Whatever happened to “let people be their own judge?” Or are we really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in individual's ability to think for themselves? Why is Mozilla, of all entities, seemingly seeking to influence YouTube, and to what end? Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas? Is it bad to be radical? Are you automatically wrong if you are? And are YouTube's own policies flawless? Just some questions that come to mind.
>Or are we really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in individual's ability to think for themselves?
>Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas?
Not all ideas are the same. The free market of ideas is a concept that promotes exploration and competition between ideas. However, some ideas are, on their face, intentionally manipulative. If we look up the 14 words or other rhetorical devices typically deployed in disinformation and propaganda efforts, we can identify a lot of soundly anti-social noise in the general pro-social marketplace of ideas.
Someone refusing to pay ad revenue dollars to monetize a flat earth, anti-vax, or white supremacist message isn't saying 'ideas are bad and we should not have them'. They're saying 'we explored these ideas, and I have judged them. They didn't win the competition'.
This IS the competition inherent in the marketplace of ideas. To remove this does not promote competition in the marketplace; it banally removes it, replacing it with a nihilist 'no idea is better than any other' position.
"Social justice" movements are also manipilative and are doing much more harm than good at this point, but companies and a lot of people keep pushing them. Should we start banning them too?
What concrete evidence do you have that social justice movements are "doing more harm than good" or that whatever harm they are doing is equivilent to flat earthers, anti-vaxxers and white supremacists?
Well, to be fair, these companies are only woke in some markets. This isn’t a global problem.
Show me the major corporation’s Middle East division with a pride logo. I’ll wait right here… skelton.
So clearly the solution to overly woke social justice is just for everyone to become the one religion that no one is allowed to criticize and who is still “allowed” to have different opinions.
Modern solutions and problems and all that.
My plan has no downsides unless it does. You’re welcome /s.
Social justice movements are almost without exception extremely critical of countries like Saudi Arabia but despite this fantasy conjured up by conservatives that it's the woke crowd that shy away from criticism of Islamic theocracies, it's amusing how it's always the former that love multi-billion dollar arms deals with them (though to be clear, both neoliberals and neocons are guilty of this).
I guess hijabs in American streets are a larger problem than enabling the mass surveilance and extermination of undesirables in their eyes.
>"Social justice" movements are also manipilative and are doing much more harm than good at this point
Seems like a completely separate discussion, but I'd disagree emphatically with a premise that attempts to equivocate between content that is misleading, false or intentionally promoting genocide and whatever you'd define as falling under the umbrella of social justice.
The "free market of ideas" sounds like a great ideal. But it gets really messy in practice. What should such a "marketplace" look like? I'm happy to have a free and vigorous exchange of ideas among my friends and me gathered around a dinner table; we're bound by mutual trust and respect to operate in good faith with one another, even in disagreement. How should we try to scale that to a global communications plaform? Is that even feasible?
It scales up just fine, but individuals have to take personal responsible for their feelings.
As long as we allow folks to flip out and go crazy over bits of text, or even images appearing on their screen that they don't like or are offended by, nothing will will work.
You see, in your situation, if you don't like what somebody is saying you uninvited them from the table. But on the internet, folks demand the offender be removed from the internet -- this won't scale.
What nearly all social media needs to do is simply hide users or content from somebody when they "flag" or "report" it. This scales nicely.
But no! we demand they remove it from the internet and ban them from contributing anything further. This is liken to getting into a argument at the dinner table, being offending, and then killing the offender so they can't offend you again, verses just ending future interactions with this person. Yeah, you might see them at the store, and yeah, they might have have to look away passing them in on the street, but the majority of the content you don't like coming from them is removed from your life.
But that is not good enough, you want this person to not be able to share the ideas, topic, or crude joke you did not like with anybody else.
I don't know what it is about the internet, but folks seem to think they should have way more control over what others do than they normally would in the real world.
It's the scale, speed, and reach that makes it a different beast. It's the difference between a party popper and a flashbang; similar principles, but completely different implications.
You're taking an overly simplified view of the power of internet speech. It's not that people are merely "offended." It's that an individual can be on the wrong end of an internet mob for which there's no accountability. By your standards, swatting is a perfectly acceptable outcome as long as the victim had the opportunity to mute their harrassers. Likewise, poisoning someone's reputation and making them unemployable is fine too. It's just words, right?
> By your standards, swatting is a perfectly acceptable outcome as long as the victim had the opportunity to mute their harrassers.
Folks don't get swatted via tweet, meem, or fb post. They have to pick p the phone and commit a real crime.
> Likewise, poisoning someone's reputation and making them unemployable is fine too. It's just words, right?
We have had laws against this long before the internet. Maybe they need strengthened.
Edit:
We are clearly talking about two different cases. We have things that are already illegal, and should continue to be illegal. Your examples are both something covered by existing laws.
On the other hand, we have folks who want to ban things that are legal, simply because they are offended. I can name a few, but in this clement, it would not be wise.
As somebody with less to lose, I guess it's my duty to take the fall for you. Examples are the idea that women are underrepresented in prestigious jobs because they're biologically determined to not want to do them or not be as capable of doing them. Another is that blacks are poor because they're genetically inferior at doing things that make money (ie. professional work).
Swatting is only a problem because the police are incompetent. They absolutely should never shoot somebody with the only information of their being dangerous an anonymous tip. It should obviously still be a crime but one against the police, not the target.
As for becoming unemployable. If there was truly free speech, nearly everyone would get it and it would be obviously unreliable so employers would disregard that signal. Even if that didn't work, stricter labor laws might prohibit hiring discrimination based on internet rumors, same as we do for race/sex/etc. discrimination.
I think it's fundamentally a fear that political ideas you don't like will become popular and end up having actual power. If they spread enough, people might vote for them, get laws changed for them, etc. or they might just change their culture in a large scale way that affects your daily life because these "wrong" people might be all around you.
Of course that's pure arrogance and complete disregard for the concept of democracy and respect for other people's ability to think.
I think that what's different about the Internet is scale. On the Internet, you can find a group of people to validate whatever fringe theory you want - and with social networks, you can do this _extremely_ easily. When you do find these people, you treat it as validation ("See, I'm not the only one who thinks this!").
For most of human history, if you had a fringe idea, your community would be extremely skeptical until you came up with something to convince them - or, more likely, concluded "huh, no-one else thinks this, I must be wrong" and veered back into the mainstream.
Even in the days _just before_ the internet, with pervasive newspapers and TV, your 'circle of validation' would've been _much_ smaller.
I think these are great questions, because there is a way it touches on fundamental values such as the freedom of speech.
Human attention/willpower/judgement etc are exhaustible resources, and they don't scale like a machine does. Even if the machine is conveying mere human utterances and likeness, the recommendation itself is ultimately the "speech" of a machine, which was conjured by thousands of highly paid engineers and data scientists to do some "magic" of keeping you talking to it. The attractiveness of the recommendations of a machine can out-tire the willpower of the reciprocating human, especially considering the ubiquitousness of the machine; be it on your tv, phone, car, videos, music, news, social media.
So I think it is possible to formulate the reaction you see as a defense against building machines that abuse organic human attention. Going back to free speech, there wouldn't be defending the right to free speech of the machine if it could denial-of-service the recipients' judgement with all the engagement tricks in the book and at scale.
And the spirit of the objection is not about the radicalness of the content; but rather the frequency of which such content as brought to the user by the machine. In a free marketplace of ideas of humans, such content would a) have lower incididence than youtube b) would have much different propagation/decay function than youtube c) you could give direct, high fidelity feedback to those humans. People's ability to filter out bullshit collectively in a real social setting is much stronger than our 1:1 encounters with youtube. There is no talking back to youtube, there is no friends you can together vet the ideas you encounter on youtube.
The problem is that many people, especially advertisers, don't want to be part of a marketplace with ideas that will cause great backlash. Parents don't want their kids in a marketplace with ideas they don't want to expose them to.
The principles of a marketplace also apply to marketplaces.
YouTube is being its own judge of what is on its platform. And Mozilla is participating in the "market of ideas" by holding them accountable for those decisions.
The feedback loop the recommendation algorithm generates is really powerful. I personally have to treat youtube cautiously the way I treat any addictive drug otherwise I end up watching it long after I would have liked to.
YouTube has never been a free market as long as they've had editorial discretion at removing/promoting any videos they like. An unbiased YouTube would be a directory of videos organized by topic, like old Yahoo categories, that was shown exactly the same to every visitor. We don't have free, unfettered activity in any domain of life because the fabric of society would break down. Then you get Somalia.
Like it or not there are young children watching YouTube. YouTube doesn’t give any useful way of controlling the content that children see beyond its default recommendation engine. You can’t as a user easily block a channel (just report it, or dislike, and hope the recommendation engine notices).
So, if you accept that children should at least be somewhat monitored/guided in what they watch, this is a problem.
Of course, someone might say that parents should be monitoring the content anyway. That may be true, but doesn’t always happen in practice. And it’s a constant fight against the recommendation engine in any case.
YouTube has become the default way to share video content online, there is no way to “opt out” of the recommendation engine, and they do their best to push low value content at children. So in my view, yes this is a problem.
YouTube kids is kind of clearly designed for preschool children (5 or less), and you lose a lot of functionality.
It also blocks a huge amount of content, I just tried searching for Biotechnology related content most of it is not available. I’d guess because it’s not been marked as “targeted at children”.
There’s no way of saving or sharing content.
So, no it’s not a great solution in my opinion. It would be better to introduce these features into the main app.
Right that’s true. To be honest I’m not sure that always factors into recommendation. I also can’t block classes of content (like short videos). And I can’t go to a video and just set is it or the channel as blocked.
“don’t recommend” and “block” are also different concepts. I’d like the ability to block content so it doesn’t appear at all if searched for, linked etc.
The fact is, YouTube could easily provide much of this functionality. Particularly the ability to block short content. But they’re interested in pushing this content on users.
> Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas?
Yes, please! This has never existed in the past, and continues to not exist in the present, and seems to me logically impossible to ever exist in the future.
Just like many would not consider Fox News to be "fair and balanced", but instead consider this slogan to be a dishonest attempt to obscure Fox News' bias, the sooner we give up on the "free market of ideas"-style sloganeering the sooner we can approach problems like those discussed here with any sort of honesty.
Nope, the original question was if we should "abolish the idea", not the thing itself.
I'm saying that the idea is a myth in the same way that "unbiased news" is a myth. Both sound like a nice idea on the surface, but with both eventually it all boils down to humans making decisions that elevate one viewpoint (bias) over another, and this holds true whether we are publishing newspapers or publishing HTML documents.
Adding another step (e.g. "human writes code; code publishes HTML document") unfortunately doesn't fix this either.
It’s hard to argue that a platform that’s algorithmically selecting the next video based on ML models is anything close to a “free market of ideas”, banned content or not.
It’s not a free market because the owner of the platform is sitting on the scales. It’s hard to argue that the best videos or ideas win out when a large chunk of what’s watched next is actually controlled by the platform itself.
Honestly, that’s probably fine, but it does mean that any analysis along the lines of “the free market of ideas” is of questionable value, given that YT is heavily manipulated by YT itself.
Some others- Should Youtube develop and use algorithms which lead people down the path of radacalism for the purpose of engagement? Why are people so radically and violently opposed to conflicting thoughts?
Should the village smith make pruning hooks and knives which can cut throats? Should the carpenter make direction signs which may be posted anywhere to mislead anybody?
> Whatever happened to “let people be their own judge?
This. In the end, doesn't it come right down to this? The sad thing I've noticed about these discussions when they come up is that they quickly degrade imho into arguments about the merits of points of view rather than whether or not society or corporations should be making the decision on what a person sees or doesn't see on something ostensibly called "YOU"tube. Obvious caveats about lawful/unlawful content aside.
> Why is Mozilla, of all entities, seemingly seeking to influence YouTube, and to what end?
