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The Second Wave of the Internet
[draft 180115]
implications for AI automatied censorship
stuff that used to be said in private between friends is now visible to everyone
When email was created, the presumption was that everyone that used it was nice and professional.
Consequently, there was no built-in protection against abuse.
Fast forward a few years and spam accounts for 50-60% of worldwide email traffic.
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Similarly, the major internet platforms were created with the assumption that users were not malicious.
In the beginning, that was true.
The first people to use Youtube, Twitter, Periscope, Instagram and most of the other platforms were nice.
It required a bit of technical knowledge.
You could generalize and say that early adopters are nice.
That niceness hides the fact that many people in the world are not nice. Most of them are not early adopters.
But when they do get going they can do some serious damage.
tldr;
Imagine that you invent something like a laser pointer, but it can cut.
It’s kind of complicated to use, requires a certain intelligence to configure.
So, all the people who use it at first are basically thoughtful, intelligent people.
But as time goes by, big companies figure out how to mass produce your tool, make it easy to use.
Now anyone can have this thing, and it becomes very dangerous.
Sure, it’s useful when you want to carve a mini-totem pole, but it’s also useful to stab people in a crowd
[larry niven, office of bad technology]
ben thompson, the interet is not a nice place
ben thompson, the basic business model of the internet giants is unmediated, zero marginal cost.
cement mixer video with screaming birth video inserted in it.
Certain kinds of content are easier to filter than others.
there’s a range of “easiness” to filter
- textual, non-realtime, non-anonymous content is easy to filter. If you put up a site filled with hate speech, we can call your hosting service, get your name and sue you.
but every level of immediacy, complexity and anonymousness adds a layer of difficulty
I have heard that every youtube videos get the majority of their hits in the first 24 hours, but regardless…
youtube uploads ___ hours of content every minute. They are completely dependent on customers to report harmful content.
None of these companies can filter user-generated content in any meaningful way
so some things we can deduce
the internet is filled with *bad* people
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