got a teenage cousin with a dark sense of humour.
The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.
It's not just prudish, it's down to legality as well. Age verification is a big thing there. It's trivial for a minor to post their junk online (please don't ask me how I know) outside of parental oversight; everything has a camera and is internet connected these days. Who dares take responsibility?
Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw.
Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke.
I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.
At least in the UK there seems to be some push back. PayPal recently cancelled (but re-instated after pressure) [1] the Free Speech Union [2]. This seems to have got the attention of quite a few MPs who are looking to pass laws banning politically-motivated cancellations.
First off, you kinda have wrong notion of "utilities or publishers", there is no such distinction, at least, not in a sense that would put finance companies into "impartial utilities" category. KYC is why somebody is allowed to be a finance company, they are required to be partial.
Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.
For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet.
But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly.
If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.
> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws
In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical.
Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with.
Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.
>"If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal."
Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.
It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content.
Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.
You can still buy a domain and happily host it in thousands of places that will allow you to put up anything you want, including your own home. However you have a point about utilities/publishers.
I would argue it's laws that make them behave this way. Of course profit-seeking companies would like to profit off everything. But they also don't want to risk be sued or investigated.
A lot of these laws are being pushed by religious-affiliated anti-porn groups that rebranded as anti-sex trafficking because it's more effective for them to make that argument.
It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship.
It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned.
Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs.
But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences!
All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense.
And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad.
A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.
And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed.
It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”.
Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.
The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable.
You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.
I can't tell one way or the other if people have forgotten that SESTA/FOSTA passed in 2018.
All of this is consequence of that law working as intended (not as described; it's supposed to stop human trafficking, but those supporting it made no bones about their position that if it chilled all online pornographic content, they didn't care).
All of these companies pivoted hard because hosting previously-legal content may now be a federal crime, and nobody wants to get dragged through the mud of that legal case. Until and unless that changes, this is the new status quo in the United States (and therefore, much of the Internet).
Matt on Tumblr seems to have missed that even if a company does all the things on his list, their owners could still end up in prison if they are aware that any pornography on their sites was "facilitating sex trafficking," which is an extremely broad category (is someone using racy pictures as advertisement for face-to-face meetups? Oops, go to jail; Section 230 protections were specifically stripped out for that case and if it violates state law in the state you're operating in, the state the poster is in, or the state the viewer is in, you're now liable as the site operator!).
This mentality change goes far beyond porn. A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible.
Now it seems like every headline about social media companies attracts a lot of comments demanding regulations, restrictions, and laws to crack down on... something. Even here on HN it's common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry calls for Facebook to be "banned" for kids or for lawmakers to step in and regulate.
Meanwhile, journalists and politicians love to amplify stories about tech companies doing harm to kids. Allowing, or even encouraging, something like porn on your platform is an open invitation for these journalists to put you in their sights. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, so it's a constant game of companies tightening their standards.
I'm an individual who's opinions on unfettered anonymous speech have changed over the years, so I'll give my take.
I was a "free speech absolutist" in the early 00s, which was the "default" on places like Slashdot, and later on places like Reddit and HN. The reason I changed my opinion is that I was generally surprised by the amount of real harm that can be caused by the way technology can amplify false or harmful content. Specific examples:
1. I was actually surprised by the amount of glee people would take in online harassment, things like r/jailbait and fatpeoplehate. I believe that the social norms that would have prevented the proliferation of this content "in the real world" were ineffective in the anonymous, online world.
2. I was surprised by the amount of laughable BS that got real, widespread traction, stuff like QAnon.
3. Regardless of your politics, interference from foreign powers in democratic governments is now a much more realistic and effective attack scenario.
So I guess the short of it is that some "axioms" that I used to believe about free speech (e.g. "the truth will always bubble to the top in open debate") I no longer believe to be true in the way that technology can "hack" people's emotions. I definitely don't know what the right solution is, but I think that unfettered anonymous free speech on the Internet will lead to a type of society that scares me.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I have been mostly just floored by #2. The lack of critical thinking ability amongst the general population is just shocking.
The fact that social media companies optimized for screen time just exacerbated the problem.
I would venture that it is not that your opinion has changed but that the fabric of people engaging online has changed.
Free speech absolutism worked 20 years ago when you just hosted a PHP message board on a server in Iceland or Romania and a few hundreds of curious people got together around a specific topic or hobby.
The problem now is 1) the volume of people online. 2) the normal distribution of people online (no longer just the curious one).
Thanks for writing this comment. I mostly disagree with it (although I struggle to formulate my objections), but you summarized this change in attitude very well and helped me understand it. Even if I disagree on points, your argument makes a lot of sense to me.
I think your position is a pretty reasonable take but I’ll try to take it on as someone who still has the early 00s mentality.
I think the primary argument against it basically boils down to the fact that the internet hasn’t actually changed things as much as most people of our generation who grew up with it think, and many of the changes are better, not worse.
1) For harassment, it would be hard to do worse than the harassment we had in the past. Open racism has certainly declined since the 60s/70s. There was significantly more actual violence against people during that time than today.
2) Misinformation was certainly more prevelent in the past. Did you know that in 1970 30% of Americans thought the moon landing was faked? The number now is much much lower and has only gone down.
3) The idea that foreign powers were influencing America was certainly a lot bigger in the past. The “red scare” was a thing. People were mistrusting of thier neighbours and accusations of being communist abounded.
I think the main thing the internet has done is surface the craziness so that more people know about the fewer actual number of crazies.
Fear is never a good guide, and leads straight to authoritarianism, every time. We need a rational approach not ever-more-emotion.
The 230 protections have done more damage to the world than good. Platforms should be responsible against horrible things, but the laws should also be lax enough to allow platforms to remove the worst without being liable to go to jail every time someone shows a nipple. Our legal/tech system is dysfunctional by its ancient nature and the easy/populist politics around censorship.
> I'm an individual who's opinions on unfettered anonymous speech have changed over the years, so I'll give my take.
Alternative take: you never supported free speech and were just upset Bush era policies censored porn, gays and contraception. Once those things stopped being censored you stopped caring.
I'd imagine the people who are now pro-censorship would turn back to free speech zealots if we banned all mentions of homosexuality online like they have in Russia.
Plus the fact that social networks today are intentionally designed around a dopamine reaction feedback loop.
They’re hacking your emotions as you describe, but they’re also hacking you chemically to get you addicted, which is why I no longer support giving young people access to those social media sites.
In all due respect nobody needs an explanation for such flip flopping. It’s merely human nature. We all want freedom for ourselves, but not our enemies who will use their freedom against us. You have become an authoritarian, which is the natural reaction. It’s what most humans default to when they are scared.
> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space
Honestly, in my opinion having such a public image can also be a market advantage for such a company. For example in its early days, Reddit attracted a huge initial audience by being perceived this way and being perceived as a very pro-free-speech website.
This was easier back before the proliferation of increasingly niche subreddits. It didn't even have them to begin with. A policy that works when the most niche sub is /r/technology doesn't hold up so well once subs practicing free speech increasingly come into conflict over what speech they consider acceptable. People who genuinely believe in unrestricted free speech are few and far between and tend to find some exceptions are reasonable once they see how bad people can be.
Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here.
Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the service, and they killed the effort.
> "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter] concluded
> Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here
Journalists cherry pick to create an incredibly misleading impression, this is true whether it's politics, floridaman, science or lifestyle.
They also encourage people to ignore scale, which actually really really matters. When comparing two outcomes you need to multiply the number of events times by how bad/good they are to get a total to compare, and that number is ignored by journalists.
> Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here.
Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation.
And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.
> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space
This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no actual bottoms are allowed.
> A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible.
Some of those people have kids and stopped saying racial slurs and just grew up. You're talking about forums that were overwhelming inhabited by 15-22 year olds.
We want regulation for data privacy and user freedom, not for banning content someone somewhere finds offensive. We want surveillance capitalism and anti-monopoly regulation.
Gotta be careful to distinguish between censorship and anti-trust. I very much want Meta to be regulated, or better yet, broken up - not because it "platforms Nazis" or whatever, but because it's one of the monopolists that controls a huge chunk of the Net.
I actually wonder sometimes if the real reason why the tech monopolies aren't busted is because the threat of anti-trust is a very effective tool to get them to censor things without having to go through legislation.
This is conflating two very different issues around social media regulation in my opinion. I won’t claim to know “HN’s” opinion because it will likely be as varied as its users, but there are two main camps in this area:
1. Regulate data privacy and tracking
2. Regulate porn/liability risks
The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps.
The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site.
You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful.
I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image.
Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way.
This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.
The real story here is how we let mobile phones become completely closed and privative environments, and how credit card companies got into politics for some reason.
Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public. Even bitcoin is 13 years old and I know nobody getting into it for utilitarian reasons unless they are already into it for investing.
> Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public.
I disagree. It seems like if anything, it's the public of today that has let down the hackers. In all honesty though, it's probably more just, "people gonna people."
You used to have to -want- to be a hacker, and connectivity much less the processing power to receive it was not guaranteed. I had to mow lawns to get a ride to the library to read dusty Bell UNIX surplus manuals. You were lucky to even meet someone other than Dewey D who knew the same words or the nature of what you were doing.
Consequently, when you met someone online, it didn't matter what kind of weirdo they were. You knew that when you were in certain spaces that anybody there had some special something and that kinship bridged all gaps and mismatches. Those friendships were forever and we didn't even know eachother's names or faces. That's not guaranteed now.
Now everyone has an apollo mission's worth of compute on their wrist/pocket and the swill is so sweet nobody's hungry. If you extrapolate the current situation to other events in history, we're headed for danger and that's a good thing, we need that struggle.
"Crises precipitate change", Deltron3030 was right.
p.s. don't say 'mainframe' say 'cloud', you're all set.
Credit card companies didn't get into politics, politics got into credit card companies. The USG (correctly) identified Visa and Mastercard as the "choke point" that would allow them to take action against things they dislike in ways that would be unconstitutional if they did it directly.
This is also, I think, a reflection of American values and culture on the internet and so also a failure of other countries to own more of the internet/tech world. Other countries (especially European) are far less bothered by nudity and adult content.
Mobile apps are so bloated and intrusive these days that I vastly prefer the web app version of most social media sites even when they're feature limited like Facebook.
Originally I switched to using home screen bookmarks to save some storage on a cheap iPhone but now I can't go back.
I wonder how long it will be until a popular social media site avoids the app stores completely due to content and payment restrictions.
If you look at the timing of these decisions, it's pretty clear that that yeah it's risk based, but the risks are political. It's only a week between this op-ed calling on the credit card companies to drop Pornhub and them following through on it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
There was a flurry of congressional bills specifically citing that article at the time. (Here's one for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-introduced-criminalizin...) I can't find one that specifically threatens the payment processors, most go after the sites or their hosting providers, but the payment processors probably had the sense to realize they were in the blast radius and that it was best to pre-emptively self regulate.
I'm certain the reason CC companies want to drop adult services is because of the vastly increased risk of charge backs, but I suspect they'd cast a wider net if not for politics. Absent the risk they'd be happy to pocket the cash, but with it public opinion gives them an out
Someone asserted to me that porn purchases have a really horrific chargeback rate, and that's the main reason credit card companies are against them. It sounds at least superficially plausible.
The credit card companies had a point. By transacting with platforms that openly didn’t care about selling access to content of unwilling, exploited, and underage people, the payment processors opened themselves up to liability and moral guilt. There is a difference between well moderated platforms and platforms that do a halfassed job and pretend that’s ok.
never touched any of the mobile platforms (i did a bit, but quickly dropped) . It's possible to make money just on the web. Don't drink the AAPL+GOOG koolaid
One problem that's perhaps underdiscussed is that all of this is coming from an entirely US-centric world view. In Europe, for instance, we are generally less paranoid about nudity, I don't think that the notorious "nipplegate" halftime show incident back in 2004 would have caused any uproar over here, perhaps bemusement.
But because the "world wide" web is really a "US-American" web at its heart, we now have to adhere to whatever standards are en vogue there today.
This is perhaps the weirdest thing about American moral values. Everything from ads to performances are oversexualised as hell but all hell comes down when someone actually pulls off their clothes. I've seen dresses that are closer to wearable nipple covers than an article of clothing on TV and some music videos contain more grinding than the average porn movie, but show a nip slip and you're in for a world of trouble.
There's an absurd focus on the female nipple specifically. Someone should create a service that censors female nipples by replacing them with male nipples so they can be posted on social media and other platforms without any issues.
I've always been puzzled how in movies on TV in the USA, they'll air brush nipples, cleavage and butt cracks away... in the same scene that someone is being gruesomely murdered with blood spurting and entrails hanging out. It makes no sense that nudity is too dangerous for children to see, but desensitizing them to violence and gore is OK.
Our culture is biased in ways that helped it survive harder times.
The bloodlust is easy to explain. The tribe better at war survives. Veneration of honorable warriors runs deep in our veins. Sales for Top Gun, Marvel movies, action games continue to soar.
The puritanical outlook developed to create stable monogamous families. That bit of artifice is dissolving now. More polygamy means the top men hoarding reproductive access, which historically leads to instability. Sexual socialism was an interesting run, but with the demise of religion, I'm not sure how we could save it.
Isn't this some variation on the idea that as something gets "successful" it becomes shitty? I'm sure there are private corners of the internet where lots of people are going and showing nuts, that by definition most people don't know about, allowing more people than in 2007 or whatever to share what they want. But the internet is also now completely dominated by the blandness of success, so what we see are the successes that have been forced to sell out to the complainers and pearl clutches (there's an associated name I can't remember).
(Incidentally, this is a reason I've argued that the facebook metaverse will suck. It is never going to have some halcyon days as a cool site before success ruins it. It's coming out of the box with people worrying about "groping" and whatnot in a way that will force it to suck by design because everything will be about "safety" and the like, before anything good takes hold. See also the Zune)
I distinctly remember reading Kurt Cobain’s journal collection hardcover and there was an observation that bothered him:
With success, the crowds at the shows started to change, eventually to the point Kurt lamented “why are these people here? these are the people who beat us up in high school.”
Readit News
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.
Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or "social" cause.
These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube dislike button or manifestv3.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_State...
Take Youtube "content-creators" as an example making a living from ad revenue: Aussie / Scottish other native-English-speaking contributors face "de-monetisation" for presenting their natural selves and instead are asked to present according to US cultural norms in order to use the platform. And this isn't unique to Google/Youtube - the same applies to content-moderation across the internet.
Yep. Im wondering when will countries start preventing US tech platforms from enforcing US laws and US morals on the people of those countries.
I wonder if parents do the same these days, and if they share them online like how they used to pass around the family photo album?
Ironically, that set of jurisdictions includes all US national parks... See, for instance, https://www.tripsavvy.com/visiting-limantour-beach-1478617 - it's a lack of federal laws against public nudity.
The disturbing thing is that the hives of scum and villainy you find there are for the most part no more subversive than reddit in 2010. And they are actually fun which is more than I can say for _anything_ on the regular web.
I somewhat agree, but might characterize it as meeting the tightest western restrictions. I have tons of cookie pop-ups now that GDPR happened, but that doesn't really apply to the US. So the influence isn't fully unilateral. Considering the companies started in and are headquartered in the US, it makes sense they follow US regulations more closely.
Not to US social mores, to some weird averaged out amalgamation of Western social mores. In the US, firearms are very normal and a regular part of life, but try doing a YouTube stream or channel about them and you'll quickly find yourself "sanitized" anyway.
Probably because a lot of kids use these platforms aka social networks.
Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service?
What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).
Wouldn't all payment processors and Cloudflare qualify for this in certain ways?
We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.
You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.
It is also very telling that when independent discussion platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat, wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take down their hosting or stop payment processors from working with them.
The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are not allowed to operate'.
At any substantial scale at all, these are true:
- If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website.
- If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered.
- If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid.
We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is illegitimate.
I used to agree with you, but watching Kiwi Farms get cut off from the internet has been pretty sobering.
Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TM_31-210_Improvised_Munitions...
And if you wanted that on paper - or on your Kindle - Amazon is happy to oblige:
https://www.amazon.com/Improvised-Munitions-Handbook-TM-210/...
Similarly, for homemade guns, there's e.g. FOSSCAD (and there are many forks of that repo on GitHub even):
https://fosscad.org/
Or for something more oldschool, search for "expedient homemade firearms". I got my paperback a few years ago from Amazon, as well (sadly gone now, but some derivative works are still around if you look).
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves.
Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court.
Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!
A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content.
So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
I use Twitter because the people I like are on there. They often get banned for dumb reasons, and I'd prefer they didn't, but the general network effect of Twitter is strong enough that people will just make new accounts and/or avoid posting stufff that trips the censors.
Plus, as some other comments mention, Gab does not in fact "not delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court", their TOS[0] says they can ban you for posting obscenity. Why would I want to go on a website full of white-christian-nationalists if I can't send them goatse?
[0] https://gab.com/about/tos
I don't think this is the reason. I've never used Gab but Reddit 10-15 years ago was a lot more free than it is today and it was great. I'm sure there were some people who were displeased with moderation, but in general, most users enjoyed the freedom and diverse(in the real sense) communities that existed there. The change on Reddit and similar websites came from the top. There is no way to be sure about how they did it, but I'm certain it wasn't freely chosen by the users.
Be obscene, sexually explicit or pornographic. Note that mere nudity e.g. as a form of protest or for educational/medical reasons will not fall foul of this rule.
Me scrolling through gab won't make visa more accepting.
Hate speech is not speech, banning it is not censorship.
What does sex have in common with the actively and directly harmful Garbage that people go on Gab for? Nothing if you're not a troll.
That is also false. It is a majority that chooses. The majority , also called a mob , has figured out that it's more profitable to weaponize their votes rather than increase human dignity.
1. Most people like censorship, or at least certain kinds of censorship. They don't use Gab because Gab doesn't censor the things they want censored.
2. Most people don't want to be in a forum that's all crazy evil people all the time. They don't use Gab because they think most of the people on Gab are crazy and/or evil.
3. Most people just want to use whatever social network their friends and family use. Maybe also other people they admire or find interesting and want to follow despite not knowing them. They don't use Gab because hardly anyone they know or admire is on Gab and everyone they know is on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever.
You are claiming it's all about #1. I actually suspect #3 is much the most important effect. The other two may look alike but they are different and I think #2 is much bigger than #1.
A hypothetical version of Gab that didn't censor white supremacists, QAnon groupies, people who think the COVID-19 vaccines will enable Bill Gates to control you with 5G networking, etc., but that somehow wasn't (perceived to be) dominated by those people might actually be pretty attractive. It probably still wouldn't get much use because everyone's on other social networks and no one is on Gab, but it would be in with a chance of success.
But, of course, if everyone else is running full-scale witch hunts and you make a space that doesn't do that, then all the witches will go there, whether or not that was your goal. I think in Gab's case it was actually their goal, though. They may say that they're all about freedom of speech, and maybe they believe that, but I'm pretty sure that what motivated the creation of Gab was wanting freedom for certain particular kinds of speech.
(Note: wanting a space not dominated by X is the same thing as wanting X to be censored, even if it turns out that not censoring X inevitably leads to the space being dominated by X. Someone who leaps off a tall building because he delusionally thinks he can fly doesn't want to fall to the ground and die. Someone who tries to avoid accidental death and fatal diseases doesn't want to suffer gradual decay as a result of aging. Etc.)
Anyway: if you want to argue that Gab's lack of success shows that people want censorship, you need to show some actual evidence that it's #1 rather than #2 and #3 that causes it, and so far you haven't.
They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process.
Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be?
The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business.
In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.
No it isn't. Discriminating against certain classes of people is illegal. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against individuals based on their behavior.
It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture.
Here are some examples...
1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be.
2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.
3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.
This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff.
In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.
Honestly, this was not different in my youth. When we found access to the internet, we of course looked for weird stuff (for those who remember: for example rotten.com; I was rather disturbed by it and learned my lesson that you shouldn't click on every link that you see on websites).
I can tell you how this transformed me: if you have seen the early free spirit of the early web in your formative years, you become deeply suspicious of the political attempts to censor the internet - for example to "protect the children". This is what the authorities really fear: that people don't believe that this is all for their best.
Citation needed. Unless you're taking about CSAM shared on the dark web, I seriously doubt that sex slaves account for any significant portion of pornography. The only way I can see this being true is with a very wide definition of "sex slave" that includes someone doing porn to pay for rent.
#3 was no less true in the 2000s - I can attest to that myself.
They are two different things. Did you mean "sex slaves in porn"?
Also, any kind of slave is a problem. You don't need to qualify it.
Either you believe in an open internet or you don't. Either you're with us, or you're against us.
Why? As a child who grew up either the free Internet of the early 2000s I can tell you it does far less harm than thing like going to school where a teacher dislikes you. If you're worried about kids getting an inaccurate impression from porn that take them aside and show them real sex tapes.
Sure, I got myself into sketchy situations, but I wasn't at risk of getting murdered. The worst that would have happened is being emotionally scarred or going to juvy. A good exchange, for me.
I think point 1 is key - the internet is a bigger place, which also means things get more specialized and separated. You dont stumble across specialized content as much anymore, you have to go looking instead.
And whose responsibility is that? People start treating the internet like TV and radio, so we have to start sanitizing it like TV and radio?
Says who btw. Does that include 3D porn ? AI generated porn? American prudishness is the problem, as well as all the backwards religious societies which are now more dispersed around the world than ever and support it. I think it's important to remember that liberalism is what brought technological progress to the west, not the inward-looking repressive attitudes. And that includes bodily liberalism as well.
The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.
Including Google.
Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX.
Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards.
It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money.
People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.
It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.
This is not exactly true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-pri...
>The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.
Aka user-generated content.
Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech.
Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1].
Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law.
A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself.
[0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.
[1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
[2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.
Have they really though? I guess plantiffs might find it easier to get damages out of Facebook or Google, but it still seems to be very easy to get stuff taken down.
Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.
They're targeting the wrong layer. Regulate ISPs, and maybe big hosting companies like AWS and Cloudflare.
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
There is no “monopoly” on running servers and connecting them to the internet.
5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services.
Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized.
Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies.
Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.
Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference.
Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone?
There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces.
Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.
Did you miss this part?
> There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.
It's different now. I've been on 4chan a long time. It's a more sinister and hateful place than it was when I was a teenager.
I can't think of a single policy in which they disagreed or were not in lockstep. So it's like we have a single cabal, not 6
> how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.
When you accumulate money, your interest is to protect it, not to make more
Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw.
Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke.
I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.
The auto-mask feature in ios16 will do shirtless men, but not shirtless women.
I’m a photographer who shoots a lot of nudes, and I don’t use iCloud at all.
This is the local, on-device software editorializing over my art.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reins...
[2] https://freespeechunion.org/about/
Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.
For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet.
But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly.
If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.
In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical.
Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with.
Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.
Nowadays you have to take active measures to disconnect.
I'm not sure what to do about this.
Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.
Sometimes they win, sometimes their effort backfires like that elderly lady with a cliffside beach house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Be the change you want to see and stop using normie, silo'd sites
Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.
In theory yes, but maybe envision the lawmakers as a monopoly with vested interests and no accountability then project the result.
It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship.
It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned.
Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs.
But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences!
All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense.
And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad.
A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.
And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed.
It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”.
Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.
Why do you say this?
The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable.
You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.
All of this is consequence of that law working as intended (not as described; it's supposed to stop human trafficking, but those supporting it made no bones about their position that if it chilled all online pornographic content, they didn't care).
All of these companies pivoted hard because hosting previously-legal content may now be a federal crime, and nobody wants to get dragged through the mud of that legal case. Until and unless that changes, this is the new status quo in the United States (and therefore, much of the Internet).
Matt on Tumblr seems to have missed that even if a company does all the things on his list, their owners could still end up in prison if they are aware that any pornography on their sites was "facilitating sex trafficking," which is an extremely broad category (is someone using racy pictures as advertisement for face-to-face meetups? Oops, go to jail; Section 230 protections were specifically stripped out for that case and if it violates state law in the state you're operating in, the state the poster is in, or the state the viewer is in, you're now liable as the site operator!).
Now it seems like every headline about social media companies attracts a lot of comments demanding regulations, restrictions, and laws to crack down on... something. Even here on HN it's common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry calls for Facebook to be "banned" for kids or for lawmakers to step in and regulate.
Meanwhile, journalists and politicians love to amplify stories about tech companies doing harm to kids. Allowing, or even encouraging, something like porn on your platform is an open invitation for these journalists to put you in their sights. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, so it's a constant game of companies tightening their standards.
I was a "free speech absolutist" in the early 00s, which was the "default" on places like Slashdot, and later on places like Reddit and HN. The reason I changed my opinion is that I was generally surprised by the amount of real harm that can be caused by the way technology can amplify false or harmful content. Specific examples:
1. I was actually surprised by the amount of glee people would take in online harassment, things like r/jailbait and fatpeoplehate. I believe that the social norms that would have prevented the proliferation of this content "in the real world" were ineffective in the anonymous, online world.
2. I was surprised by the amount of laughable BS that got real, widespread traction, stuff like QAnon.
3. Regardless of your politics, interference from foreign powers in democratic governments is now a much more realistic and effective attack scenario.
So I guess the short of it is that some "axioms" that I used to believe about free speech (e.g. "the truth will always bubble to the top in open debate") I no longer believe to be true in the way that technology can "hack" people's emotions. I definitely don't know what the right solution is, but I think that unfettered anonymous free speech on the Internet will lead to a type of society that scares me.
The fact that social media companies optimized for screen time just exacerbated the problem.
Free speech absolutism worked 20 years ago when you just hosted a PHP message board on a server in Iceland or Romania and a few hundreds of curious people got together around a specific topic or hobby.
The problem now is 1) the volume of people online. 2) the normal distribution of people online (no longer just the curious one).
edit: no obvious solution though.
I think the primary argument against it basically boils down to the fact that the internet hasn’t actually changed things as much as most people of our generation who grew up with it think, and many of the changes are better, not worse.
1) For harassment, it would be hard to do worse than the harassment we had in the past. Open racism has certainly declined since the 60s/70s. There was significantly more actual violence against people during that time than today.
2) Misinformation was certainly more prevelent in the past. Did you know that in 1970 30% of Americans thought the moon landing was faked? The number now is much much lower and has only gone down.
3) The idea that foreign powers were influencing America was certainly a lot bigger in the past. The “red scare” was a thing. People were mistrusting of thier neighbours and accusations of being communist abounded.
I think the main thing the internet has done is surface the craziness so that more people know about the fewer actual number of crazies.
Fear is never a good guide, and leads straight to authoritarianism, every time. We need a rational approach not ever-more-emotion.
The 230 protections have done more damage to the world than good. Platforms should be responsible against horrible things, but the laws should also be lax enough to allow platforms to remove the worst without being liable to go to jail every time someone shows a nipple. Our legal/tech system is dysfunctional by its ancient nature and the easy/populist politics around censorship.
Alternative take: you never supported free speech and were just upset Bush era policies censored porn, gays and contraception. Once those things stopped being censored you stopped caring.
I'd imagine the people who are now pro-censorship would turn back to free speech zealots if we banned all mentions of homosexuality online like they have in Russia.
They’re hacking your emotions as you describe, but they’re also hacking you chemically to get you addicted, which is why I no longer support giving young people access to those social media sites.
Guess the question is does it scare you more than having arbiters of truth?
Deleted Comment
Honestly, in my opinion having such a public image can also be a market advantage for such a company. For example in its early days, Reddit attracted a huge initial audience by being perceived this way and being perceived as a very pro-free-speech website.
Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the service, and they killed the effort.
> "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter] concluded
I think that's a completely valid outcome - I think it's valid for no one to want to be responsible for facilitating that. https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...
Journalists cherry pick to create an incredibly misleading impression, this is true whether it's politics, floridaman, science or lifestyle.
They also encourage people to ignore scale, which actually really really matters. When comparing two outcomes you need to multiply the number of events times by how bad/good they are to get a total to compare, and that number is ignored by journalists.
Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation.
And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.
Dead Comment
This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no actual bottoms are allowed.
Some of those people have kids and stopped saying racial slurs and just grew up. You're talking about forums that were overwhelming inhabited by 15-22 year olds.
I actually wonder sometimes if the real reason why the tech monopolies aren't busted is because the threat of anti-trust is a very effective tool to get them to censor things without having to go through legislation.
1. Regulate data privacy and tracking
2. Regulate porn/liability risks
The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps.
The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site.
You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful.
I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image.
Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way.
This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.
Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public. Even bitcoin is 13 years old and I know nobody getting into it for utilitarian reasons unless they are already into it for investing.
I disagree. It seems like if anything, it's the public of today that has let down the hackers. In all honesty though, it's probably more just, "people gonna people."
You used to have to -want- to be a hacker, and connectivity much less the processing power to receive it was not guaranteed. I had to mow lawns to get a ride to the library to read dusty Bell UNIX surplus manuals. You were lucky to even meet someone other than Dewey D who knew the same words or the nature of what you were doing.
Consequently, when you met someone online, it didn't matter what kind of weirdo they were. You knew that when you were in certain spaces that anybody there had some special something and that kinship bridged all gaps and mismatches. Those friendships were forever and we didn't even know eachother's names or faces. That's not guaranteed now.
Now everyone has an apollo mission's worth of compute on their wrist/pocket and the swill is so sweet nobody's hungry. If you extrapolate the current situation to other events in history, we're headed for danger and that's a good thing, we need that struggle.
"Crises precipitate change", Deltron3030 was right.
p.s. don't say 'mainframe' say 'cloud', you're all set.
Originally I switched to using home screen bookmarks to save some storage on a cheap iPhone but now I can't go back.
I wonder how long it will be until a popular social media site avoids the app stores completely due to content and payment restrictions.
There was a flurry of congressional bills specifically citing that article at the time. (Here's one for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-introduced-criminalizin...) I can't find one that specifically threatens the payment processors, most go after the sites or their hosting providers, but the payment processors probably had the sense to realize they were in the blast radius and that it was best to pre-emptively self regulate.
Even worse: a huge amount of (former) hackers defended this kind of golden cage because they loved the iPhone and worshipped Steve Jobs. :-(
But because the "world wide" web is really a "US-American" web at its heart, we now have to adhere to whatever standards are en vogue there today.
Though we reject Chinese style censorship which is more restrictive but unacceptable.
Nobody remembers that in 2007, Prince used shadow puppetry to stroke a penis-shaped guitar. Not one peep about that.
There's an absurd focus on the female nipple specifically. Someone should create a service that censors female nipples by replacing them with male nipples so they can be posted on social media and other platforms without any issues.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Imagine if they were consistent and movies/tv/video games were also whitewashed of blood too. What a miserable media world we'd be in.
I can remember how disappointed I was when I bought home Mortal Kombat for SNES and there was no blood. Truly horrifying.
The US armed forces, with close to 1.4mln personnel, is one of the largest employers in the country.
The bloodlust is easy to explain. The tribe better at war survives. Veneration of honorable warriors runs deep in our veins. Sales for Top Gun, Marvel movies, action games continue to soar.
The puritanical outlook developed to create stable monogamous families. That bit of artifice is dissolving now. More polygamy means the top men hoarding reproductive access, which historically leads to instability. Sexual socialism was an interesting run, but with the demise of religion, I'm not sure how we could save it.
(Incidentally, this is a reason I've argued that the facebook metaverse will suck. It is never going to have some halcyon days as a cool site before success ruins it. It's coming out of the box with people worrying about "groping" and whatnot in a way that will force it to suck by design because everything will be about "safety" and the like, before anything good takes hold. See also the Zune)
With success, the crowds at the shows started to change, eventually to the point Kurt lamented “why are these people here? these are the people who beat us up in high school.”
/s