Politics are like medieval royalty. A complex inter-generational web of influence, alliances, and quid pro quo. Support of these influencers was required to earn votes, and policy had to repay these influencers - rather than voters.
Through the application of advanced techniques and data, Facebook enabled the circumvention of that at a shockingly lower cost than in the past.
There is great irony here. These supremacists are the same type of bully they are seeking to correct for: people who abuse socially acceptable ways to oppress others.
In the Middle East accidental innocent casualties create more enemies and terrorists, such that the army often displays greater restraint than our police.
The animosity being generated in the 1/3rd of the population (white males), who also happen to own most of the guns, is already being politically leveraged. I worry that someone will find a way to harness it further.
> I think it's fine for large web companies to apply their own morals.
This is rather like saying you think it's fine for libraries to only carry books in line with their morals. Or perhaps that your phone only works for approved topics.
At a certain size these sites become primary platforms for communication. I would argue that at that point they should be considered a governmental entity for laws around freedom of speech applied to historical means of communication. Or made into one.
You have a right to publish your own materials. You do not have a right to make a newspaper publish a classified that is against its policies. Similarly, you can put whatever you want on your website. You cannot force another website carry your content simply because that website has achieved some level of distribution.
>I would argue that at that point they should be considered a governmental entity for laws around freedom of speech.
That's then infringing on their freedom of speech (or lack of). It's an interesting opinion but as it's so far away from any other I've read can you explain it more?
I'm thinking 'telephone network' rather than 'newspaper'. Phone companies were built as monopolies and faced strict regulation. Imagine your phone only working for company approved topics :)
Speech was worthy of protection under the universal declaration of human rights, and these platforms are becoming so fundamental to communication that they should be given the same consideration.
These platforms have become so centralized, powerful, and ubiquitous that censorship on a platform has a greater impact than preventing a person from speaking. That kind of power should never be wielded unchecked by a private entity.
It's not just about money, but the appropriate application of money. Sure the Dems may have bought some likes and upvotes, while CA applied information warfare technique normally reserved for military activity.
From the Guardian:
>He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”.
This is a fatal vulnerability to the ideal of democracy. The only way to beat this game is to play it, and whoever can play it faster, smarter, and harder wins.
The only limitation is when these actions cross the line and cost you support by alienating your base, but I don't think that line exists for Trump.
In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated.
I’ve done research on credit card data like that. I can tell you both experientially and mathematically that four bits of random information is insufficient to identify people. The information was not anonymized and they were tracking people engaging in a common, narrow activity. Not only that, but they were only tracking 1.1 million individuals. They had a relatively small search space and significant non-random information with which to bootstrap the deanonymization. Calling that “four bits” is disingenuous.
Contrast this with trying to identify a single individual in a population with no other information about them. It would take about 33 bits if we knew absolutely nothing about her, given log_2(7,280,000,000) = 32.7. But we know she’s American, so we can cut our search space down to 322,000,000. That leaves us with 28 bits. We also know she’s a woman, so we can cut our search space down by 50%. Now we have 27 bits to go. I can virtually guarantee you an analysis of anonymous donation patterns will not meaningfully cut down the search space beyond a few more bits, and that’s exceptionally non-random data. The more useful information is knowing that she resides in New Hampshire, but that still only brings us down to approximately 20 bits.
It's not unreasonable to try to make something a bit more difficult even if you understand it won't stop determined attackers. There's a middle ground between 'doing nothing' and 'making it impossible'.
You can also commit crimes in novels or roleplaying games that are illegal. That's different from supporting a market that causes child abuse.
Possessing digital/virtual information that required abuse endorses abuse. Entropy is our friend here; only an extremely rare set of bits results from child abuse. You won't just find it.
Even fiction or photoshop is illegal. Your argument is much more applicable here, but seeing how society treats even inactive pedophiles as criminals rather than sick, I don't think it'll be very popular.
Through the application of advanced techniques and data, Facebook enabled the circumvention of that at a shockingly lower cost than in the past.