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Having had the experience a few times now of trying to type something (e.g. the domain name of a 3D printed gun files host) into various boxes on the internet & seeing it "Noped" by the platform, I didn't agree with @zeynep on this when it was first published, & still don't. https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/1281694551808376833
Censorship is still a real thing, & it's getting worse. The 3D printed gun people were on the leading edge of it, but it's coming for everyone's unpopular viewpoint eventually.
Furthermore, in saying that u can still "publish" an idea online, just maybe not on your...
Furthermore, in saying that u can still "publish" an idea online, just maybe not on your...
...preferred tech platform, /she/ is the one being unrealistic about the modern internet, not the free speech absolutists. The modern internet means that FB, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit are the public square, & if you're denied access to them you're denied access to it.
She has this exactly backwards. The architecture of the modern internet -- consolidation of public speech into a few platforms -- makes it very easy to set up chokepoints & operate them.
I just think all this is incorrect. The new censorship looks exactly like the old censorship, just at internet scale, & done even more quietly & effectively.
Here, as I said, is Zeynep being the one in denial about the true impact the modern internet has on free speech issues. If Baked Alaska is booted off a single-digit number of platforms, he is, in fact, very effectively censored.
The essay is, in fact, a call for nostalgia. Not for the Walter Cronkite era, but for the internet of the mid-aughts & the blogosphere, when you could still say with a straight face "the internet interprets censorship as damage & routes around it."
The irony here is that it may be that the only part of the article I even provisionally agree with is the conclusion. I don't think we have to resign ourselves to the current situation, & the law has a role in addressing it, but we have to start with old-school free speech values
The underlying problem that I see over & over in all these debates is not that the internet changes the definition of "free speech" -- rather, it's that it changes the definition of "censorship."
The folks who say "free speech is outmoded" are working with an outmoded concept of "censorship" that still means "if the government doesn't do it, it's not actually censorship." THAT is the idea that is old-school and totally outmoded, not free speech.
We have a situation right now where a handful of non-governmental actors can "censor" with a power & an absolute, unreviewable authority that governments of the past would have envied (& modern governments do envy!).
I agree with many of the problems Zeynep diagnoses in the WIRED piece -- the pollution of the infospace by bad actors working in coordination & at scale, to the point where the "marketplace of ideas" is mostly just malware. And I agree there's a regulatory role in addressing it.
We need new norms and new kinds of regulation, and fresh thinking about the proper interface between moderation on large-scale platforms & the law. But to me, all of that is to the end of encouraging truly free speech & of protecting the marketplace of ideas.
To throw out the marketplace of ideas & all that "legacy code" that has served so well, simply because bad actors are abusing it. I dunno. Baby, bathwater, etc.
Ultimately, network theory is leading people astray, I think. Modern-day 2020 information control -- including outright deleting unpopular ideas from megaplatforms -- is not about DNS or hyperlinks or any kind of graph. None of the info control uses that apparatus...
...because that stuff is outmoded if you're trying to control what people can & cannot see. Instead, every major platform has a sophisticated anti-malware/SPAM system -- a kind of platform immune system -- and THAT is what's being brought to bear on lawful speech to remove it.
Free speech vs. censorship in 2020 does not look like "it was deleted over here, so I republished over there & avoided a chokepoint". No, it looks like "I attempted to publish it, & then the mod tools + anti-SPAM/malware tools nuked it instantly, & I can't even link it."
