…week of Mar 08, 2021
Welcome to my weekly letter! This week we are talking about censorship and freedom of speech on the internet. Without further ado…
Weekly Read
- How Censorship Can Influence Artificial Intelligence (Wired) – AI being ‘artificial’ suffers the same pattern as any other data pipelines: garbage in, garbage out. Yet it should be interesting to observe how the AI trained by these vastly different corpora (democratic v.s. authoritarian) further influenced people’s thinking – would it make people living in authoritarian countries more obedient to their government regime? Was it how QAnon worked into some people’s minds?
- I was a cog in ByteDance’s vast censorship machine (Protocol) – the impressive stats: 20,000 moderators! And with rough math consider daily active usage of Douyin and Toutiao (420m) assuming each user makes one post a day and comes to ~14 posts reviewed each minute, which means they can’t be reviewing every post without some tooling/automation.
- Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam (NPR) – @01:40:40 they talked about the uprising of 8chan and how the platform balanced its policy and its decision to drop a customer (8chan) due to the dangerous content hosted in the name of free speech. The result is a 40 pages (version 1.0) content policy protecting Patreon against the dark corners on the Internet.
- Finally, an Interesting Proposal for Section 230 Reform (Wired) – section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] is the law that’s providing digital services a ‘safe haven’ to allow freedom of speech on their platforms. Yet in many ways it has also been abused thus criticized. It is a real challenge to encourage freedom of speech while making platforms accountable to take action against any abusive content, without creating a dramatic barrier of entry for smaller players or new platforms to enter and compete.
Thoughts
Having grown up in countries covered in democracy, I realized that I was very much implanted with the idea of ‘freedom of speech = good’ and ‘China’s censorship = bad’ but nowadays I realize these are really two different approaches on content moderation, each implemented to drive its government’s political scheme and goal:
- China’s story (Iran, Russia, similarly): the government censors everything, allowing most of the stuff while blocking particular contents not aligning with the government. This leads to the perception of lack of freedom of speech on the ‘public’ web. However, people can still talks among smaller ‘circles’ (e.g. in person, Signal apps or private video calls)… the events of ‘CloudHouse’ and how people bypass the ‘Great Firewall’ via VPN also suggest people have, and will continue to, tried and circumvent these limitation to communicate, in additional to their day-to-day self censorship. This paradiagn requires the government to dedicate heavy investment on relevant technologies and resources, yet the effort creates the perception or, debatably illusion, of stability.
- US’s story: the government doesn’t [typically] monitor people’s speech, and depends on platforms/companies’ policies (take-down notice to remove inappropriate content) to uphold decency in accordance of section 230. So far the policy is criticized to be too ambiguous, leading to violent baiting, extremist pruning, discussions (in the form of social media feeds, groups, forums…etc) and with some heated incitement of politicians, the mobilization of the Jan 6th violence at US capital. And the legal framework provides a ‘safe haven’ that the government can’t easily prosecute the platforms. The argument has been that the ambiguity was intentional and necessary to allow freedom of speech, while not raising the barrier of entry for smaller , newer online platforms. Because, otherwise, it would discourage smaller entrants and encourage monopoly.
As I started to edit this writing, I picked up this wonderful piece by The Atlantic and really appreciate it. I will just stop here and encourage you to read or listen to it 🙂
I am excited and curious to see how we move forward to uphold real democracy with decency, without breaking the internet.
Stay Tuned…
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