Slowly and inevitably imperfectly, social media begins to realise that censorship does not automatically equate with bad. Not censoring some things is far, far worse.
Twitter has suspended the accounts of two leaders of a British far-right group shortly after revising its rules on hate speech. Paul Golding, Britain First's leader, and Jayda Fransen, his deputy, can no longer tweet and their past posts no longer appear. The organisation's official Twitter page has suffered the same fate. It appears that three of Ms Fransen's posts that President Drumpf retweeted have gone from his feed as a result.
Hateful imagery - such as the Nazi swastika - can still be posted, but will initially be hidden behind a "sensitive media" warning, that visitors must disable to proceed. However, such content will no longer be allowed on a person's profile page. Those that featured examples will be asked to remove them. Repeat violators will be banned.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42402570
One of the consequences of this is the idiots go off and try to set up their own systems. Except because they're not the brightest tools in the box, they make a load of rubbish.
ReplyDeletenytimes.com - The Alt-Right Created a Parallel Internet. It’s an Unholy Mess.
Why is it "far, far worse"? What are we really afraid if here? That some might be persuaded?
ReplyDeleteIf that's your fear, why have democracy at all? We can point at times when it appears the voters have made bad decisions. Why not protect society from bad votes rather than bad ideas that lead to bad votes?
Look, these sites are private and can do what they like, but when they start policing speech, they become responsible, in my mind, for who they do keep on board.
Is it even effective in stopping this kind of speech from spreading? People who want to hear it can still gorge on it in different places and those who don't are pretty much immune to it. Those on the fence are likely to take the fact of suppression to wonder what is being kept from them.
I think it's ultimately a marketing move. Progressive people don't want to see this kind of thing, so they take it off to improve site traffic. I bet they will be less ready to suppress any controversial voices from the left that might post.
I can understand these commercial concerns. Every site makes decisions to target an audience likely to spend on their ads. Don't pretend this is some socially responsible move to avoid something that is "far, far worse" than the alternative.
Mat Brown not clear how much of that is due to bugs and how much is due simply to lack of interest in participating on a Social Media platform with few users. The Twitter fail whale was a common site in the early days of Twitter. Facebook was also ridden with bugs in it's early days.
ReplyDeleteMat Brown I don't remember if I posted it separately or not, but your link reminds me of this :
ReplyDeletebbc.co.uk - Is Islamic State losing control of its 'virtual caliphate'?
Jordan Henderson I'll take any solution that works, the goal being the prevention of a racist, unjustly hate-filled society. Though I'm not sure how we would prevent bad votes without first preventing bad ideas.
ReplyDeleteThe extent to which social versus conventional media influences opinions is an interesting topic, but the restriction of access for groups such as Britain First and the American Nazi Party (! for crying out loud) seems like an entirely sensible course of action. There was an article (I forget which one, don't have time to look it up) calling such extreme movements "democracy's anti-matter", which I agree with : they use "freedom of speech" as a tool to remove freedoms of all kinds from others. This is exactly what they're campaigning for, after all.
I don't know what the morally best of most effective course is to prevent such ideologies, but I'm willing to bet that social media restrictions are at the very least a necessary (though surely not sufficient) condition.
My preferred solution would be a world in which all ideas are permissible and all speech is allowed, but certain ideas are simply never expressed (as valid) because it's obvious to everyone that they're complete bollocks. Nazism certainly falls in to that category. In the absence of such a world, the second best solution is one in which such ideas are actively prevented.
Rhys Taylor The thing is, I don't think there's any reason to believe this is effective.
ReplyDeleteThe Popper paradox, that we can't tolerate the intolerant is interesting, but way overblown as a threat.
I've seen where people ascribe what happen in Weimar and the introduction of Nazism as an example of how the intolerant were tolerated and resulted in horror. That was a complete misreading of history. Weimar Germany had long been intolerant of free speech, the NAZI party had been outright outlawed for a period in the 20s. There was frequent suppression of Left and Right media by Weimar in an effort to control society.
When the NAZIs gained power, they effectively used this anti-free speech tradition to suppress all views but their own.
That's what you have to face. Once you start suppressing speech, you assume that those levers will never be used against you.
Fight speech with speech.
That said, again, these are private sites and can are free to accommodate the community they want to support.
Jordan Henderson I do appreciate the principles of all of that, and yet... the US President, aka Joffrey Baratheon, is retweeting stuff from a racist hate group. It's not as if people didn't speak out against him or Britain First and their ilk, but it doesn't seem to have done any good. So I question the efficacy of fighting speech with speech. Additionally, experience on social media[1] has taught me that an awful lot of people believing this kind of crap aren't worth arguing with : they care no one whit about the truth, so they don't listen to reason. It doesn't matter how delicately the argument is put, or how much sympathy is given to their situation[2], because they fundamentally just don't care. With the important caveat that those that are on social media are probably the most voracious in their beliefs and therefore the most difficult to persuade.
ReplyDelete[1] This morning I blocked someone - an extremely rare event for me - with 5,000 followers whose posts were almost entirely about the "war against the whites" and how Jews are in some kind of Communist conspiracy theory... honestly, it's extremely frustrating to see such people gaining traction while others posting far more interesting content fall by the wayside... how can one fight speech with speech in a situation like this ? It's not too dissimilar in the mainstream media either.
[2] The other thing that annoys the hell out of me is that defending minorities results in cries of "political correctness gone mad !", whereas calling a spade a spade or a Nazi a Nazi results in calls for being more sympathetic...
Of course, an over-zealous suppression of speech leads society to becoming a Nietzschean monster that the suppression was designed to prevent, which is useless. Yet completely unrestricted speech doesn't seem to work either. I broadly subscribe to the "marketplace of ideas" concept : you've got to have some regulations, even if only very light ones, otherwise some ideas tend to dominate which suppress all the others.
Well, that's my rant over. I shall now return to Christmas festivities and adorable dogs and whatnot.