Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2018

QotD: The new Wobblies

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I live in two worlds. One has www in front of it. I must admit I don’t like the imaginary place that’s become the ironclad version of reality for most people. The jackanapes who rule the Friendface planet are the worst people extant, if you ask me. By the way, if you’re reading this, you asked me.

I don’t like the invertebrates who run the Intertunnel. I’ve decided they need a name. Let’s coin the term right here and now: The Wobblies. The Website Wankers of the World have united into a Voltron of suck, and they rule this alternate ecosystem that’s taken over the real world. They don’t care if anything productive happens in the brave new world they’ve created. As long as they lord over the nonproduction, of course.

Sippican, “Minor Swing by Minors”, Sippican Cottage, 2016-11-05.

August 9, 2018

“… here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Are you on Facebook? Or perhaps it’s more proper to ask “are you still on Facebook?” J.D. Jagiello used to be:

To Whom It May Concern:

I was already tired of your rants about food, bad-hair days, roommates, feeling too many feelings, the public transit, lost IKEA tools, TV shows, wives, husbands and children and, above all, Trump (that’s like ranting about having an asshole—we all have it). I was tired of your quirky disregard of punctuation and how it’s for the olds. Guys you don’t need it to understand what I’m trying to say, so here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death.

I was tired of the quizzes: What Kind of Pizza Are You?

And the Inspirational Quotes. “It’s during our darkest hours we must focus on the light” (—Aristotle, supposedly). Here’s mine: “There’s no better time than now to delete.” (Position this one against a background of a man in canoe swimming away to a proxy of freedom.)

Shares about yoga, running, god? Ugh.

“Funny” kid dialogues: no. (But I’ve done it myself, yeah.)

I read your high-brow discussions about postmodernism or grammar, out of my leftover Good-For-You homework sense of obligation. I didn’t go to the right schools to be able to join in and I don’t retain information easily. I rarely felt philistine-aggressive about it; I accepted that I didn’t have the membership.

On a positive note, I always looked at your baby pictures because I like babies. I will miss the baby pictures. I won’t miss twice-a-week updates on some of those babies.

I also never got sick of memes or videos of animals, or articles about octopuses or archaeological digs or stupid but cleverly funny reviews of your mundane experiences on the bus or your convos with grandma. On a serious note: I am also passionate about health policies, and Indigenous issues in my country and have a lot of educated friends who post about it — stuff that doesn’t even make it to mainstream media — so I liked to get my information that way.

I used to post status updates on Facebook that many people found interesting or funny, and sometimes I shared opinions, and it was a good place to feel socially connected during times of isolation (a new baby, illness). But about two years ago or so, I stopped posting about anything serious, though I still asked for recommendations, innocent stuff. Occasionally—an old reflex—I would post something of more substance but then delete quickly because Facebook became the place of who knows who is watching.

I’ve tapered off my Facebook activities over the last few months. I check my feed at most once per day, and I find myself scrolling quickly past “the same old stuff”. I occasionally leave comments on some of my friends’ posts, but for the most part, I’m not getting into conversations — especially on anything faintly political — and I don’t much miss it. I stopped automatically posting links to my blog earlier this year … and only a couple of people seem to have noticed. That tracks well with my blog statistics which show very little of my traffic comes from Facebook and that number didn’t drop very far after I stopped posting links. I still use a plugin to auto-Tweet my blog posts, but outside a few Vikings fan groups, I’ve never really been interested in conversations on that platform.

Facebook’s algorithms seem to have noticed my slow disengagement, as I’m now getting reminders and notifications when friends post much more often than I remember in the past. I’m even getting the odd “Friend A responded to Friend B’s post” stuff, which is certainly a new attempt to entice me to log in again.

July 4, 2018

It’s never a good idea to expand the power of the state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Francis Porretto on the problem of giving the state yet another tool for its already overflowing toolbox:

    The party in power is smug and arrogant. The party out of power is insane.” – Megan McArdle, a.k.a. “Jane Galt”

Among the older maxims of politics is to beware handing the State a new power without first reflecting on how your opponents could use it against you. For as sure as the Sun rises in the East, your opponents will return to dominance someday, and whatever powers you awarded the State will be in their hands.

Just now, the focus is on President Trump’s choice of a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats are tearing their collective hair out over this, as now that the filibuster is a dead letter for judicial appointees, their minority status in the Senate leaves them no way to block his selection. Yet it was Senate Democrats during the Obama Administration who first attacked the filibuster – when they were in the majority and sought to confirm Obama appointees. Coulda told ‘em then, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Today’s critical battles are over freedom of expression and “deplatforming.”

Some folks of sound mind and generally good will are exercised about how Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter regulate their immensely popular social-media platforms to disfavor conservatives. The complaints have been many, and a great many of them are both accurate (i.e., the things complained about really happened) and valid (i.e., only persons of conservative or libertarian bent were silenced). However, they come up against a barrier that’s proved impassable to date: the right of private property.

So a lot of those folks have embraced the notion that those platforms could be regulated by the federal government as public accommodations. That’s the conception under which the Civil Rights Acts were deemed to hold legitimate authority over restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and other nominally private properties. If you present your facility as “open to the public,” the logic runs, then you can be forbidden to discriminate – i.e., to provide your services to some members of the “public” but not others.

(For those who remember the “nationwide Bell System,” the phrase common carrier might rise to mind. The concept is essentially the same, as was the federal government’s assertion of authority over it. However, in that particular case, the rationale was that the Bell System was a monopoly, protected by that same federal government. Telecom deregulation and the breakup of the Bell System put paid to that scheme, thank God.)

Those in the Right who favor this notion are asking for trouble. Someday the balance of power will shift leftward once again. What would the Democrats – an increasingly totalitarian bunch who’ve never seen a law, a regulation, or a tax it didn’t love – do with the precedent that an Internet platform can be regulated as a public accommodation, despite being private property?

H/T to Bill St. Clair for the link.

June 30, 2018

Enriching the public in ways that do not show up in the GDP calculations

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall looks at the calls to regulate the big tech firms and points out that we already get a very good deal on “free stuff” that isn’t reflected in standard economic statistics:

It won’t have escaped your attention that rather large numbers of people are calling for the regulation of the tech companies. The Amazon, Google, Facebook (Apple and Microsoft often added, just because they’re large) nexus have lots of power over markets and thus therefore – well, therefore something. My own prejudice here is that certain people just cannot look at centres of power and or money without insisting that they, the complainers, should be the ones exercising that power and determining the disposition of that money. Thus much of the drive for “democratic” regulation of the economy more generally, the self proclaimed democrats being the ones who would end up with the power. The advantage of this analysis being that it does describe reality, the same people do end up making the same arguments about different companies over time. Mere prominence brings the demand for control.

The economist on this subject is Jean Tirole. His Nobel was for exploring this very subject, tech companies and the two sided market. Google, for example, sells the search engine to us and us to the advertisers. The tech here is different, obviously, but the underlying economics is the same as that of the free newspaper.

Tirole’s a new book out and there are a number of interesting points to be had from it:

    Yes, on the whole consumers tend to get a good deal, because we use wonderful services — like Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and Waze — for free. To be certain, we are not paid for the valuable data we provide to the platforms, as for example Eric Posner and Glen Weyl remind us in their recent book Radical Markets. But on the whole, our living standards have substantially improved thanks to the digital revolution.

From which we can extract a few points. We’re richer, we really are. Substantially richer and yet in a manner that normal economic statistics entirely fail to capture. As Hal Varian has pointed out, GDP doesn’t deal well with free. Near all of those benefits of the digital revolution are coming to us for free and so aren’t recorded in that GDP. So, we’re richer yet the numbers say we’re not. In that is much of the explanation of slow economic growth these days, even of slow real wage growth. We’re just not counting what is happening to our living standards.

But we can and should go further than that. If the above is true then we’re very much less unequal than we’re recording. Stuff that’s free is, obviously enough, distributed rather more evenly among the population than extant monetary incomes. You, me and Bill Gates all have access to exactly the same amount of Facebook at the same price. We’re entirely equal in that sense. Bill’s actually poorer concerning search engines, stuck for emotional reasons with Bing as he is while we get to use Google or DuckDuckGo. Our standard measures of inequality are wrong both because of the undermeasurement of new wealth and also the extremely equitable pattern of the distribution of that new wealth.

May 23, 2018

Farage and Zuckerberg

Filed under: Business, Europe, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

April 19, 2018

The mis-measurement of the digital economy

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why our current statistical model does not adequately reflect the online world’s contribution to our economy:

To give my favourite current example. WhatsApp is used by some billion people around the world for some to all of their telecoms needs. It turns up in economic statistics as a reduction in productivity.

That’s mad.

In more detail, WhatsApp is free to use and carries no advertising. That means there’s no sale associated with it. We measure consumption at market prices – a price of $0 means no consumption. Consumption is one of the three ways we measure GDP – each of the three should be the same as the other two but isn’t because lying about taxes.

The other two calculations are all incomes, or all production. Things that are sold at no price do not add to production given that we measure it at market prices.

Income, well, there’re 200 or so engineers at Facebook who work on it (I checked with Facebook itself). Say their salary is $250k a year each. Probably too low but we’ve got to use some number or other. $50 million then. That’s incomes added to GDP.

So, in our three methods of calculating GDP – they should all be the same but that doesn’t matter here – we’ve value of WhatsApp (more accurately, WhatsApp adds value of $x each year to the global economy) of $50 million. Or $0 or $0.

April 15, 2018

Facebook is stalking you, even if you don’t have an account

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:

In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”

What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.

This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.

But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:

  • tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
  • maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
  • logs Android users’ calls and texts.
  • absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
  • tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
  • tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
  • watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
  • linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
  • bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
  • manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
  • files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.

Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.

Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.

I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.

April 10, 2018

QotD: The built-in toxicity of social media

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can’t include too much nuance and caveat in 140 characters.

It also has a strong bias towards anger, because, as far as short missives go, “Go fuck yourself” has the virtue of being brief, direct, and very easy to write.

Much easier to write a bunch of fuck yous to strangers than compose an article explaining your beliefs or the defects of the claims of those you disagree with.

And a lazy medium thereby encourages lazy thinking.

I kind of think anything important one has to say should be said in person. If you’re going to break up with someone, it should be in person.

If you’re going to tell someone you’ll never speak to him again because he supports a candidate you don’t like, you should probably man up to deliver that message in person, too.

If you have the guts. But that’s hard. Much easier just to rip someone in a 140 character Sick Burn.

Ace, “Divisive Political Season Causing Mass Unfriending on FaceBook”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-15.

March 30, 2018

New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:

Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.

Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.

Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.

But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.

It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.

March 29, 2018

Google, Facebook, anti-trust laws, and the Network Effect

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google and Facebook (and other, lesser, social media companies) have a lot of information on you. Lots and lots and lots of information on you. Many people are coming to the conclusion that this is bad, bad news and “something must be done”. Politicians and activists share a tendency to respond to such demands by pushing “something” they already favour as the solution to the popular demand for action. A few days ago, the “something” seemed to be some form of anti-trust action over the social media giants.

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why an over-the-top anti-trust offensive is likely to leave everyone in a worse state than the status quo:

Which brings us to the tech companies of today:

Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for Consumers

Quite so, thus no antitrust actions should or need be taken.

At the first level there’s the simple point that Facebook, Google a little less, Microsoft, e-Bay, they benefit from network effects. The more people who use them the more attractive they become to the next user. Meaning that size, in and of itself, creates yet more size. That’s just what we mean by network effects.

In turn that also means that the efficient size of an organisation here is that global monopoly. It isn’t true in most cases because there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of it, but another way to describe network effects is just that we’re insisting that the -economies outweigh the dis- at scales up to and including 7 billion people.

In that first reading of antitrust that would mean they gain economic power and thus government must step in. In our second reading that’s not enough.

Firstly, the monopolists must exercise that economic power they have. Something not greatly in evidence as just having power doesn’t mean it can be exercised. For when you do try to, say, raise prices can someone come in and try to undercut you? If so you’ve got contestable economic power, or even a contestable monopoly. As an example, think the Chinese and rare earths. They were producing some 97% of the world’s supply. So, they decided to play silly buggers, exercise that power. It took a couple of years but two new mines opened, China’s share of rare earths fell and prices halved, below their original point. People contested that Chinese economic power when China tried to exercise it. China didn’t win either.

If Google tried to raise the price of adverts then business would flow away from them. If Facebook started charging for access then there wouldn’t be a Facebook. They’ve got contestable monopolies.

[…]

Sure, we should keep a wary eye open and if the consumer is being gouged then we could and should do something. But while we’ve got efficient companies, monopolies or not, benefiting consumers then the correct response is to get the hell out of the way.

Unless you’re a politician who simply wants to expand the powers politicians have over society – something which explains most politicians – but then we can tell them to go boil their heads. Only the exercise of economic power to the disbenefit of consumers justifies intervention.

March 24, 2018

Today in bad ideas examined – Time to [nationalize | regulate | break-up] Facebook?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:

The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.

There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.

That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?

[…]

Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.

He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?

We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“

There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.

March 22, 2018

The social media mistake

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

H/T to American Digest for the link.

March 19, 2018

Meet “the gay Canadian vegan who [created] ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool'”

Filed under: Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr talks to the young developer at Cambridge Analytica who says he’s the one who created the tools that the Trump campaign used to sway opinions their way:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

January 31, 2018

QotD: “Enhancing the user experience”

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Once upon a time, computers weren’t all constantly connected to the intertubes. What we call “air-gapped” these days was the normal state of machines back in the desktop beige box days.

Back then, when you bought a program it came in a cardboard box on physical media. You would install it on your computer and it would work the same way from the day you installed it to the day you stopped using it. Nobody could rearrange the menus on WordPerfect or change the buttons in Secret Weapons of the Lufwaffe … Good times.

Nowadays, half the software you interact with doesn’t even reside on your PC. Further, there are whole departments at, say, Facebook or Blizzard or Google whose entire job is to “enhance the user experience”. If they’re not constantly dicking around, adding and removing features, changing what buttons do, moving things around … then they’re not doing their jobs.

We have incentivized instability.

Tamara Keel, “Tinkering for tinkering’s sake…”, View From The Porch, 2018-01-10.

December 1, 2017

Censorship on the web

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At City Journal, Aaron Renn explains why some of the concerns about censorship on the Internet are not so much wrong as misdirected:

The basic idea of net neutrality makes sense. When I get a phone, the phone company can’t decide whom I can call, or how good the call quality should be depending on who is on the other end of the line. Similarly, when I pay for my cable modem, I should be able to use the bandwidth I paid for to surf any website, not get a better or worse connection depending on whether my cable company cut some side deal to make Netflix perform better than Hulu.

The problem for net neutrality advocates is that the ISPs aren’t actually doing any of this; they really are providing an open Internet, as promised. The same is not true of the companies pushing net neutrality, however. As Pai suggests, the real threat to an open Internet doesn’t come from your cable company but from Google/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others. All these firms have aggressively censored.

For example, Google recently kicked would-be Twitter competitor Gab out of its app store, not for anything Gab did but for what it refused to do — censor content. Twitter is famous for censoring, as Pai observes. “I love Twitter, and I use it all the time,” he said. “But let’s not kid ourselves; when it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate.” (Twitter’s censors have not gotten around to removing the abuse, some of it racist, being hurled at Pai, including messages like “Die faggot die” and “Hey go fuck yourself you Taliban-looking fuck.”)

Google’s YouTube unit also censors, setting the channel for Prager University to restricted mode, which limits access; Prager U. is suing Google and YouTube. YouTube has also “demonetized” videos from independent content creators, making these videos ineligible for advertising, their main source of revenue. Much of the complaining about censorship has come from political conservatives, but they’re not the only victims. The problem is broad-based.

Yet sometimes Silicon Valley giants have adopted a see-no-evil approach to certain kinds of content. Facebook, for instance, has banned legitimate content but failed to stop Russian bots from going wild during last year’s presidential election, planting voluminous fake news stories. Advertisers recently started fleeing YouTube when reports surfaced that large numbers of child-exploitation videos were showing up on supposedly kid-friendly channels. One account, ToyFreaks, had 8 million subscribers — making it the 68th most-viewed YouTube channel — before the company shut it down. It’s not credible that YouTube didn’t know what was happening on a channel with millions of viewers. Other channels and videos featured content from pedophiles. More problems turned up within the last week. A search for “How do I …” on YouTube returned numerous auto-complete suggestions involving sex with children. Others have found a whole genre of “guess her age” videos, with preview images, printed in giant fonts, saying things like, “She’s only 9!” The videos may or may not have involved minors — I didn’t watch them—but at minimum, they trade on pedophilic language to generate views.

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