Charles U. Farley
How do folks reconcile the idea that fake news must be censored or deplatformed with the notion of democracy? If we're too stupid to filter fake news, how can we be smart enough to vote?
I *think* most people's answer will be something related to the wisdom of crowds and systematic bias, but if that is the case doesn't that mean the real power that matters is the power to filter what information people see?
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Charles U. Farley
I think that having a population that cannot filter information is a tremendous threat to democracy, if not the largest. And I don’t see how we get to the point where people can filter information if we filter it for them. It seems to me that we need to go completely the opposite direction and remove nearly all filters aside from those that are effective in protecting the most vulnerable. Note that I didn’t say intended to; they must actually work.
Charles U. Farley
@clacke I think we can incrementally introduce the idea of personal responsibility for filtering. I don’t think any kind of entrance exam is required.
There is also an extent to which it’s not really important for democracy to make good decisions. Just not terrible ones. But that requires strong constitutional limits that don’t get systematically and irrevocably eroded over time so that certain things are permanently outside the scope of voting.
florian
@freakazoid I think information literacy is something that needs to be better taught in general. As to reconciling the imperative to censor disinformation with the rights of free speech, this is a great example for how our squishy human intuition might sometimes do a better job than absolute, amoral formula approaches to justice.
florian
@freakazoid Democracy operates by way of public opinion, and this is generally good if you want people to have agency in charting the path of the society they inhabit. Here’s a spontaneous metaphor that will likely fall apart under hard scrutiny: If society is an organism, then there are channels for moving resources and information through it. We often benefit from occasional attacks on our biology. It makes our immune system stronger.
Charles U. Farley
@flowb I think this does tend to be the result when the feedback loop is relatively tight, as it tends to be with ad-supported cable channels and social media. I think it’s less true with subscription media, because the loop is slower and I think people are much less willing to pay monthly or yearly for “quick fix” kind of stuff. I think once we slow down our higher faculties tend to kick in.
florian
@freakazoid I’ve had a lot of opportunities over the last decade or so to think about how Capitalism’s imperative to monetize human attention has sort of turned the reasoning faculties of our collective organism into a weird testing ground for ever crazier stimulants. In my less optimistic moments, I think the result is a twitchy paranoid sitting in a living room, flipping channels looking for the next hit.
florian
@freakazoid back to your idea of letting this play out to make us stronger in the long term: to quote John Maynard Keynes “in the run, we’re all dead” :) Rugged individualism is awesome for individualists, but the idea that the fate of society should be decided by the invisible hand of evolutionary fitness is kind of Libertarian.
florian
@freakazoid So when you get a cold, we’re generally less inclined to bombard your body with biological-censorship (antibiotics) because you’ll be better off in the long run by letting your immune system figure it out. But, if there is an assault that threatens the survival of the organism, what is one to do?
This is sort of a personal choice for sure. But what if the organism we’re talking about isn’t just an individual, but a collective organism?
Charles U. Farley
@flowb This is a major reason I’ve started using an RSS reader again. I’ve also subscribed to a bunch of publications. Putting thought even just into what I put in my RSS reader has helped a lot, though RSS doesn’t seem like a usable solution for the masses. News apps that are oriented toward subscriptions can be, though. Learning aggregators of free content definitely aren’t.
Charles U. Farley
@flowb I think the drive to monetize attention comes largely from the enclosure of commons, which provides the opportunity to do that. Even if Facebook appears to have “built” the commons, the true commons is the interpersonal space that has moved there. Same is true of search engines. It seems like these should be public resources, though I have no idea how to implement that.
Charles U. Farley
@flowb Cable and over-the-air TV and radio are much clearer enclosures of the commons. It’s obvious with radio spectrum but even with cable they’re using right-of-ways they had to be granted special access to by the government.
Charles U. Farley
@flowb The Internet also requires this, but there’s a lot less vertical integration with the Internet. That may point to a possible solution, but I don’t know what.
Charles U. Farley
@flowb Perhaps the answer is that everybody on the planet is entitled to an IPv6 /48 and the right to run servers with a minimum of 100MiB without any filtering and if you can’t provide that you don’t get to use any right-of-ways. And you’re not allowed to offer any services beyond IP connectivity. Which means probably municipal Internet for all.
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