The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation
&gt; Facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment<p>I don’t think we can ascribe intentions that easily. Speech is also the way people process their emotions, clarify their thoughts, get into <i>dialogue</i> with other people and form a dialectic to discover the <i>truth</i>. If people can’t fight their with words, they will fight with their swords, because they will lose hope of integrating their world-view with others.<p>I am also bothered the word <i>facts</i> getting thrown out that easily. We are all exploring an infinite problem space with limited knowledge and processing power we have. This has 2 consequences a) no one can have the epistemological monopoly on truth and b) one could definitely deceive themselves and others with <i>factual</i> information that otherwise doesn’t give the complete picture.<p>Which means, there is no terminal place for reality, and we always need to be in the process of integrating new data, including the perspective of others.<p>Author bends over backwards to ultimately manufacture consent for censorship, but the problem has never been about <i>misinformation</i>. It is not even about the <i>volume</i> of content to sift true with new media. It is the new platforms themselves with their perverse incentinves.<p>When we read twitter, we think we are interacting with people. But just like fish not seeing the water, we don’t see the medium, and the fact that the largest entity we are interacting with <i>is the AI</i> that keeps curating the content we see for one and only goal: engagement.<p>Behind the curtains, the biggest applied psychology experiment is being run by the best paid PhDs of the world; your every interaction is processed through the lens of <i>every single heuristic you have</i> and their failure modes (fallacies, biases) are exploited in the name of <i>engagement</i>.<p>The result is of course we going crazy, because no one, not even the most self-disciplined stoic, can defend against prolonged exposure to this machine and preserve their rationality.<p>So to assume the answer to this madness is to restrict speech is not only futile but also harmful. It is empowering the filtering role these platforms play, and will <i>definitely</i> drive us crazier.<p>Instead I propose this solution; <i>marketplace of ideas</i> now has to incorporate the <i>marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas</i> to be complete. Make it mandatory for any sufficiently large content curator to have alternative recommendation engines users can pick from. Then watch people chosing ones that doesn’t make them enraged at the expense of engagement, that rewards curious, honest intellectual discourse, that doesn’t reward impulsivity etc.<p>Those recommendation engines are the hidden parties in our speech, constantly whispering “have you heard so and so said this” and carrying around the most enraging but engaging stuff, because it can make a few cents showing you ads everytime you let it speak. We need to make and pick ones that has the best interest of people in mind, not just shareholders’.