Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth

Comments

• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “Free speech can’t flourish online”
  Subscribe to unlock this article

  LOL. Truth!

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  • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    With the truth there is a price to pay?

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    • Mr_nutter_butter@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Used to be slowly changing

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• Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.

  And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.

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  • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.

    Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they’re not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that’s 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.

    Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It’s how the far-right procreate now

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  • r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The right wants to make it so that if you ban Nazis from a website, armed men from the government will come and arrest you. At the same time, they rant about being compelled to use transgender pronouns.

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• Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Free speech online doesn’t even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth “good faith discussion” about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as “just a joke”, or promote a “dating and lifestyle coaching” business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It’s the same reason they don’t show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.

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  • joel_feila@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What they seem to want is a right to an audience.

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• reksas@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule

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  • Adalast@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Free speech has nothing to do with corporations? As long as the government doesn’t start a social media platform, the First Amendment has 0 to do with any of them.

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    • reksas@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      True. I think i mean something different that probably doesn’t even have a term for it.

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    • warmaster@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not in this Cyberpunk world

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• adeoxymus@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No paywall: archive.ph/…/8fde56b7-2515-441a-9472-30c8aedcc200 Tbh, the article doesn’t really talk about the headline. Just some history and talk about Elon musk and Twitter. Not a convincing argument about social media in general.

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• mydude@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If you want a proper civilized discussion, head to pornhub. You’re welcum.

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  • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.

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    • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.

      This is the most _________ comment I’ve ever read on the Internet.

      *Can’t think of the proper word to use for this comment, it’s totally blown my mind. Esoteric? Nope. Non-sequitur? Nope. Has the word actually been invented that describes this comment? It’s power is over 9000!

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• RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  People tend to reflect and post the outrage media they subscribe to, then look for echo chambers to reinforce those views. Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.

  Also IMO the “gentleman’s agreement” we had, in the US at least, that free speech was somewhat honored most places including your job or online decades ago is dead. It’s quite clear that even the government isn’t too keen on the 1st amendment depending on who is in charge, much less corporations who will terminate people for speech conflicting with corporate agendas, and absolutely not petty or controlling forum moderators.

  People that yell “muh freedum of speech!1!1!” the loudest are often the ones doing their best to force some hateful subjects or outright lies into other’s faces, then they get upset and claim they’re being attacked or bring up some other victim complex when they get “cancelled.”

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  • Adalast@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I feel you are pointing in the right direction, but you did miss some stuff that is commonly missed. (I am going to preface that all I am doing is presenting facts, corps can burn in hell for my personal opinion)

    • Freedom of Speech only has a bearing on law, government, and the agents thereof. Corporations in the US are not bound by the Constitution, only the government. Corporations and individuals operating a space where the public are able to act are bound by the laws, but as long as they don’t directly violate any if those law, they can restrict speech as much as they like.
    • While echo chambers are a major issue, and one we should all be focused on making sure we don’t get trapped in, they are not the largest issue concerning the issue at hand. Humans are more prone to engage with controversial topics, whether that is surging to the protection of something that affirms our biases, or lashing out against things that offend them. Social media platforms only care about so-called “engagement”. Their statistical validity for investors and advertisers are strictly based on sanitized numbers regarding how many users live on their platforms, how often they post, and even more so how often they comment. Polarizing posts see the most commentary, so social media companies are financially incentivized to propagate as much polarizing information as possible, regardless of the content. The advertisers never see what the post info is or how how much hate and vitriol are in the comments, and they don’t care (some are starting to realize). All they want to know is “if I pay you to put my add on peoples posts, how many people will see them?”. It is disgusting, but true. Bad news sells. Tragedy sells. Hate sells. Polarization sells. It makes me long for the days when all we had to worry about being manipulated by marketers with was sex.

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    • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m thinking that maybe you missed my point, which is exactly what you said.

      First point: Free speech only applies to government retaliation, but that’s on thin ice. Like I said. Not sure what needed clarification, maybe my more sarcastic take on it made it less clear.

      Second point: The point is that people aren’t really falling into echo chambers and having the lack of awareness to remove themselves from it, the point is they don’t want to leave the safety of their rage-bait fed herd and face criticisms of their narrative and/or worldview. Sure, someone who views a controversial or fringe subject will probably be fed more by algorithms, and the fault not only lies in that algorithm that wants to profit off clicks but the person that actively excludes any factual evidence to the contrary. Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and they don’t want to be told so.

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  • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.

    Sometimes though, it’s not about winning or losing the battle, but just pushing back against the messages that’s trying to shape a harmful narrative. To leave both sides of the argument available for third parties to read and consider.

    And for that, every reasonable person should be doing some of that, instead of just bailing. Consider it a civic duty.

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• guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Multiple US court cases have repeatedly affirmed the concept that money is speech because access to media costs. At the end of the day, we have to get it through our heads that media will always be dominated by those with the most money to create media.

  All media ends up being shitty and awful because it’s a business. It’s always a business. When the Internet got big, businesses showed up and turned a framework for cheaply exchanging information across large distances and turned it into Cable 2.0, because cable is inherently more like what they want than a powerful framework that empowers citizens to speak their minds or whatever.

  Social media is an outrage machine for the exact same reason cable news is filled with horrible and terrifying imagery – it hits your emotional buttons and keeps you coming back. Social media just makes the manipulation even easier and more fine-grained.

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  • EarthShipTechIntern@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thank you!

    Such a better writing than whatever shit was behind that paywall.

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• unreasonabro@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Free speech can’t flourish online, says the paywalled article

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• fubo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, “social media” and “online” ain’t the same thing, now are they?

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  • nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, mostly they are nowadays. Sure, there’s still old school forums and personal websites around but most people online interact via social media.

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    • JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The old forums I used to go to don’t exist anymore. One is now a separate entity from the sponsor company because they pivoted from renting game servers ( the old times when you could host your own private server) to telco and it lost all the value to have gamers attached to the image of the company. Also gamers in the meantime assumed another meaning entirely…

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• rob299@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is this an issue with… social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can’t control every little detail when it’s federated but, that’s a good thing for the freedom of ideas.

  If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.

  Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i’ve seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.

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  • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I would have agreed with reddit before but the moderators are killing it the other way. Too much power, zero oversight, and quick to delete or even ban without having knowledge of what they’re supposed to be moderating.

    It’s one of the reasons I’m here now, hoping for less of that. And I don’t mean “the vaccines are making my 5G reception weak” type of posts. I mean factual information just getting removed of it doesn’t align with the random moderator of the day when someone inevitably reports it. So much information there is scrubbed that’s accurate and what remains is just an echo chamber of outdated or false information. I don’t know how anyone can solve it other than relinquish control to our robot content moderator overlords.

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• Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think we’ve always thrived on outrage.

  Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn’t what the masses bought.

  We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here’s a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.

  The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.

  We’ve always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We’d have to want to be better, and I don’t believe most people do.

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• I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There’s also no algorithm taking the most controversial answer and making it the top most comment ala Facebook.

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• CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I couldn’t even get to the article. My screen was immediately blurred on the top half, and the bottom half with a full width pop-up talking about “managing cookies”.

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• trackcharlie@lemmynsfw.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This was clearly written by someone who has very little interaction with healthy forums for dialogue. There will always be trolls online and in real life, pretending like idiots and jokers only exist in an online setting is disingenuous or the view of a completely sheltered individual.

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• ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Up- and Downvotes should be removed entirely.

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  • r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have mixed feelings about this. Self moderation is better then needing to get mods involved with everything. Lemmy does it pretty well where voting only impacts each post and there’s no total karma count.

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    • nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’d like the system if it at all resulted in self-moderation. but it really doesn’t

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  • Aolley@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I disagree in the sense that I think voting is useful but just up/down is not. A consensus engine that can judge each aspect of a statement alone and in a group can be used to find what is misleading, dishonest, and the like as well as what is simply untrue or lies.

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• daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of “free speech”. If you have total “free speech”, right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda, you won’t get nazis, you’ll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is “free speech”, technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they’re taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way.

  Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it’s still spam, it’s just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume to bad faith. Which, is something that isn’t necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn’t necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn’t necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith.

  I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what’s being said sounds sensible, but doesn’t actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that’s what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil’s advocate nonsense stance super seriously until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you’re someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog’s dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.

  And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this, especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots. Then we’re gonna see this all play out all over again with the spam, except in a way that’s much harder to detect. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse. I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can’t really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there’s nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.

  And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It’s like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It’s fun for a while, probably too long actually if you’re insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it’s not fulfilling long term. You have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren’t your own but are still fully internally consistent, and just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different, easily malleable information landscapes. And if that’s the case, then you’re not really trolling anymore, you’re just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.

  Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!

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  • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    > ChatGPT crits you for 1,000! <

    Seriously, you have to be more concise than that. We didn’t purchase one of your novels to read over an afternoon, we’re browsing a comments section of an online form.

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    • daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Seriously, you have to be more concise than that. We didn’t purchase one of your novels to read over an afternoon, we’re browsing a comments section of an online form.

      “We” who, bro? If you’re not reading the post, don’t read the post, maybe it wasn’t meant for you, if you don’t wanna read it, I dunno. But also, in the words of blaise pascal: if I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter. I’m not gonna waste like an extra hour, on top of the thirty minutes I already spent, to try to compress my thoughts as much as possible. If people are interested, they can read it, if they’re not, then they can go read some other dude’s comments.

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• interceder270@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s not true. People are just talking about what interests them.

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• SwooshySnail@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s a paywall. “Subscribe to unlock this article”.

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