One of the weird things about the “Ministry of Truth” problem is how, somehow, liberals have a perception that other liberals will think that “Facebook should ban ‘disinformation’/‘pseudoscience’” is the responsible position. How does that happen? I don’t think we were ever explicitly told by somebody. Nobody made a cogent, persuasive argument in favor of that position.
If I had to try and trace it back, I think it went a little something like this:
People talk a lot about how much stupid stressful crap is on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook gets a crappy public image, not for producing the crap, but for profiting off the crap.
People blame MZ/Facebook for a lot of social ills: pseudoscience, Trumpism, depression/anxiety/teen suicide, privacy concerns, hate speech, etc. They’re in everybody’s bad books. Yet because there are so many competing notions for what FB ought to do to correct the problem, they don’t have any obvious fix.
Facebook doesn’t want to be in the bad books. They strategize about how to project the image of a responsible, upstanding company. For a while, their position is “we’d be irresponsible to police ‘disinformation,’” which is based on the fear that people would in fact call them irresponsible if they did. Asymmetric justice applies: Facebook is safer doing nothing (or less things) than doing something (or more things).
COVID-19 changed the game, giving a much more unified concept for what “responsible social media behavior” would look like. Somebody else, the freakin’ CDC, makes the policy for what constitutes improper speech. Facebook just enforces it. It’s a time of crisis, when public health concerns take priority over privacy/free speech/democratic concerns. Facebook can look like a noble guardian of public health. The few remaining “free speech” advocates and uncredentialed contrarian science enthusiasts can not only shove it, but get framed (by a gigantic corporation!) as the new villains in the story.
It’ll be important for people who are worried about being cast inappropriately as a villain to look for people who might have been deemed as such manage to alter their perception. How does Zeynep Tufekci manage to get in and stay in the good books? How do we raise controversial but important issues with our families and friends when they’re so much less fluent in the issues than we are that we risk looking unbelievably overconfident just for talking about what we know?
I think these things are possible, and I think it’ll help if we focus more of our attention on tractable solutions to them than on overemphasizing the current climate. After all, politics isn’t the mind killer. Fear is the mind killer. How do we let some of this fearful stuff pass over us and through us, and yet remain?
IMO 2020 wasn’t a turning point, and Facebook is not special. The events that happend lately have been a predictable development in a steadily escalating trend toward censorship. I’ll note that these censorship policies are widespread across every social media platform, and infact extend well beyond social media and apply to the entire infrastructure stack. Everything from DDoS protection services, to cloud service providers, to payment processors have all been getting more bold over the course of several years about pulling plugs on people saying the wrong things or providing platforms for others to say the wrong things. Here’s how I think it went down:
1.From 2010-2020 Social media and other SV companies gained a tremendous amount of power by gaining control over social media networks. 2. By virtue of all being near each other, they formed a political monoculture/ingroup. 3. They found themselves capable of deplatforming anyone they disagreed with. 4. They started banning people, starting with the most deplorable and the outgroup and working their way up from there. This seems to have become especially noticeable sometime around 2015. 5. First the deplorables complained about this by making appeals to free speech, which made free speech low status. 5. Then the outgroup complained about this and made appeals to free speech, which made supporting free speech an outgroup identifier. 7. Everyone falls in line because otherwise they might get unpersoned if they’re mistaken as a member of the outgroup or the deplorables by defending free speech. 8. The overton window of acceptable speech continues to shrink as opinions on the ever changing fringe continue to get silenced in a process that’s not too different from the evaporative cooling of group beliefs.
I expect that the trend towards more censorship will continue unabated, especially on public social media platforms.
I personally have a very tough time fitting your interpretation into my model of the world. To me the popularity and actions of Facebook et al. are mostly disconnected from our ability to communicate with family and close friends.
In my opinion the timeline seems to be a little more as follows:
People are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms both to stay in touch with friends and to complain about the outgroup.
COVID-19 hit, significantly reducing quality of life everywhere. People realign their political discussions and notions of outgroup along COVID-lines—are you a believer in lockdowns and masks and science or the opposite? This temporarily supersedes other political discussions, not because people have wonderfully unique and insightful opinions on COVID countermeasures but because this is the biggest event happening and as such is necessarily political.
After approximately one year of lockdowns and countermeasures people have sunk significant parts of their public profile into their thoughts regarding COVID. A large portion of the public, as well as officials, will support silencing opposition if only to retain a coherent public image (after all, if communication on COVID is not more important than free speech, what have you been doing all these months?).
Facebook rises to the occasion and offers to selflessly censor people according to criteria set by the WHO.
I’d like to couple this with a prediction that Facebook will not start censoring older messaged by the WHO and other Respected Officials. I see Facebook’s cooperation more as a power grab with plausible deniability than a desire for certain messages (officially endorsed) over others (crackpot/other). It only exists through the support of the very serious people, so it is counterproductive to start challenging them on their own history.
Lastly I think that if you genuinely want to have a heart-to-heart with your friends and family it is silly to restrict yourself to communicating via Facebook. Call them, start a blog, meet somewhere outside for a walk if you want. This has the twin benefit of you not having to worry about issues being ‘controversial’ as defined by Facebook, and them not having to publicly change their thoughts over your message. Also it is much less embarrassing if it turns out you were unbelievably overconfident all along.
One of the weird things about the “Ministry of Truth” problem is how, somehow, liberals have a perception that other liberals will think that “Facebook should ban ‘disinformation’/‘pseudoscience’” is the responsible position. How does that happen? I don’t think we were ever explicitly told by somebody. Nobody made a cogent, persuasive argument in favor of that position.
If I had to try and trace it back, I think it went a little something like this:
People talk a lot about how much stupid stressful crap is on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook gets a crappy public image, not for producing the crap, but for profiting off the crap.
People blame MZ/Facebook for a lot of social ills: pseudoscience, Trumpism, depression/anxiety/teen suicide, privacy concerns, hate speech, etc. They’re in everybody’s bad books. Yet because there are so many competing notions for what FB ought to do to correct the problem, they don’t have any obvious fix.
Facebook doesn’t want to be in the bad books. They strategize about how to project the image of a responsible, upstanding company. For a while, their position is “we’d be irresponsible to police ‘disinformation,’” which is based on the fear that people would in fact call them irresponsible if they did. Asymmetric justice applies: Facebook is safer doing nothing (or less things) than doing something (or more things).
COVID-19 changed the game, giving a much more unified concept for what “responsible social media behavior” would look like. Somebody else, the freakin’ CDC, makes the policy for what constitutes improper speech. Facebook just enforces it. It’s a time of crisis, when public health concerns take priority over privacy/free speech/democratic concerns. Facebook can look like a noble guardian of public health. The few remaining “free speech” advocates and uncredentialed contrarian science enthusiasts can not only shove it, but get framed (by a gigantic corporation!) as the new villains in the story.
It’ll be important for people who are worried about being cast inappropriately as a villain to look for people who might have been deemed as such manage to alter their perception. How does Zeynep Tufekci manage to get in and stay in the good books? How do we raise controversial but important issues with our families and friends when they’re so much less fluent in the issues than we are that we risk looking unbelievably overconfident just for talking about what we know?
I think these things are possible, and I think it’ll help if we focus more of our attention on tractable solutions to them than on overemphasizing the current climate. After all, politics isn’t the mind killer. Fear is the mind killer. How do we let some of this fearful stuff pass over us and through us, and yet remain?
IMO 2020 wasn’t a turning point, and Facebook is not special. The events that happend lately have been a predictable development in a steadily escalating trend toward censorship. I’ll note that these censorship policies are widespread across every social media platform, and infact extend well beyond social media and apply to the entire infrastructure stack. Everything from DDoS protection services, to cloud service providers, to payment processors have all been getting more bold over the course of several years about pulling plugs on people saying the wrong things or providing platforms for others to say the wrong things. Here’s how I think it went down:
1.From 2010-2020 Social media and other SV companies gained a tremendous amount of power by gaining control over social media networks.
2. By virtue of all being near each other, they formed a political monoculture/ingroup.
3. They found themselves capable of deplatforming anyone they disagreed with.
4. They started banning people, starting with the most deplorable and the outgroup and working their way up from there. This seems to have become especially noticeable sometime around 2015.
5. First the deplorables complained about this by making appeals to free speech, which made free speech low status.
5. Then the outgroup complained about this and made appeals to free speech, which made supporting free speech an outgroup identifier.
7. Everyone falls in line because otherwise they might get unpersoned if they’re mistaken as a member of the outgroup or the deplorables by defending free speech.
8. The overton window of acceptable speech continues to shrink as opinions on the ever changing fringe continue to get silenced in a process that’s not too different from the evaporative cooling of group beliefs.
I expect that the trend towards more censorship will continue unabated, especially on public social media platforms.
I personally have a very tough time fitting your interpretation into my model of the world. To me the popularity and actions of Facebook et al. are mostly disconnected from our ability to communicate with family and close friends.
In my opinion the timeline seems to be a little more as follows:
People are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms both to stay in touch with friends and to complain about the outgroup.
COVID-19 hit, significantly reducing quality of life everywhere. People realign their political discussions and notions of outgroup along COVID-lines—are you a believer in lockdowns and masks and science or the opposite? This temporarily supersedes other political discussions, not because people have wonderfully unique and insightful opinions on COVID countermeasures but because this is the biggest event happening and as such is necessarily political.
After approximately one year of lockdowns and countermeasures people have sunk significant parts of their public profile into their thoughts regarding COVID. A large portion of the public, as well as officials, will support silencing opposition if only to retain a coherent public image (after all, if communication on COVID is not more important than free speech, what have you been doing all these months?).
Facebook rises to the occasion and offers to selflessly censor people according to criteria set by the WHO.
I’d like to couple this with a prediction that Facebook will not start censoring older messaged by the WHO and other Respected Officials. I see Facebook’s cooperation more as a power grab with plausible deniability than a desire for certain messages (officially endorsed) over others (crackpot/other). It only exists through the support of the very serious people, so it is counterproductive to start challenging them on their own history.
Lastly I think that if you genuinely want to have a heart-to-heart with your friends and family it is silly to restrict yourself to communicating via Facebook. Call them, start a blog, meet somewhere outside for a walk if you want. This has the twin benefit of you not having to worry about issues being ‘controversial’ as defined by Facebook, and them not having to publicly change their thoughts over your message. Also it is much less embarrassing if it turns out you were unbelievably overconfident all along.