[whimsicalism]

I still vote Democrat, but it is the growth of exactly this attitude that you've identified that is causing me to move increasingly away from considering myself a "Democrat".

I can't see how people fail to notice the snobbish elitism underlying "we need to manage the discourse so that people's behavior is under control."

It's amazing how cyclical this sort of stuff is. Plato's Republic was enmeshed with a similar logic: that there is a natural way for society to progress, that human society is interfering with this natural way and that is a problem, and that we ought to have philosopher-kings (read: techies & politicians) to shape beliefs and discourse into a more natural (and thus "good") direction.

G.A. Cohen's writings on the history of philosophy have a scathing critique of this sort of thinking that I recommend.

[calinet6]

I do not think we need to manage speech or control discourse whatsoever. If you think that's the idea here, you're not thinking deep enough about the nature of the systems that are problematic right now.

We've designed communication systems that are optimized for instant gratification, engagement, getting the dopamine hit of seeing things you agree with or angry at, and rapidly moving to the next. That's not speech, that's a designed system of attention seeking, all with the primary objective of getting eyeballs on advertisements and content primarily.

We've designed communication platforms that cause us to cease seeing each other as human beings, and instead condensed thoughts and memes that are simply repeated to conform and get reinforced for a quick natural drug.

I do not think we should control the discourse or have structural control over what's right or wrong to say or think; that would be absurdly dystopian.

I do think we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech, and reinforce our own humanity in how we read and respond to it.

I think it's possible to design better platforms that don't bring out the worst in society, and that we should do so.

[whimsicalism]

Anyone who has studied the history of philosophy would know that the arguments you are making are classics among defenders of censorship: limiting speech for the "sake of speech" (over attention-seeking), "incentivize the context", "reinforce our humanity." None of these exempt you from managing speech, you're just trying to launder your values to a higher level - like what "good speech" is or whether a given speech-act appropriately "reinforces our own humanity." Tune the knobs of the social media platform until it starts producing speech I am more comfortable with.

Indeed much of JS Mill's On Liberty (1859) was dedicated to responding to these and others.

> we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech

Who is the "we" who "should" do so? How does that "we" coordinate so that everyone building these systems builds them in the same way?

And why should these systems be optimized for whatever extrinsic goal you like better than "attention seeking"? That is managing speech.

[calinet6]

The key difference here is that the speech is already highly managed and influenced to a degree never before seen in history. To think otherwise would be foolish.

Twitter isn't some natural state of the world that is pristine and unassailable; Facebook isn't the square in the park where people can speak their voice, and other choose to listen, participate, or walk along. Neither are anything like a book or newspaper.

If you're saying we shouldn't optimize or manage or turn the dials of these systems, then that's accepting that the current management and optimization and dials are somehow, inexplicably, acceptable or natural.

Someone has designed these systems and is influencing speech with their decisions. I don't have any power over them, but someone does, and the dials and designs of the system and the type of speech and communication they reinforce or encourage will change over time.

What gives them, the designers of the systems, any more right to manage their own system and the speech on it by their design choices? Are we to simply accept the corporations' design of their systems without critique or argument?

Not taking any action is to accept the current action, which still influences society. Not managing systems is to accept the current state of those systems, which still manages speech.

I do not see any difference whatsoever in those paths, so I will argue for trying to improve the systems.