I’m sure we’ve all seen the news that Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Shopify, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Pinterest, Discord, and Reddit have similarly cracked down on Trumpy content. Parler, a social network for people that find Twitter insufficiently extreme, has been banned from the Google Play store, and Apple has fired a shot across Parler’s bow that will probably end with the app being banned from the App Store. (Thanks to commenter Wyatt Salamanca for the above link and the reminder to write this post.)
Is this good? That is a difficult question. It isn’t hard to whip up a slippery-slope argument. It also isn’t hard to say that Trump’s social media accounts present a truly unique problem at this time, which justifies a unique response. But is that special pleading? It’s easy to argue the importance of free speech, just as it’s easy to ask what the true goal of enlightenment principles were, and whether slavish adherence to them will get us where we want to go. But is ditching principles for two weeks going to weaken them? Should it? Reasonable people can disagree (not that all of the people disagreeing are reasonable).
I’m interested in a different question, though. How did we find ourselves grappling with this problem in the first place? Much as I’d like it to be Donald Trump’s fault, it really isn’t. This is an inevitable result of how the Web works 2021: walled gardens and closed protocols have concentrated informational power in the hands of a few companies, companies whose every action affects the structure of our press and our democracy. As a wise man once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
So, what’s to be done? I don’t know, but I do know one way we could have done it better. So, if you’re interested, join me below the fold for a discussion of distributed social networks.
What is a social network? In a nutshell, it’s just people, forming connections, posting content, and reacting to said content. We know these mostly as centralized systems like Twitter, where a single organization controls all of the content and user accounts. It is completely predictable that such an organization, of sufficient size, will find itself in a constant, morally fraught fight against extremism, harassment, and illegal content. This architecture will always have a serious problem via Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: “Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.”
So what is a distributed social network? Let’s talk about the most popular one: Mastodon. Mastodon is, essentially, a series of communication protocols that are woven together to link decentralized communities.
Huh?
One protocol you might know is HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. Anybody can set up an HTTP server, and if you send it the right text, it sends you a web page, or whatever. You can link websites together, form informational networks, and so on, very easily with this protocol. This is what the Web is, or was, back in the day: a mostly-open collection of linked documents encoded in HTML, an open standard. We would later call this Web 1.0, and it was very different from the walled gardens of today.
Mastodon occupies a space somewhere between Twitter and Web 1.0. Anybody can set up a Mastodon instance; think of it as their own personal Twitter. Mastodon instances can form voluntary connections with one another, and all instances, user accounts, and posts (“toots”) share an open data format and communication protocol.
The key word here is interoperability. It’s a little like Reddit, where people run subreddits with their own rules, except in this case, there would be nobody who actually runs Reddit–it’s like a community of linked subreddits.
Here’s a toy example. Let’s say I run a Balloon-Juice Mastodon instance, and Scott Lemieux runs a Lawyers, Guns, & Money Mastodon instance. We both have public timelines, and can post replies to each other, etc.
Now let’s say that the people from some troll or Nazi instance discover ours, and we want to get rid of them. We can block individual users or even their entire instance, preventing them from reading (and therefore replying to) our posts. Their Mastodon account is still around–it’s just formatted data, after all–it just won’t do them any good here.
In a system like this, you deal with a Donald Trump not by deleting his Mastodon account–which you cannot do–but by banning that account from the respectable instances. He’s still welcome at any instance that does choose to deal with him, which in this case would be something like Parler (or for a real example, Gab, which is a Mastodon fork). We’ve reduced the moral footprint of this decision dramatically, even as we’ve achieved a similar result.
I hold little hope that we will end up in an open, decentralized informational utopia any time soon–it’s just too hard to monetize, compared to the alternatives–but a man can dream.
Update: I just remembered that Twitter is funding a small, dedicated team to explore this space and either develop a new standard or bring an existing one to the next level. So, good for them!
Doug R
Words across common platforms. Like a Word Press. Something we should disqus?
jeffreyw
What Trump was do was shouting fire in the theater while soaking the seats with gas, and throwing lit matches.
Major Major Major Major
@jeffreyw: “fire in a crowded theater” is really best avoided when discussing free speech.
@Doug R: WordPress is a great example of the power of open protocols and open source code, though it’s not quite the “social web”.
Ohio Mom
I’m having an attack of “I’m so old!” because I never even heard of some of the platforms listed in the post.
But I do remember Obama talking recently about misuses of social media being a turbo-charged threat to democracy.
NotMax
May Parler become the digital equivalent of Miss Havisham’s.
jeffreyw
@Major Major Major Major:
Noted, but I will feel free to ignore that advice.
The Dark Avenger
Moderari moderatoribus solvendum erit?
Cermet
When “free” speech kills (or creates a riot, or results in attempts to overthrow a government), it certainly can be banned. No slippery slope at all.
boatboy_srq
If nothing else, this should spark renewed interest among the Reichwing for net neutrality standards. It was all fine and dandy letting businesses be businesses and attend to their customers and the Free Market, Baby!!11!1!™ But now that those same Internet businesses are blocking Hair Furor, they’re likely to sing a different tune.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Was jefferyw wrong in his take on the situation?
Or did you just not like his analogy?
Or were you showing him how a distributed network, works?
Or was just the mention of the act being considered an endorsement?
After all he wasn’t doing the deed or asking others to do so, to most of us I’d bet his take was actually a call as to why not to do what trump did.
boatboy_srq
@jeffreyw: Don’t forget he was blocking selected exits because they were Blue.
PJ
@Major Major Major Major:
@jeffreyw: One more instance where Popehat is full of shit. Trump incited sedition without the assistance of Twitter on Wednesday, and no one is stopping him from making speeches or issuing press releases, but no person, platform, or company is obliged to spread his criminal activity or his lies.
Mike in NC
I read that CNN is televising a two hour special about the attempted coup tonight. Looking for time listing.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: Was just an FYI.
@PJ: That doesn’t have anything to do with the link, at all, whatsoever, clearly this has been misunderstood by everybody but jefferyw. Perhaps you would prefer an Atlantic article. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
I’m just saying, I wish people would stop using that one specific phrase, there are other ones.
joel hanes
Lies are free; facts are behind paywalls.
Discuss.
RSA
Interesting! Thanks. I’ve just created a mastodon account; I’ll see how it works
ETA: Could you expand on your observation about a moral footprint? I don’t understand what it means.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: Jester Actual runs one at counter.social that I think is supposed to be pretty good.
The moral quandary isn’t much of a quandary when you’re just banning somebody from your own community, rather than removing their ability to post on all of Mastodon. One example people are using is that it’s like SMTP, which is used to send emails: if SendGrid bans Trump from using their service to send emails, there’s still an open protocol that any old jackass can use.
This particular example is more complicated than it sounds; because of spam, the SMTP architecture is now based around a handful of gatekeepers, but the basic analogy is sound.
Uncle Omar
After the events of this week and what the maggots think they have planned for the next couple of weeks, I’m not sure that I approve of better broadband service for rural areas. Give these dufi dial-up and only three television networks.
charluckles
Can’t we separate that free speech doesn’t apply here and that these companies have the right to refuse service from the fact that these companies have way too much power and lack of accountability?
artem1s
Assuming that companies who profit off broadcasting on the web have a different obligation than those who profit off broadcasting the public air waves is a difficult argument to make. There is a reason Trump is frantically looking for an alternative to Twitter right now. If he had pulled the same stunt on a radio broadcast out of the Oval Office (he can do radio addresses) or in front of the podium with the Seal of the President of the United States or any other official communication vehicle, there would be no question about whether he was committing treason. If he called up Fox or CNN or a Clear Channel station and they kept him on air while he told his followers to march on the Capital, and then cheer on those who were rioting, those media outlets would lose their licenses and wouldn’t be allowed to broadcast on public airwaves. And there would be no question that Congress, the VP, and the various agencies should do everything in their power to stop those broadcasts immediately.
No government agency is violating Trumps free speech rights. These private companies have the right to protect their consumers from hate speech and violence. And they have the right to decide to not participate in insurrection. If Twitter was a radio station, they would have been obligated to cut off the mic long ago. There is no slippery slope here.
Major Major Major Major
@charluckles: Free speech does apply here–the companies have the right to ban the president under the first amendment.
Brachiator
I don’t know that this is the heart of the problem. Many of the biggest opponents of walled gardens are techno libertarians who resist almost all regulation, are free speech absolutists and people who yearn for a return to the early days when much of the Web was dominated by a relatively small bunch of white guys and nerdy tech enthusiasts.
Trump abused his authority and privilege and deserved to be banned. But he was as cagey in exploiting a new medium as was FDR, who used radio to get around a hostile press.
Subsole
@RSA:
I think he is saying that as the web is currently structured, you better hope Zuckerberg the Voight-Kampff flunkee feels obligated to limit hatespeech, or you are SOL.
Basically, multiple networks give multiple chances to limit the spread of malinformation. One network gives only one chance.
And our current crop of bitcoin bros have failed pretty catastrophically, pretty consistently.
NotMax
Also interaction with humans. Just sayin’.
;)
charluckles
@Major Major Major Major:
I interpreted your statement to mean that these private companies were interfering with Trump’s free speech rights.
dmsilev
Interestingly, one of the oldest electronic networks was almost completely decentralized: Usenet. It operated in a similar manner. Organizations (or individual people) owned “newsservers”, and individual users had accounts that let them post messages and read other people’s posts. Different servers then had agreements to pass messages back and forth between them, so a message might end up going from a->b->c->d etc. depending on who was linked with who. Be a bad enough actor at the server level (allow spammers, for instance), and you might find yourself getting cut off from the rest of the net.
Also, at the client (individual user) level, the software used to read the messages supported a wide range of filtering and customization, far more than just about anything I’ve seen on any web forum system.
In ways, we still haven’t caught up to 1990s-era messaging technologies.
hueyplong
@Mike in NC: Looks like tomorrow at 10 pm
RSA
@Major Major Major Major:
@Subsole:
Thanks, I think I understand the issue better. Good points.
Baud
This does not seem like a better world to me.
Seriously, how does this idea prevent the network effects that result in single source communications platforms like Twitter or Facebook?
Major Major Major Major
@charluckles: ah! No, sorry if I was unclear, I meant the general principle, which does apply to both parties in debatable ways. But I’m trying to sidestep this very thorny issue for now, i haven’t really made up my mind. As far as the law goes I actually wrote a post here recently https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/12/28/lets-talk-about-section-230-of-the-cda-or-why-youre-allowed-to-comment-on-this-post/
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: before I try to come up with how it prevents that, which seems self evident to me, I’m curious to hear how you think it causes that.
NotMax
@artem1s
The FCC does not license networks. (If there are network owned and operated over the air broadcast stations, each of those has its own individual license.)
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Trump could create some page like Balloon Juice or LGF or LGM, but any new venture could easily be throttled down in the absence of Net Neutrality.
Who is responsible for the death of Net Neutrality?
Donald Trump.
I feel no pity.
Major Major Major Major
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Great point about net neutrality, and how it ensures the free and open use of the HTTP protocol.
Steeplejack
@Mike in NC:
Not seeing anything on several schedule pages. The likely spot would be to preëmpt 48 Hours at 9:00 p.m.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t think your idea causes that. I’m suggesting it doesn’t seem to solve the problem of having a few key gatekeepers policing commonly used social networks. At least as far as I understand it.
MattF
I think you have to include the possibility that there is no ‘good’ way to achieve all the desired goals. I don’t have a proof, I’m unsure what a proof would involve— but I do know that non-linear systems do unexpected things. Add ‘large’ and ‘distributed’ to ‘non-linear’…
Ken
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal offered a different solution (?) this week.
I’m also reminded of The 90s: A Look Back. Published in 1989, it was a satirical prediction of the next ten years. One thing they got right (except for the timing) was the development of personalized news services, where people only saw news that pleased them and agreed with their preconceived views.
Elizabelle
@joel hanes:
Yep. The paywalls around explicatory material is a real problem.
Maybe the paywall should expire about 48-72 hours after the content is posted to the web.
And some of those headlines are so ass-backwards, one really has to wonder about their composers.
Meanwhile, whatever shit anyone made up out of their heads or found on an email chain — it’s out there.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud:
Gotcha! The idea is more about ameliorating the potential harm of the gatekeepers banning somebody. Let’s say 100% of Mastodon instances ban Trump. He could make his own instance, tomorrow, and set it up so that anybody with a Mastodon account could participate.
Bruuuuce
For all the bitching about Google (and probably Apple) removing Parler apps from their stores, they haven’t shut down Parler itself. Anyone with half a brain cell to rub against their cranium can access it by going through a browser (even on their phones). If that makes it harder for some folks, well, that’s a shame. It will be when browsers automatically block sites that I have a problem (and I can see it as a possibility, but not, I think, a likely one). Blocking sites is either a net nanny job or an antimalware job or both.
JoyceH
@Mike in NC: it’s tomorrow at 10 pm eastern. Gloriously titled “The Trump Insurrection”.
Also awesome – just heard on CNN that the QAnon Shaman guy has been arrested and made a statement to the FBI that he came to DC following the orders of Donald Trump to overthrow the fraudulent election. Kinda draws a straight line, doesn’t it?
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
So you’re disentangling the user accounts from the social network and making it interoperable with other social networks?
It sounds a little bit like how reddit works, where people can create their own subreddits and moderators can set the terms.
Omnes Omnibus
If it results in threaded comments, it can fuck right off.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was wondering yesterday where you were.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: Interoperability! That’s the word I was trying to find while I was writing this! Yes, exactly. Except that in the Reddit parallel, there would still be no central Reddit authority that could ban a subreddit entirely.
Major Major Major Major
@Bruuuuce: Browsers already block sites with bad crypto certificates, known malware providers, etc.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Thank you.
Having a migraine morning, can’t say it makes me not myself as it’s been going on for decades, but it does redirect some of my attention.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I was informed. I can only take so much doom. As a result, I went dormant.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Major Major Major Major: I am one of those gatekeepers; I run a mail system in Canada with over ten million users. With all due respect, this is not accurate.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
A network of clubhouses is still clubhouses.
Frank Wilhoit
The public discourse is broken. The Web is not the public discourse, but only one potential vehicle of the public discourse. It also aspires to be a meta-discourse — or, if you prefer, a style, or even a paradigm, of discourse; but that aspiration is not valid, any more than it was when newspapers aspired to [essentially] the same thing, nor radio, nor television.
So far I have merely restated your point, but now we must expand the frame. The public discourse is an altogether larger thing than any medium or any style. It is supremely important — nothing could be more important; even propaganda, which seeks to destroy and supplant the discourse, pays it the tribute of pretending to be it, like the parasite that destroys and supplants a fish’s tongue.
The debate — so confused, like all debates, because Modernity forbids any thing be called by its right name — is over the curation of the public discourse. And that does not mean who should curate it, because we have forgotten why to curate it, and we must figure out why before how before who.
And the confusion goes further, because curation and gatekeeping are not the same thing, and the solution does not lie on a one-dimensional slider of how much curation is necessary…
…tempting though it is to adopt the simple frame and to say that formerly (?when) the public discourse was excessively gatekept and that [it is easy to understand how the appearance arose that] the solution was to abolish all gatekeeping entirely. Certainly this framing resonates with our perception of the status quo and why it is unacceptable. But it is not so simple.
Bruuuuce
@Major Major Major Major: True. But those are site issues, not shutdowns of the sort that I thought were the concern here, and can be rectified (often but not always moderately easily). Certainly they aren’t content-related.
Ken
At the very least we can look forward to another Trump “hostage video”.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I understand.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Major Major Major Major: I am one of those gatekeepers; I run a mail system in Canada with over ten million users. With all due respect, this is not accurate.
@dmsilev: I loved usenet. NNTP is an excellent protocol, and I personally think that a news server with proper clients would be the best collab software environment going for a firm.
Major Major Major Major
@polyorchnid octopunch: how would you describe the current SMTP architecture? I’ll admit I’m just repeating what I think I’ve been told by some architects at work, SwiftOnSecurity etc., which squares with my own app development experience. If you want your emails to not run afoul of a handful of anti-spam gatekeepers, it’s easiest to just use SendGrid or whatever, and even then, end up on a few too many block lists and you’re right back to being incommunicado. SMTP is an open protocol with a closed implementation thanks to the ubiquity of eg Microsoft and Google mail services.
NotMax
@JoyceH
“Sincerely held religious beliefs” in 3…2…1…
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Self preservation. An admirable quality. Do you give lessons?
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: I could teach you, but I would have to charge.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Bruuuuce: Allow me to introduce you to dns and domain seizure… which is how you do what you’re worried about, and has been done to various folks over the last twenty years or so.
Subsole
@Uncle Omar:
I would like to point out a LARGE chunk of those dufi live in the burbs.
White trash ain’t trash because they’re poor or rural or live in a trailer park.
They’re trash because they are loudly, proudly ignorant. Just fence-post stupid, selfish and abusive and they think it makes them better than you.
Look at Trump. He’s none of the common hillbilly stereotypes, and probably the trashiest ass this southern white boy has ever seen.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: hot take alert, clubhouses are good, people like clubhouses, and open clubhouse systems like PHPBB led to a flourishing online ecosystem that everybody benefitted from.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Understandable, yet the doominess was surprisingly muted.
Bruuuuce
@polyorchnid octopunch: Thanks. I am aware of them, and of their dangers. (Thanks, Torrentfreak!) I am not saying that the current setup is perfect, nor impervious to bias and abuse of power (oh, BOY, am I not saying that!), just that removing apps from the two main stores isn;t the same thing as shutting down the site they connect to, the latter of which, as you note, can be accomplished by different means.
Major Major Major Major
@Bruuuuce: I wish most apps would go away. Progressive web apps would do the job better for like ninety percent of the apps I’ve run into. But, they’re “vulnerable” to adblockers and anti-tracking software, and thus harder to monetize, which is why you need an app if you want to read Quora on your phone or whatever.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not sure there is any answer that any human can come up with is going to ever give us totally free speech without a level of bad speech. Humans are, mostly barely functional, because the only actual control is self control, awareness, intellect, thought. Most/all humans are at some level of deficit in one or more of those areas and I am positive that there are others that I’m not mentioning.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
If you could teach that it might be worth it.
I’d be willing to pay if I hadn’t recently crested the hill in human aging.
MisterForkbeard
@JoyceH: It does, but it’s not like the guy can’t use an insanity defense. Between this and the getup, he looks and sounds nuts.
The thing is, people have been saying all along that Trump is giving these people orders. Whether or not he MEANS to is something else, but it doesn’t really matter. He was warned and kept doing it, yahoos like this respond even if they’re not technically insane.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Major Major Major Major: SwiftonSecurity is talking about Exchange, which participates in the broader email network via an smtp component, but the global email system is not gatekept by a few small players.
It’s not actually that difficult to set up all of those things for your own domain… once you have the requisite knowledge. I do this at work on a semi-routine basis; at one of my jobs I’m managing four active domains (and about a dozen basically inactive ones) and setting up DKIM and SPF once you’re running your own name servers is really easy; at root they’re just TXT records in the DNS that are labelled in such a way as to be interpreted by receiving mail servers. The thing to understand about those systems is that DKIM isn’t really about whether something is spam; it’s about whether it comes from where it says it comes from in a way that is absolutely verifiable. SPF is about making it easier for other servers to avoid spurious mail that claims to come from your domain but doesn’t in an attempt to avoid detection. Both of these systems affect spam in a negative way… they don’t make it easier to detect spam, they make it easier to detect legitimate email.
Now, one can make the case that in the US and to a lesser extent globally, the massive concentration of users at certain service providers (gmail and outlook are the obvious ones, though there are others) acts like a gatekeeper, but simply put I have more times than I care to remember had to talk to both of those outfits to get my outbound servers removed from blacklists because we had users who got cute (which is basically inevitable once you get up into the range of users I get to manage…. let’s just say that Sun Tzu was right when he said governing a large state is like boiling a small fish) and after dealing with them (LART!) I’ve then had to get them to unblock us so our other users can resume talking to whoever and it hasn’t really been difficult. But when you look at the global context… they are very large but they are far from a majority compared to the size of the world. Nobody’s got market power in that space. Nobody.
Of course, I don’t work in the US and Swift does… the US has far more uniformity in their marketplace for some reason. As an aside… dealing with Google when their users turn out to be criming is a much better experience than dealing with Microsoft.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Need it be linked?
;)
Bruuuuce
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks. I can understand that concern. Since most of my online time is on full-fledged computers (except for FB on my phone app) with ad blockers enabled and Javascript blocked selectively by site, I have obviously chosen my bed to sleep in.
Major Major Major Major
@polyorchnid octopunch: This is great, thanks!
Ken
When you put it that way, it does sound like Slack, complete with multiple channels for specific topics. Slack does tend to shorter messages (dare I say “tweets”) than netnews used to have; though that might be because Slack doesn’t warn you “sending this message could cost thousands of dollars, are you sure” every time you hit enter.
As far as collaborative software environments, a lot of them do look like netnews if you squint. Newsgroups map to issues, messages to issue comments.
Frank Wilhoit
@Ruckus: You describe an intrinsic and structural problem. But it is, in principle, manageable, and there have been times and places and fora in which it was managed.
Today, managing it seems absolutely infeasible, and even looking at the historical contexts in which it was managed seems unhelpful: too much has changed.
Here is another approach. Each of the historical moments of management eventually broke down, and its breakdown was perceived, and injected into the discourse, in a timely manner, if never completely understood. Let us study those moments of breakdown: root causes, proximal causes, initial effects, knock-on effects. If the game is to make a list of things that have to be rolled back, that’s a mug’s game. If the game is to make a list of things that must not be allowed to happen again, that may be feasible.
Just Chuck
@Major Major Major Major:
I wouldn’t go so far as saying Exchange and Gmail have closed off SMTP in any form. They still speak the same ESMTP protocol, and I guarantee that postfix and even sendmail are still being maintained.
Spam however sent everyone running for the gatekeepers, because it was rendering email completely unusable. I was such a gatekeeper for 13 years (now I whip up websites mostly in PHP. A step down, but one I gladly took to get out of corporate BS)
Just Chuck
@polyorchnid octopunch: I guarantee you if you have a brand new domain and send an email broadcast from it, it will get blocked by a majority of antispam providers. Doubly so if your message contains URLs pointing to that domain. Triply so if it points to a new domain that’s different from the sender. I implemented a lot of that blocking policy myself at a major antispam player. When it comes to email marketing, reputation is everything.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus:
Sure, of course not, and this is how we ended up with our current free speech cultural framework, right? Gotta take the bad with the good, since there is not necessarily an objective way to tell the difference. What I’m interested in here, as @Frank Wilhoit articulates well, is: how can we build the next world better? And distributed social networks may be one way, if we’re only willing to actually use them.
satby
I think that’s right.
RSA
Not specifically related, but for historical context: When I was teaching, I’d point my students to a 1968 article by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” so that they could get an idea about what the early visionaries behind the Internet were thinking. (Taylor founded the ARPAnet project, after Licklider brought him on board.) This is the earliest discussion of the idea of an “on-line community” [sic] that I’m aware of.
Here are the last few paragraphs of the paper. They were such idealists! But the last ironic paragraph makes it clear they’re aware of at least some of the pitfalls.
Kent
Yes, this might be a uniquely good moment to jam through rigorous net-neutrality standards in Congress. Big tech is back on it’s heels at the moment and won’t always be. Some times you have to be ready to take advantage of crises when they present themselves
Also at the same time, do away with all the ALEC-driven restrictions in various states that prevent local municipal internet.,
MomSense
These companies are banning trump, Q, etc because they are violating the terms of service. The constitutional right to free speech doesn’t really apply since we are not talking about actions taken by Congress.
Kent
Prescient as hell….
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a25653416/donald-trump-twitter-velociraptor-door-jurassic-park-quote/
Another Scott
@dmsilev: Yup. Bring back and update Yarn!!1 There’s an awful lot of good about Usenet (letting readers determine what tools they wanted to use to display the content; the asynchronous or synchronous conversations; the fine granularity of kill-files; being able to read and participate in as few or as many groups as one wanted all within the same interface; etc.) that was just thrown out when HTML and blogs and chat rooms and the like took over. [sigh]
Someone here a few days ago said (IIRC) the solution to T’s and FB’s abuse of their power would simply to require that they open up their protocols so that anyone could use them. No more walled gardens (at least if you’re too big). Maybe!
Lots of people have thought about these issues for a long time. There’s obviously a lot of money involved. But something is very wrong when it’s in these companies’ interests to drive “engagement” to the point that it becomes self-reinforcing and feeds sedition, worsens pandemics, and leads to the (near) destruction of national governments. Too much power is being concentrated in unelected hands who don’t have the interests of society at large even as a consideration.
The First Amendment isn’t a suicide pact (to twist an old saw).
And Slippery Slopes usually aren’t.
Cheers,
Scott.
Just Chuck
@Kent: Velociraptors are way more intelligent than T. They were also the size of wolves, but that would have made them a lot less threatening for a movie :)
raven
@RSA: Remember ”
Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant?
Josie
@Subsole:
This, a thousand times over. You can’t identify white trash by where they live, where (or if) they went to school, or how much money they have. You sure can identify them, however, when they open their mouths and spout stupidity. Also, if they splash gold paint on everything to prove how rich they are.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: I love reading this old stuff, and Englebart and all them. Thanks.
raven
@Subsole: I may look like a bank teller but I’m just a hog caller. . .
Major Major Major Major
@MomSense:
I’m sure you and I violate terms of service all the time. They aren’t banning him for that–he’s been doing it for years. And the ideal of free speech extends beyond the first amendment.
The Masnick link I shared in the post discusses this, and the importance of patchy, subjective enforcement of ToS violations.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Yay! You’re back.
Just Chuck
If only T had posted a picture back in 2016 with an exposed female nipple, then we wouldn’t have had to deal with him on social media.
Ian R
So very true. Every time I comment or read on a blog that uses Disqus (*spit*), I wish it were late-90s Gnus. The filtering and customizability was just so much better, almost 30 years ago than it is now.
Betsy
I think we should apply the principles of public utility law in ancient and highly functional area of law to Facebook and other outlets. They have become like utilities, and that they are not easily boycotted or boycotts are not a really effective way to deal with them, they have become essential in what they provide, and their controllers have too mich concentrated power. In some ways (not all) they are like the water-mill or bridge or turnpike (to take early examples) or the electric company or gas company (to take later examples) that can only exist in one location or network area, and which everyone must needs avail themselves of.
Public utility law should be applied to more situations, and perhaps it has some useful principles for this situation.
craigie
This is not a problem with the internet, it’s a problem with capitalism. All roads lead to monopoly, unless there is strong government. Half this country doesn’t believe in government at all, so here we are.
JaySinWA
The problem is Trump is a clear and present danger with a following that is waiting for a call to arms. I believe a distributed moderated platform has limited utility in shutting down that trigger.
It may solve a different problem in moderation, but so far such platforms have no where near the reach of Twitter or Facebook, largely because of ease of use vrs utility in reaching people you care about.
Redshift
@Another Scott: Yeah, I was reading or listening to a piece not long ago about how Facebook’s current measure of success (one of them) is getting users to join more groups, I guess because then people stay on the platform more and make them more money.
This has fed, among other things, there being a huge proliferation of Q groups and people joining dozens of them, contributing to them getting radicalized, very little of which is part of what Facebook claims to monitor (when they’re not just letting profit override even that.)
RSA
@raven:
@Major Major Major Major:
Good pointers, thanks.
Because technology changes so quickly, a lot of people (both non-technical and technical! but not you) don’t seem to think it’s worthwhile to revisit older work. It’s too bad, because some of the basic ideas underneath the technology haven’t changed, and we still don’t understand many of the important issues surrounding the use of the technology.
There’s also a meta-level theme that I think is easy to forget (I do it myself sometimes), that online environments are designed environments. So many design decisions are not based on any foundation other than heuristics or guesswork or even just historical bias, so we shouldn’t assume they’re written in stone.
Twitter’s original 140-character limit is one familiar example. Another (my hobbyhorse) is the lack of support for grouping and structure between the level of the individual and level of the larger community; in the real world, for example, if you’re being bullied, your family, friends, mentors, and other bystanders may intervene, while in the online world, abuse from thousands of people can come crashing down on you alone.
Subsole
@Just Chuck: Counterpoint: those itty bitty little ones from the second movie (compsognathus?) were downright horrifying.
Subsole
@raven: Man, you always come through with the good tunes…
Just Chuck
@RSA: Twitter’s 140-char limit (which I understand is now a whopping 280) comes from when the dominant IM technology between phones was SMS, and Twitter was actively supporting it.
I weep for the state of communication platforms that haven’t evolved since the 90’s or have actually gone backward. Remember MySpace and how you could actually customize your page?
Mary G
I hesitate to jump in, because I have no idea what you’re exactly talking about, but I’ll wave my ignorance proudly.
Long, long ago before some of you whippersnappers were born, I had AOL 1.0. Not for long, because while it was easy to use, it was insular and made it hard to get out and see things I wanted to see beyond the walled garden. I went back to Compuserve or whatever. Parler is having the same problem. Since it’s all conservatives, posters are preaching to the choir and it’s boring. Half the fun of the internet is being exposed to beliefs different from your own and arguing with total strangers.
Your idea also gives me a whiff of danger in that you’re setting up “the in crowd” where it’s easy to ban people who aren’t cool or subservient enough to the popular boys and girls. The real world is full of cliques.
My next concern is that the vast majority of people want bread and circuses, which is why members of Kardashian world and rappers I’ve never heard of have millions of followers. LeBron James has 48.7. I cannot recall what my point was with all of this, maybe just that 90% of people online don’t care what we do.
Just Chuck
@Subsole: Yah, the sequel was the Aliens to the original movie’s Alien. Sure, more than one dino, but it was the lone raptors that carried most of the menace.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: a few posters (no doubt drunk or high) said they were missing you, so I posted “fuck off” with a link to a cool but obscure ‘80’s song.
Major Major Major Major
Yes!! I quote Deming in the post but I sort of lost that thread—we need to be careful about the decisions we make because we are actually in full control of these systems, and any aberrant behavior is actually how the system was designed, we were just unaware.
Felanius Kootea
What do you all think of Tim Berners-Lee’s contract for the web?
It’s interesting that if the pioneers had sought to monetize things from the beginning, the web/internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist.
Frank Wilhoit
@Major Major Major Major: You overrate design. Much of the behavior of most software is emergent and fortuitous.
Mike in Pasadena
@Major Major Major Major:
@Major Major Major Major: read the first amendment, it applies to a government entity prohibiting speech. Twitter is using the internet, but twitter is not a governmental entity.
RSA
@Just Chuck:
Yes. And if we look at the source for the SMS limit of 160 characters, we find the influence of technical limitations plus analysis of the number of characters included on postcards and Telex messages.
That’s an okay starting point. Nowadays, though, the tweets I get the most mileage from are tweet storms (with numbers, because the presentation may be out of order) and images of text. Going backward is exactly right.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major: Amen. That was clear in your post, I think.
Feathers
@Bruuuuce: Apparently Parler is hosted by AWS, which also has huge defense and government contracts. I’m guessing that the plug can and will be pulled if someone feels it should be. A reminder that Amazon makes its profit off Amazon Web Services. They are destroying the American retail ecosystem for shits and giggles at this point.
One of the things not being mentioned here is the role of venture capitalists, hedge funds and Wall Street. They prop up these social media companies, pushing growth and profit as the only acceptable goals. These companies never even have to be profitable, they just have to grow, with venture capital making the founders insanely wealthy in order to be allowed to take the company public or make their money when the start up is bought out, usually so that whatever functionality they have is buried so as not to be competition.
Ending this cycle is what the next round of regulation needs to address.
Major Major Major Major
@Frank Wilhoit: I’m a software engineer and I’m using ‘design’ loosely.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike in Pasadena: I’m aware, and if you’d like to know more about the intersection of social media and the first amendment, I wrote a whole post. https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/12/28/lets-talk-about-section-230-of-the-cda-or-why-youre-allowed-to-comment-on-this-post/
burnspbesq
@Major Major Major Major:
Not quite; it’s more accurate to say that 1A simply doesn’t apply.
“Congress shall make no law,” remember?
Betsy
@Mike in Pasadena: I think he’s pointing out something else entirely —that the First Amendment guarantees free speech to entities such as Facebook, and part of *their* protected freedom of speech is that they can ban those whose viewpoints they disapprove of.
Ken
@Betsy: Is public utility law even applied to public utilities any more? In a lot of areas they’ve been deregulated to “unleash the power of the free market”, which has worked out about as well as it usually does.
cain
Those of us in Free Software land, we’ve been using Matrix as well for chatting and collab. (https://matrix.org/ – I do have a Mastodon presence, but not on it much. I should use it more though for tech stuff and twitter for politics. But it’s hard to manage two social media accounts.
In general though, our problem is always going to be a human problem – and social networks that magnify human attitudes and scales them are a danger. What’s important is not create walled gardens as you say – especially gardens owned by one company. We should definitely think about how we can create distributed non-centralized social media – as a govt service.
Bruuuuce
@Feathers: I hadn’t looked into Parler’s hosting. Thanks for that. For “feels it should be” I suspect I can read “sees public and/or financial pressure harming its returns.”
Bill Arnold
@Frank Wilhoit:
Twitter itself experienced this when they introduced the retweet. (They hadn’t correctly gamed out how it would be used/abused.)
The Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds” – The button that ruined the internet — and how to fix it. (Alex Kantrowitz, BuzzFeed, July 23, 2019)
RSA
@Bill Arnold: Interesting! It’s often difficult to predict the results of a given design decision.
I’m reminded of a comment Tony Hoare made some years ago:
It’s possible that Hoare (Turing award winner, maybe most famous for quicksort and CSP) may be off by one or even two orders of magnitude.
planetjanet
I know this is a long dead thread, but I just want to thank Major, Major, Major, Major for such an enlightening and interesting discussion. Thank you.