You accused them of using an oversimplification with a selective definition, and then immediately performed that exact fallacy ("people with political opinions they support").
> I guess by “all” they mean only people with political opinions they support.
You are just misinterpreting what that quote says. They think that the internet should remain a public resource that is open and accessible to all. They don't think that everything on the internet should be a public resource that is open and accessible to all as you are implying.
Do you really think that everything on the internet should be a public resource and accessible to all, even your email, bank accounts, etc?
Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals.
A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
If you can effectively cast your political opponents as “terrorists” you can rationalize denying them all sorts of rights and still get to call yourself a supporter of human rights. They did a similar thing during the Iraq war.
I made a litmus test that an alarming number of people I've had recent discussions with cannot pass.
Basically it's about whether you can get them to agree with both of the following statements:
1) X-ism should not exist.
2) X-ists have a fundamental right to exist.
Point number one is perfectly reasonable as should be point two.
The really scary authoritarians flat out deny point number two, but most people will start equivocating or scream at you because you don't want to punch X-ists.
This is a growing problem that society needs to find a solution to quickly. Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
And I just want to point out before I get tons of hate that it's perfectly acceptable to give X-ists consequences for their _actions_. Not their private thoughts.
>Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
You're exaggerating. We don't have a real problem with people who want to mass murder people for being X-ists. It's easy to observe the inverse, though.
The terrorists who stormed the capitol are nobody's mere "political opponents". They are hateful, violent cowards together with some innocent non-violent people tricked by propaganda, the former of whom hide behind the broader identity of conservative or Republican, precisely so that people can defend them under that umbrella as you have done. You shouldn't be helping them.
One day, people may actually need to invade the Capitol building, but it will never happen because of your eagerness to create an authoritarian state that shuts down all controversial discourse.
If we deplatformed every “violent thug” that did something people didn’t like, you would have a fraction of the rights you have today.
I believe that we passed a controversial discourse, when a certain group of people decided to ignore all reasonable arguments, to ignore sience.
This is not about shutting down all controversial discourse.
It is about "defend[ing] a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant".
Surpression shall only happen if there is no other way to defend a tolerant society cause the intolerant are working with (massiv, wide spread) violence.
I don't know who is in the position to decide when that point has come.
But one could argue that people invading the capitol is that point.(I don't think so)
What I am really worried about, is that it seems like tech companies will have to make those decisions.
In the end there will be individual persons, who make that decisons and that is very dangerous.
Worth pointing out that innocent people were shot and killed and senators were evacuated while they confirmed the election result. It isn't "something I don't like" it is "something reprehensible which cannot under any circumstances be tolerated".
Well, in the case of violence it is quite easy to pass judgement and just lock them up. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to those terrorists. Even if they only talk bullshit you should at least try to understand why they became terrorists or else you will just declare more and more people as terrorists because it is the easy way out.
Feel free to listen to terrorists all you want -- I'm under no obligation to listen to people who are advocating for my torture or death, and I'm certainly not obligated to supply a platform for their views.
>A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
Ex CEO of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave has been removed from Mozilla for donating his private money to some conservative same-sex marriage organisation.
So what? Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
You can't be taken seriously as an advocate for a tolerant and accessible non-profit when you spend your salary denying people the right to get married.
Orwell wrote a nice essay on this, all the way back in 1940s, when the war was still being fought, and organizations like the British Union of Fascists were around:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."
"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"
(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)
"But we should claim the right to suppress them (intolerant philosophies) if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
How relevant to our age... and this appears in a treatise by philosopher Karl Popper from 1945, who attributed the paradox to Plato's defense of "benevolent despotism"... i.e. the discussion is as old as civilisation itself!
The "paradox" of tolerance is only a paradox if you tolerate actions other than speech. If you only tolerate speech, there's no paradox - as soon as speech translates to actual harm, the hammer is brought down.
Taken out of context that quote would imply "we need even more serious censorship", but admits that deplatforming a certain world leader is a not a real solution and that these actions that should be taken:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
The first two are no-brainers. The third is alright, but I doubt re-weighting Facebook's timeline algorithm is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The fourth is useful but pretty generic at "do research on things".
"We need more than deplatforming" is the literal headline, and they support it in the post:
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken"
> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken
Absolutely.
I see this policy stance as being no different to wanting the education system to not purport Racism; this isn't curtailing freedom of speech or any other freedom. It is purely an exercise in needing to do more than just deplatforming Racists: Not actively seek to create new ones!
I interpret the post as saying "banning people on Twitter won't solve our problem, transparency in advertising and social media algorithms will" because before your quote Mitchell (CEO of Mozilla) in the post says:
> But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.
And then lists several possible solutions that seem quite reasonable, and we should for sure push for the first two.
PS to anyone reading this exchange, at this point our comments are longer than the original blog post, you might as well just read the original instead of our out-of-order commentary. :)
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
This is great, silencing disinformation... or maybe not.
On one march friday, facebook would silence the "conspiracy theorists" claiming you should wear a mask, because our 'experts' (and american too, and WHO and many others) said, that wearing a mask for covid is useless.
Then, on the next day, our government mandated masks and gloves in every indoor location (stores,...), and facebook would silence the people claiming masks are useless.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation
It’s horrifying that they think this is even possible. Some of the worst political divides are over which set of facts to emphasize (children in cages vs children separated from traffickers) or are speculation on ongoing events (Russian pee tape, Trump is a Russian asset, Russia stole the election, etc).
“Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit where you follow your politically aligned fact sources like Twitter.
> “Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit
No, it doesn't. Facts, which are a subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood. For example, you'd not find schools teach conspiracy theories like "Earth is flat", or "Global Warming is a hoax" for a reason. Fringe theories that rely on absurd reasoning and have no basis in actual facts must be curtailed, and under no circumstances do those theories deserve any amplication platform, definitely not one which operates at the scale like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.
I realise that what's a universal fact today needn't be a fact tomorrow, but we have got substantially better scientific and socio-political tools to verify and come to conclusions one way or other for many topics. It is only prudent to let fringe theories be fringe and not amplify them for more eyeballs and revenue.
Consuming nonsense does affect real people and has real world consequences.
> No, it doesn't. Facts, which are subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood.
Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that both sides of the political spectrum base a bunch of bullshit based on sets of facts they deem important.
There is no set of facts that indicates wealth should be taxed or corporate rates should be cut. Each side trots out “facts” supporting their view but the conclusions are completely different.
So if one person says the ideal the tax rate is X% and another person says X+1% who is correct? One of them or neither? How do you decide certain things like that? Obviously at least one of them is spreading misinformation and is not a factual voice.
I wonder why Mozilla even bothers with these kinds of posts. I doubt a single person in the world cares about getting political opinions from their web browser so these kinds of posts just dirty their image.
It's even worse than that - it makes me less able to trust Mozilla because Mozilla wants to make sure they can help me decide what is true or not. That is definitely not Mozilla's job nor do they have that ability. It just tells me they're looking to help control the internet for corporations.
It's a statement in support of suppressing speech, and it's needlessly political. Mozilla leadership has mostly rested on their laurels (read: Google money) while Firefox consistently slid in market share. I've been a loyal FF user for 17 years, and this was the final straw. In the process of switching to Brave.
I don't see anything in that post about suppressing speech—can you help me see it? The main bullet points in the article don't seem to have anything to do with suppressing speech (unless that is how you are framing the bullet point which reads: "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation."
It starts with title "We need more than deplatforming" which means "deplatforming is good, but it's not enough".
noun: deplatforming; noun: de-platforming
the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.
It continues with "Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms."
Blocking, silencing and removal does suppress speech.
Freedom of speech should not guarantee 'right to global reach'. People should be allowed to say what they think to an amount of people who they can have personal relationships with, their neighbors, relatively close colleagues and similar. Deplatforming should not take this away, it should just take the biggest megaphone away mankind invented to date.
Deplatforming isn't suppression it's realising that you entities do not have to be neutral in their support and broadcast of various things. It's the question of a radical over a liberal mindset.
The Mozilla of 2004 is not the Mozilla of today. With unnecessary proselytizing/virtual signalling, implementing features antithetical to their values (Pocket integration, switching to WebExtensions), pursuing wasteful and fruitless endeavors (FirefoxOS), the company has completely strayed from its main focus: building a solid, open, and free browser. I'm still with them, but I'd be lying if I don't strongly consider moving to Brave every time they come out with actual innovative and exciting features like this.
Wow. Did not expect that from Mozilla of all places. Really disappointed as I've been a die hard Firefox user for as long as I can remember in large part because of the commitment to a free, open internet and fundamental Liberal values like free speech.
It means that Brave is implementing protocols that help circumvent censorship, while the CEO of Mozilla is saying that current censorship doesn't go far enough.
Gab has not updated Dissenter in 10 months (Windows and Linux) or more than 13 months (macOS). Without backporting or merging up to current Brave, this leaves its users horribly vulnerable to unpatched but disclosed Chromium security bugs, including full remote code execution vulns. Don't use Dissenter. My "salty" tweet was prophetic.
“We work to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to all.”
I guess by “all” they mean only people with political opinions they support.