Roujin wrote:

It sounds like what you really want gurt is a safe space where people can raise their challenging rhetoric without fear of people with furries for avatars dropping sassy gifs in reply and shutting down reasoned debate by showing up the absurdity of the original opinion posted.

GurtTractor wrote:

I want a place where people can speak freely about a range of topics and be challenged about them, without fear of a baying mob of dunktwats attacking them personally instead of their ideas.

Tempy wrote:

It sounds like what you really want gurt is a safe space where people can raise their challenging rhetoric without fear of people with furries for avatars dropping sassy gifs in reply and shutting down reasoned debate by showing up the absurdity of the original opinion posted.

I want a place where people can speak freely about a range of topics and be challenged about them, without fear of a baying mob of dunktwats attacking them personally instead of their ideas.

Mine lacks the ad hominem jeering and mockery, so no they are not the same.

This isn't about heated discussions which are normal and part and parcel of a debate.
This is about curbing the spread and reach of hate speech, fake news, misinformation and lies. These should be better regulated on social media and the internet as a whole. This wouldn't be such an issue if our society allowed easier access to higher education but guess who keeps throwing up obstacles?

It's worth talking about, but we're 4 pages in and all we have are a transcript of a podcast and a load of reckons about how bad it is online, how we need to be vigilant that our free speech isn't curbed and how people should be free to have debates around rhetoric.

Gurt, i totally agree with you that people who are posting things in ignorance should be talked to sensibly, but I would bet that most of the time, people getting dunked on, shouted down and just generally harassed for their opinions online are not random anonymous people who have accidentally posted something they didnt realise was harmful. Do you have any evidence that honest people, acting in good faith are being routinely shut down unfairly, and not having their right to voice their opinions heard?

As for approaching all of the people with challenging rhetoric with peace and love, I agree. However I will quote my old mucker Akala "Love is not soft, or sorry, love is so hard it can make your mum catch a body." You can debate from a position of caring about your fellow man, and it will not look peaceful or loving to the person you are debating with if their opinion is some right wing, or right adjacent bullshit.

Yossarian wrote:

Mine lacks the ad hominem jeering and mockery.

a baying mob of dunktwats.

Tbf I was describing an amorphous group rather than any one person but yeah, this is what I mean about the difficulty in avoiding being awful to each other. It can be incredibly difficult to avoid getting emotional about things, but I think it's something worth striving for even if we fail constantly.

If people start casually categorising me I'll find it hard to not take it personally, so let's not try to do that in the first place I guess.

I understand what you are saying Rouj, and I think the optimal path is probably somewhere in the middle, though I feel strongly that there's a little too much casual acceptance of 'dunking' as a way to argue with each other. Twitter mobs are a real thing by many accounts, people can become suicidal from it.

People as a whole are cunts. Don’t think that will ever change.

b0r1s wrote:

People as a whole are cunts. Don’t think that will ever change.

I don't like to ascribe too much to 'human nature' though, it's a bit easy and can misattribute stuff that might have a societal cause.

There are many supposed 'human universals', here are a few -



We can develop technologies and methodolgies to overcome them, as we have done for the past several thousand years. So I don't think we should be too defeatist about it.

Yeah it's by no means extensive, just a selection to get you thinking about how we can create our own reality, and have been doing so for a long time now.

Here's a more detailed article - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/technology/tim-berners-lee-privacy-internet.html

Not sure what to think of that yet but it seems interesting. I've been looking around and doing research about the potential for more decentralised networks, Diaspora also has things called 'pods' though those are something a bit different.

Roujin wrote:

Do you have any evidence that honest people, acting in good faith are being routinely shut down unfairly, and not having their right to voice their opinions heard?

For me it's really about the people I've seen plenty of good in getting swayed by their rightwing communities, when in person they're far more receptive to progressive views. But on my own I've no chance, and a lot of lefties I'd appreciate help from come in to dunk a busted football over the trench. Because they don't know these people like I do — don't know their backgrounds; I get it. It's just bad advertising for our tolerance, personally justifiable or not.

Loads of folk are absolute weapons clear as day, but I try to give the benefit of the doubt initially; try to prioritise civility over conflicting views in my judgement. If I say summat to a righty and a stream of abuse comes back... But sometimes it doesn't; sometimes I get a reasonably respectful reply, and by acknowledging I've noticed that, I hope they leave thinking that not all lefties are against them. Their views, aye, but not them.

After five years of socialist campaigning it took Johnson's bungling of Covid to have a palpable effect on his popularity. My takeaway is that it's probably more effective to avoid dunking, in the hope of keeping more voters close enough to centre for election flips. Or bring back the BNP and MAX DUNK to cordon off the worst.

As for censorship, all the really bad stuff already is, right? As Gurt says, if we go about trying to censor the far-right as well as the extreme, that cuts both ways with the wrong people in power. Telling X, Y and Z they've no right to online access is recruitment dynamite, and I think it already helps these dickhead enterprises to receive the amount of pushback they do. (The Mail never published any of my comments, the bastards!)

'People are bastards' is a bit of a lazy way of looking at it. Behaviour is learned, reinforced, not innate. Even on social media, most people come to have a bit of pleasant fun or chat about interests with those who share them.

Brooks wrote:

It's been in the interest of soc meeja platform capital to stoke sensation and drama for yonks, and the algos have been tuned accordingly. Until that gets dealt with...

It does always come back to this. And in 4 pages (some skim-read, admittedly) I've not seen much mention of how algorithms could be put to good use if they were freed from the demands of profiteering. If they're able to highlight the worst content to rile us up and hold our attention, they're also able to highlight the best to encourage calmer, more thoughtful conversation (learned and reinforced behaviour). 

But that means de-monetising platforms, removing the profit motive so the aim becomes that of smoother, more productive (to be defined) communication. (Edit: and encouraging moderate use, not addiction.) All those big brains being put towards the challenge of making something socially beneficial for a change. Regulation, meanwhile, is a patch over the problem, not a solution. It might file off the worst behaviour, but doesn't alter what companies are trying to achieve.

Heh, social media de-monitised. I'll believe it when I see it but usually big business prevails. I can't see them giving up targeted ads/propaganda ever. Too much money and political power at stake. Algorithms might be alterable tho.

JonB wrote:

I've not seen much mention of how algorithms could be put to good use if they were freed from the demands of profiteering. If they're able to highlight the worst content to rile us up and hold our attention, they're also able to highlight the best to encourage calmer, more thoughtful conversation (learned and reinforced behaviour).

I’m not sure how true that is. These algorithms highlight content that people engage with in some way, whether clicking a link, leaving a like or other reaction, or leaving a comment, it just so happens that the pieces that the content which does that tends to be stuff which gets us annoyed. There’s no simple inverse of this that would relate to things making us calmer or have more thoughtful conversations.

Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing these companies can do, I’m sure Facebook in particular has levers it knows it can pull, but I don’t think there’s anything quite this binary in what they could choose to highlight.

JonB wrote:

If you take out the need to maximise engagement, that already opens up a different approach. 

 
You’re right there. But you’re also right here:

JonB wrote:

I realise that de-monetisation and democratisation of platforms isn't about to happen.

And, as you suggest, the two aren’t compatible.

You can’t have a neutral public commons that’s privately funded. Not under our system of capitalism.