Navigating the tension between deplatforming and privacy?
There's a conflict in my mind that I would like others' perspective on.
On one hand, I like privacy. For example, I use Signal as my primary messaging service because I like the idea that the end-to-end encryption keeps my conversations private. It feels right that someone shouldn't be able to look over my shoulder when I'm communicating one-on-one with friends and family.
On the other hand, I also like deplatforming. I believe strongly in the idea that inhibiting communities that espouse fascist or other anti-social beliefs is a key lever in keeping their ideas from gaining social traction.
Unfortunately, I feel like there's a tension between these two ideals. Private platforms can conceivably allow for the inviolable platforming of hateful groups because they can then exist without social oversight or accountability. But maintaining some sort of oversight also feels wrong to me because it's fundamentally invasive?
I don't know what to make of this, as I do think we should be encouraging greater privacy on an internet where our actions are being scooped up wholesale for the benefit of large tech companies, but I also worry about how increased privacy measures will enable bad actors. Anyone have thoughts on this or want to help me sort this out?
I don't think I understand where you're seeing the tension? Having a "platform" is inherently an act of public expression, over which there is no expectation of privacy. Deplatforming is merely denying public expression that is destructive to the public discourse. It seems like a pretty stark line to me.
The right to privacy is something that applies to individual people, not particular ideas. In other words, Nazis can talk about Nazism all they want in the privacy of their own homes, or even in their private organizations and fascist reading groups or whatever. What deplatforming is about is denying them access to espouse those viewpoints in the public sphere. Nazis can even talk, in the public sphere about all sorts of things as long as it's not Nazi stuff. You can be a Nazi who runs a wood-working channel, and you’re not going to get deplatformed unless you start letting your mask slip and start broadcasting your Nazism.
It gets weird with social media because they consciously try to have it both ways and blur the lines between what is private and informal vs. public and formal speech. They want to pretend they're a sort of "public sphere" while also being private companies exempted from oversight or even social pressure, which is why everything ends up being so fraught. You can have private rooms on the internet by setting up your own sites and channels (e.g. Gab, Voat). The only issues you run into are when your channel has to interact with other service providers like hosting services.
Great response. I think the gray area you highlight in your last paragraph is where the source of the tension is for me. Social media feels like a sort of private-public hybrid. For example, is a group chat with 5 people that's not publicly viewable private? Feels like it to me. But what about one with a thousand people? Ten thousand? Those feel a lot more like a platform to me than private communication, and even with it "walled off", it still feels somewhat public on account of the size of the audience. I'm reminded of how Tildes felt when it wasn't viewable without being logged in. Like, it was certainly private, but also public in a way?
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding the distinction between public vs. private? I feel like I might be.
No I think the line actually does get very blurry with social media platform so it's hard to keep straight where things fall. And, unfortunately, the legal system and culture hasn't caught up to the new reality yet so the standards are still up in the air. We've never had the ability to address people on this sort of scale before without sinking tons of money into broadcast advertising.
On the plus side that means we are, functionally, creating the standards through our actions which I guess is a nice position to be in.
If we need some defined standard where we decide something is no longer public, it would mostly have to revolve around the relationships between the participants. I think the "tell" would be one where there is gatekeeping involved. Like a 300 person wedding can be private since it's invite only and based on people with relationships to the bride and groom. But a rally that gets 300 people attending becomes public because it is, in theory open to anyone regardless of how they know the organizer. But even that gets a little touchy. What counts as an invite or knowing the organizer? If I throw a party and post on LinkedIn so all my contacts can see it is that private? I hardly know most of my LinkedIn contacts, some of them I've only met once at a conference or job interview.
TL;DR it's complicated and none of us have the answers. We'll have to settle on it over time through some natural process of cultural evolution and consensus building.
Kinda, but you're not alone. As a society we haven't yet developed a definition or intuitive understanding of the grey area between private and public that the information age has left us with, much less how to regulate it.
I would consider it rather private.
Those are as public or private as every member agrees... Which means, if it leaks, it's public.
Now, once that goes public, if your hoster chooses to cut the service from you, that's their right, as they own those presses that you are using.
Well, I think the biggest issue is the lack of oversight in how our data is being used for internal company experiments and decision making. It's difficult to argue how and what the data is used for and if the purposes they are using my specific comments and pictures are to inform a company's internal processes, or for something more nefarious. When you perform experiments on people in a traditional research environment, in general you go through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) which ensures that participants in research are not harmed and their privacy is maintained. In my view, I think anytime I have given data to a company and they want to use it to do A/B testing or anything that impacts behavior, participants must be notified what is used and when it is used. If you don't like it, you should be able to opt out and remove your data, and discontinue use from the platform. I think something like this where Terms of Service enforcement are informed by data and research, will give bad actors the opportunity to self-deplatform as they likely won't want their data included in oversight research, and if not, end up deplatformed because their actions break Terms of Service through the research/analysis to find rule-breaking content they inherently consented to. It might be a bit wishy washy but the crux of my reasoning is that we have zero transparency of how and what our data is used for.
At the very least, we should always have a right to know.