So what a mess! Can we really expect a platform that has no censorship and or no ads will really be able to maintain security once it becomes popular and then is a target for hackers?
Is there any other platform that can in any way rival either G+ or the much maligned Facebook?
The ones I’ve looked into have been no censorship ones and it just seems they survive to distribute porn.
Is there any other platform that can in any way rival either G+ or the much maligned Facebook?
The ones I’ve looked into have been no censorship ones and it just seems they survive to distribute porn.
That's a good question.
ReplyDeleteFind some answers.
John Lewis I’ll keep looking. Hopefully others will post there finds for platforms the see as good.
ReplyDeleteWe have time, and this is a good start.
ReplyDeleteMike Kennedy That's a damned good question and something I'd very much like to see under "Considerations and Concerns". I've been meaning to start a stub on this topic. You own it ;-)
ReplyDelete"no censorship" sites typically quickly become magnets for trolls and hate speech and deliberate abuse.
ReplyDeleteWalter Roberson yes. The very, very bizarre hate group really get on these groups. White supremacy, and anti Jewish conspiracy theories. I guess I continue to be amazed that people think this way.
ReplyDeleteMike Kennedy I've been doing a lot of thinking on this over the years. It's involved moderating my free-speech stance considerably, and with a lot of personal discomfort.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to sort through what I think the dimensions of this are, and what guidelines I get out of this.
There's overt racism and what I refer to generally as "punching down" against disempowered groups. How they're disempowered doesn't matter so much as that they're disempowered. All social power constructs are social constructs. The usual assortment tend to be: race, gender, religion, socioeconomic status (really the ur-category), any of numerous cultural distinctions, etc. Most ultimately boil down to "empowered" vs. "disempowered".
There are flavours of punching up. I punch up and don't deny it, but I attempt to do so targeting power specificially rather than some other element that is (often temporarily) associated with it.
(There's ... someone on Mastodon who's been annoying the hell out of me for a few months now by claiming to fight for the oppressed, but doing so by ... lashing out at anyone else, on expressly racist terms. I cannot abide by that.)
There's the whole question of platforming, especially of bad or intentionally disinformative content. Paul Baran's group, the Institute for the Future, and RAND, both seem to be doing much of the better work on this. Kate Starbird at UW. Jeff Jarvis and Emily Parker had their shorts handed to them in an Intelligence Squared debate (Franklin Foer and Roger McNamee representing the winning side) in a discussion I'd recommend.
Celebrity can be a considerable problem. Wil Wheaton got hounded (very unfairly IMO) out of Mastodon due to a very vocal, and highly abusive minority, themselves painted as a disempowered group. The dynamic was several-fold, and I've been meaning to write something on that at length, on my considerable to-do list.
There are the mundane, though critical, and frequently deadly, issues of crime, gangs, domestic and interpersonal violence, stalking, etc.
There's a whole host of "trigger warnings" which range from the relatively reasonable to ... well, I don't consider "no pictures of dolls or things with heads" as particularly practicable. I'm not dismissing the pain, but the idea that every sensitivity can be addressed in every way, by every person, at every moment, simply doesn't scale. Even God only came up a total of ten commandments, and three or four of those were pretty much dupes.
Woozle Hypertwin came up with his Paradox of Epistemic Systems: the more used and frequented these become, the more value there is in subverting them. That transition can occur quite suddenly and consequentially, catching operators / creators unawares.
And more.
So, yeah, there's a lot at play.
http://www.iftf.org/?x
https://www.rand.org/
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/social-media-good-democracy-0
iftf.org - IFTF: Home
I’m trying out mewe. We shall see.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius or indeed "no pictures of people", since some people consider pictures of people to be against their religion. (And I gather that some still think that photographs "steal the soul"). Other groups say no pictures of cattle or pigs or religious figures or human feet or female faces....
ReplyDeleteIt definitely is not practical or realistic to satisfy everyone.
Walter Roberson Which raises the questions:
ReplyDelete1. Where to draw the lines?
2. According to whom or what criteria?
3. Different communities / divisions with different rules?
Asked not in the sense "this is impossible to decide, who are you to determine this", but "what's a reasonable way to accommodate a wide range of preferences, and where do we draw the limits on the requests themselves?"
A problem with electronic media is that it removes space and time. It turns out that space and time are useful for keeping everything from happening at once in the same place.
Edward Morbius as a fraction of an idea as I worked on Thanksgiving dinner:
ReplyDeleteIf images are the problem, then how about a setup in which by default, images are not displayed, but that users could ask to display a specific image. Furthermore, users could specifically mark individual other users to display that person's images by default. Perhaps with posters being able to designate images as not typically to be displayed by default but with users being able to mark "Yes, display everything from this particular user by default."
Thus for example a poster might post images that were routine for them, but the general public would have to ask to display the image for the most part. If you don't like seeing rolly polly fishheads and you ask to display an image from someone you don't know well without knowing it contains no fishheads, then unless the poster blatantly lied about the contents, the responsibility is on you for looking under the hood. If you had marked the poster as generally being trusted for images and so to display automatically, then again if you see something that you don't want then the responsibility is on you for specifically marking the poster for default viewing.
Users could mark choose to mark individual images as NSFW or containing blood or whatever they think some of their regular audience might prefer not to see without warning, and those images would not show automatically to people who had marked the poster for routine display. And if you mark a particular poster for Display All then if they suddenly post a nude then it ain't the site's fault that you said you wanted to see everything from the person.
Umm, perhaps also a way to mark "please don't show me this particular image by default even though I generally trust this person", such as if the image has content that I happen to be personally sensitive about even though it isn't somehow "unfair". Like if I happened to have a bad experience with a particular umbrella style I might recognize that the image might well intentioned for whatever it is, but I still don't want to see it.
What else... Maybe the ability to say "show me the normal pictures in this thread by default." It might be a cute bunny thread and maybe I am willing to take the risk of seeing images in the thread even from people I don't know well.
... Not intended as a full fledged proposal, just a first reaction to the particular issue being focused on at the moment.
Walter Roberson A large part of the problem, particularly with images, aren't those that offend the user but which are illegal to present or posses in specific areas.
ReplyDeleteMastodon ran into this problem in several regards as cartoon imagery which is legal in Japan may be illegal in other countries, and Nazi imagery may be specifically illegal in Germany and other EU countries.
Simply not displaying the images isn't sufficient, as they cannot be transmitted to or stored on servers. Which are being run by ... a range of interests, from businesses to individuals. Most of whom have little capability to resist a legal action against them by government investigators (local, regional, or national).
This is a domain where simple technical cosmetic fixes don't work well. And is part of what I was getting at as regards rules.
The rules vary, though I believe any of the following could be problematic:
* Levels of dress acceptable in public in the US or Europe, but not in the Middle East or Asia.
* Religious iconography or images, in many Muslim countries.
* Representations of the Thai Royal Family, in Thailand.
* Maps depicting specific boundaries or labeling, in Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, China, or Taiwan.
* Maps depicting Taiwan, in China.
* Numerous texts, images, music, or other representations, in numerous jurisdictions.