FREE SPEECH IS THE NEW CENSORSHIP
I linked to this article in the previous post, but I thought it was worth highlighting in a separate post because I think it really best sums up the problem I’ve tried to describe regarding how social media, blogs and the internet in general has resulted in alt-reality bubbles for people on different sides of the political fence - one consequence of which is that not everyone is exposed to the same kinds of information.
In essence, the article argues that if censorship is defined as the practice of preventing speech from being disseminated, the democratization of speech via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc has actually resulted in more censorship, not less. Yes, everyone can say what they want online, through one channel or other. But will anyone hear it? And will enough people hear it? And for the people who do hear it, can they trust it - i.e. can you be sure it’s not a hoax? Can you be sure the person saying it isn’t a guerilla marketer or a Russian spambot?
Relevant to the previous post regarding the notion that people who defend Trump are knowingly defending racism because we have all seen more than enough evidence by now that he is, this implies we have all seen the same evidence equally. But this isn't how it works today:
… all this online speech is no longer public in any traditional sense. Sure, Facebook and Twitter sometimes feel like places where masses of people experience things together simultaneously. But in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in-but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.
An example:
During the 2016 presidential election, as Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg reported for Bloomberg, the Trump campaign used so-called dark posts-nonpublic posts targeted at a specific audience-to discourage African Americans from voting in battleground states. The Clinton campaign could scarcely even monitor these messages, let alone directly counter them. Even if Hillary Clinton herself had taken to the evening news, that would not have been a way to reach the affected audience. Because only the Trump campaign and Facebook knew who the audience was.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing. For those of us who idealize the First Amendment and free speech, we need to understand that the old mechanisms for ensuring free speech no longer work and that the new platforms are already being manipulated by authoritiarians and totalitarians in ways that don’t look like traditional censorship but accomplish the same thing. We also have to realize that it’s not simply up to Mark Zuckerberg to fix this by changing the News Feed or employing better algorithms to spot fake news, etc. The problem is much bigger than that.
On Facebook no one can hear you scream,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1610297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
In essence, the article argues that if censorship is defined as the practice of preventing speech from being disseminated, the democratization of speech via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc has actually resulted in more censorship, not less. Yes, everyone can say what they want online, through one channel or other. But will anyone hear it? And will enough people hear it? And for the people who do hear it, can they trust it - i.e. can you be sure it’s not a hoax? Can you be sure the person saying it isn’t a guerilla marketer or a Russian spambot?
Relevant to the previous post regarding the notion that people who defend Trump are knowingly defending racism because we have all seen more than enough evidence by now that he is, this implies we have all seen the same evidence equally. But this isn't how it works today:
… all this online speech is no longer public in any traditional sense. Sure, Facebook and Twitter sometimes feel like places where masses of people experience things together simultaneously. But in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in-but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.
An example:
During the 2016 presidential election, as Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg reported for Bloomberg, the Trump campaign used so-called dark posts-nonpublic posts targeted at a specific audience-to discourage African Americans from voting in battleground states. The Clinton campaign could scarcely even monitor these messages, let alone directly counter them. Even if Hillary Clinton herself had taken to the evening news, that would not have been a way to reach the affected audience. Because only the Trump campaign and Facebook knew who the audience was.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing. For those of us who idealize the First Amendment and free speech, we need to understand that the old mechanisms for ensuring free speech no longer work and that the new platforms are already being manipulated by authoritiarians and totalitarians in ways that don’t look like traditional censorship but accomplish the same thing. We also have to realize that it’s not simply up to Mark Zuckerberg to fix this by changing the News Feed or employing better algorithms to spot fake news, etc. The problem is much bigger than that.
On Facebook no one can hear you scream,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1610297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.