What is scary to me is how censorship has become completely accepted by the new generation, including software engineers here in their 20s. No true hacker (this is Hacker News after all) would be OK with corporation or government censorship. Slippery slope is real.
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by -- and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing -- they only like `cooperation' that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults.
> Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy.
And authoritarians also thrive on chaos and propaganda. The recent rise in authoritarianism hasn't been related to censorship and secrecy as much as chaos, misdirection, conspiracy theories and forced polarization.
In the past and in some places today profane and obscene material was/is censored and no one bats an eye. Books are being removed from libraries and that has happened apparently for decades.
This type of censorship has been completely accepted by all past generations.
We went from censoring things that everyone thinks is bad (CP, death threats), to now censoring opinions which 50% of Americans share, and probably 90% of the world in just a few years.
Censorship is a cheap and bad solution to a problem that a lot of people feel very real. We have a real issue of regular people and malicious actors using the unprecedented reach of social networks to spread falsehoods, conspiracy theories, attacks on certain groups... Yes, the usual response will be "it's the responsibility of adults to filter what they see" but the reality is that doesn't happen. We are not ready for such an influx of information, and the structure of social networks incentivizes outrage and false or misleading content, and penalizes nuance and well-researched arguments. Social networks are being used to manipulate massive amounts of people. That's what should be scary. Censorship is just a response to that.
Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
> Yes, the usual response will be "it's the responsibility of adults to filter what they see" but the reality is that doesn't happen.
Let me stop you there.
Those platforms dont give you tools for that! You can't say "but people won't do it" if they don't have any good option to do that in the first place.
But yeah, shoving algorithmic garbage to get people to click would be bad enough, but now we have that with added tries of trying to manipulate politics with it.
> Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
I firmly believe that RSS model of people having to choose what to subscribe to get anything would be much better off. If someone wants to put collective vomit of the internet (which what pretty much twitter algorithm does) as a feed they are free to do so but nobody is shoved whatever algorithmic crap decides that will get reaction and ad views out of them.
And before someone says Mastodon/Fediverse, nope, they fucked it up. The fact admin can decide "no, I decide for my users that any updates from this @server.address are bad and nobody, not even someone who subscribed explicitly, can engage with it" disqualifies that because it have same problem of exacerbating bubbles decided upon by tiny minority
For one thing, you’re mistaken. A big realization of hacker culture in the 90s and early 2000s was that the old forums and the like had to be heavily moderated otherwise they digress into flame wars. Social media definitely knew this, but made their fortunes off of flame wars.
We’ve realized how idealistic and out of touch with humanity we were. If everyone online was a good faith actor attempting to have intellectual dialog then I would oppose all censorship.
The fact is though that bad faith and agenda driven actors dominate the public narrative, stressing all of society out in the process as they either directly, or by proxy, then the real world and daily interactions of society into a giant flame war.
I care a lot more about society not being divided and these tools of connection not being used to wage large scale disinformation campaigns than I do any ideologically driven morals. We have to live in this country, this world, together.
FWIW, plenty of "true hackers" observed the same data points and concluded that the cyber-utopia envisioned in the '90s is a pipe dream and deserves to be dead and buried.
A lot has happened in the past couple decades as society has tilted around into the information age. Some assumptions have undergone rigorous testing. Some deserved to be discarded. I don't think anyone has the One True Approach yet, but freedom-of-speech idealism proved wanting as a strategy.
What is scary to me is how censorship has become completely accepted by the new generation, including software engineers here in their 20s. No true hacker (this is Hacker News after all) would be OK with corporation or government censorship. Slippery slope is real.