So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.
Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?
Do you allow others to poison your well like that? If so, that strikes me as easily exploitable.
Also, the idea that this sort of content is inherently dangerous doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet. Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.
> So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.
That is intentionally and maliciously obfuscating the issue by equating social media (Google, Facebook, Tumblr) with infrastructure hosting (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost).
Those two types of companies are very different and should be regulated very differently.
> Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?
Um, yes?
Links to social media vaporize regularly. If it isn't worth the effort to pull and host onto a less ephemeral medium, was it really worth sharing at all?
> Also, the idea that this sort of content is inherently dangerous doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet. Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.
There's been enough work that suggests a close link between exposure to propaganda and getting funneled in to increasingly more radical material, e.g. [1].
Particularly regarding Twitter, it's noticeable that it's not just one racist tweet that gets shown to you when you deliberately click on one - the space below will be filled with similar kind of content, and you can see a marked increase of far-right crap on your algorithmic timeline as well, with every little interaction you have with far-right content.
It was bad before Musk, but since his takeover it's gotten really really bad.
Your link mentions YouTube. Under your logic, should we also stop using YouTube because its recommendations will radicalize us?
This line of thinking doesn’t make sense to me. Furthermore, bad ideology and its ideologues won’t go away simply because we individually stop looking at them.
I quit Twitter after 12 years when they started censoring the site search. I was trying to research QAnon wackos and it turns out that the search box had been neutered.
It’s one thing to tell people what they can post, it’s another to tell me what I’m not allowed to read (that is allowed to be posted).
> you can see a marked increase of far-right crap on your algorithmic timeline as well, with every little interaction you have with far-right content.
And?
I trust people to be intelligent enough to make their own decisions. If seeing an incredibly (or even mildly) racist tweet suddenly makes them proverbially goose-step around their home, they already were going to. One, ten, or hundred posts won't make them racist unless they were already predisposed to those ideas. In a healthy mind, viewing alternative views may broaden their view which might include disagreeing with their previous opinions.
If viewing a gay marriage doesn't make you gay, neither does seeing someone complain about other races or LGBT people. I am on 'your' side politically but the opinion that all conservative opinion should be extinguished or somehow that it is inherently harmful because you disagree with is just as bad as conservatives saying the same about your opinion.
There is no harm in reading and understanding other's opinions. All sides need to understand that. It only crosses into the need for 'deplatforming' when they are making implicit or explicit threats against a person or a group of people.
"I think <x> race is less likely to be successful due to <x, y, z>" is not a bad opinion. It may be wrong, but it isn't hurtful beyond maybe to someone who is too sensitive. "I think <x> race should be exterminated" is beyond the line and shouldn't be allowed to be posted publicly.
> So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.
Those are all very different things. Only Facebook is somewhat similar in that it has an algorithm that surfaces emotionally engaging content.
> I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet.
How about if it showed you 50 racist tweets? If repetition and exposure didn't have any effect on our behaviour then there would be no advertising market and no one would bother to spend vast sums on political campaigning.
> Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.
How about misinformation? As an example, I'd say the rise in anti-vaccination activity is an example of inherently dangerous information that has been spread primarily through social media.
The initialism "TERF" means "trans-exclusionary radical feminism"; I'm sure those who hold these views see themselves as being "just" radical feminists — the way the discussions go, it seems to me people with these views are unable to comprehend that the model they have of what gender is, is one of several, or that there is any value in the models they do not themselves have.
There's only room for one model when it comes to deciding who gets to use which space though.
For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.
> There's only room for one model when it comes to deciding who gets to use which space though.
One model per space. For example, the answer to "given how much testosterone is now in their body, which gender sports team should this F2M person be on?" is different to "which do we need to screen them for, testicular cancer or cervical cancer?"
> For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.
Four[0] options, if you think outside the box.
Ideally, I would have my prisons set up with enough guards that this doesn't matter. As I don't live in the ideal world, I would also have a[0] trans estate for those who have begun but not yet completed transitioning, and those who have completed a transition would be in whatever the new gender is.
