there is that podcast called rabbit hole (by nytimes) which was very revealing to me.
i started using youtube before it became a popular platform and never in my life have i ever watched a conspiracy theory video on youtube! i don't think i have ever been recommended one either. i only hear about them in the news.
so hearing that person talk about how youtube recommended videos upon videos to them was really surprising. there were names that i have never even heard of.
so yes, social platforms changing people's view is real and a problem.
People tend to bring this up as some sort of forceful counter-example, but the printing press contributed significantly to religious sectarianism in Europe, fuelling the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century which killed over a third of the German population.
Books might not have been burned, but about 50.000 'witches' did.
A rapid increase in the dissemination of information in systems that have no mechanism to tolerate them is no trivial matter.
Witch burning pre-dates the printing press. Might want to look up the 13th century some time. Didn't know there were any anti-printing press advocates left out there. I thought y'all died off during the Enlightenment? As far as sectarianism goes, the Catholic hegemony was never going to last forever. And Europe was plagued with sectarian violence for thousands of years. Free exchange of information is the one thing that eventually got them to come together.
Books can be publicly scrutinized, facebook feed will only reach it’s targeted audience. I think a more apt comparison is pamphlets at a rally. And even a rally is absolutely scrutinized—or even stopped by the police—if they are found to distribute illegal, radicalizing, or dog whistling material.
In real life there’s a loophole to get around this kind of scrutiny: religion. It doesn’t matter which one really. But if it’s religious and you don’t discriminate against people in obvious ways, you have much wider latitude to say eyebrow-raising things in public.
Seems like that works online too, now that I mention it.
If the cost (monetary and one’s credibility) of publishing a Social post matched that of publishing a book, we wouldn’t be here discussing this.
If we allow anyone with opposing thumbs to spew garbage online, platform have some responsibility to have some limits or require making source/author public
Yeah that's how freedom of speech works. Listen, you don't police private conversations among friends. Not in America. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I'm sure I could comb over your personal beliefs and find all sorts of garbage, including what you're saying now Corporate regulation of speech is a losing proposition for society. Period.
My only ask is that you see the difference between free-speech as intended in the constitution vs free-speech under an unverifiable and easily forged online pseudonym. You may not even be defending free speech of an American citizen/resident
Free speech under an unverifiavle and easily forged obline pseudonym is worth the cost of the speech. If reading my $0 speech incites you to do something stupid or illegal, bad on me, but good luck enforcing that; in the meantime you did something stupid or illegal and will have to live with the consequences.
If people continue to act on information without regard to its source or veracity, and we need to rely on the platforms to sort it out, we're in some deep shit. The telephone company never comes on the line and says 'Hey harikb, your friend is full of it, what your friend said is totally untrue' but somehow we expect that of today's communications platforms. If the telephone company was monitoring the content of your calls, you'd be rightfully pissed.
Of course, maybe these platforms could stop showing me random garbage from random people that aren't on my list, and weren't meaningfully interacted with by my list. (What gets shown on FB because someone I know liked a corporate page 5 years ago is like huh???)
Disclosure: I used to work at WhatsApp, including while it was part of Facebook; my opinions are my own.
I believe free speech is a human right. Facebook itself is not built up around pseudonyms, that would be Twitter moreso. But the founding members of the U.S. regularly wrote in pseudonyms in the Federalist Papers. Ben Franklin also regularly wrote in pseudonyms.
I don't like social media, as it exists today. I think it's a toxic form of communication.
But I'd rather people just realize that and migrate off it and towards chat rooms, group chats, discussion forums, etc.
I'd be fine with forcing social media companies to regularly warn users of addiction and to provide built in and highly visible tools for tuning it out.
