But there are so many things that are wrong about his opinion!
1. There was never a "hell of not being able to turn off" email. Nor is there one for social media. There are push notifications implemented as defaults in contexts where they shouldn't be, by hungry marketers and product managers. There's a war for your attention and as long as unscrupulous marketers live and breathe, there always will be. Censorship doesn't solve this. Better software does!
2. The argument that online forums create murderers/criminals is an old bogeyman in new clothes. Remember when conservative reactionaries tried to convince us that D&D promoted Satanism? And then that video games created murderers? This is the same, repeatedly disproven argument. Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers. Censorship doesn't solve this, either. Better health care and hard, frank discussion about the problems in our society do. And censorship works directly against open discussion.
3. These flawed arguments are used to call for "better policing" of ideas on the Internet. We don't need this. Policing inevitably means regulations which entrench the most well-funded incumbents and make it harder for new services to complete with better ideas. Yes, Twitter definitely needs to police itself better. So does Facebook. But in the meantime, you can deactivate your account and leave, and maybe even switch to an upstart competitor like Mastodon, which millions of people have already done. That's what needs to be easier. Censorship laws will make it harder. If we close the door now we consign ourselves to a future with largely the same incumbents as the present, and that's a recipe for failure. That really would be the death of our society.
"Seduction of the Innocent is a book by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was taken seriously at the time, and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry."
A somewhat non-related question. Do you guys think a book like Rushdie's Satanic Verses would ever be printed today? I was thinking about this today morning.
The challenge is probably getting something as subtle as Satanic Verses printed; there's a market for overt islamophobia, but they're not interested in analytical heretical views of actual muslims.
The way to stave off censorship (i. e.) regulation is not insisting on the harmlessness of these people, or arguing against the revealed preference that shows that the web is useful for them[0].
It's establishing technologies and customs that reduce the usefulness of the net for extremists.
But all I hear in the tech community are appeals to a sort of moral nihilism that nothing can be done, because it's supposedly impossible to distinguish anti-semitic conspiracies from any other opinion. Or that even the idea of technological changes, or licenses, or codes of conducts, could serve any role in making some tools less useful for the bad guys while preserving its usefulness for everyone else. It's slippery-slope fallacies all the way down. And in many cases, I'm left unsure if some righteous defenders of free speech haven't actually at some point started to identify with the vile cesspool they claim to defend only in the name of the larger concept.
0: (Telling people to leave facebook is also not the best advice, in they that "just don't go to that part of town" does not adequately replace policing)
I propose a simple law - there is no software fix that will not harm human beings, if said fix aims to target a human neural failing.
Any such fix will only open the way for additional vectors of attack. Eventually the myriad vectors of attack for which we must defend, will result in being overwhelmed.
> Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers
True - on average. Its worth remembering that we figured out how to convert engineers and educated people into suicide bombers.
The internet and our platforms though excel at efficiently polarizing people.
While the great many of us may not feel the tug, it is just a matter of probability that decides who gets pulled by these algorithms into the dark reaches of the propaganda world.
I've effectively lost good friends to the world of 4chan and the invasive viruses that have taken over the discourse there.
But there are so many things that are wrong about his opinion!
1. There was never a "hell of not being able to turn off" email. Nor is there one for social media. There are push notifications implemented as defaults in contexts where they shouldn't be, by hungry marketers and product managers. There's a war for your attention and as long as unscrupulous marketers live and breathe, there always will be. Censorship doesn't solve this. Better software does!
2. The argument that online forums create murderers/criminals is an old bogeyman in new clothes. Remember when conservative reactionaries tried to convince us that D&D promoted Satanism? And then that video games created murderers? This is the same, repeatedly disproven argument. Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers. Censorship doesn't solve this, either. Better health care and hard, frank discussion about the problems in our society do. And censorship works directly against open discussion.
3. These flawed arguments are used to call for "better policing" of ideas on the Internet. We don't need this. Policing inevitably means regulations which entrench the most well-funded incumbents and make it harder for new services to complete with better ideas. Yes, Twitter definitely needs to police itself better. So does Facebook. But in the meantime, you can deactivate your account and leave, and maybe even switch to an upstart competitor like Mastodon, which millions of people have already done. That's what needs to be easier. Censorship laws will make it harder. If we close the door now we consign ourselves to a future with largely the same incumbents as the present, and that's a recipe for failure. That really would be the death of our society.