Slashdot Mirror
You Can't Say That On the Internet
hessian writes in with a story about the arbitrary and often outdated online decency standards being imposed by companies."A bastion of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide. What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable. Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test."
Must.
Not.
Offend.
Anyone.
(unless the target is white males)
Perhaps if we could set our own content filters this would solve the problem? I'm uncomfortable with others deciding whose nipples I can and can't see.
go use some other internets! Oh wait, you mean to say it's not the internets that is being censored? It's actually company or privately-owned websites that are accessed using the internet? And these companies and people who own these sites are able to set the bar for what is allowed on their site? There are many wonderfully open sites out there that will gladly let you post whatever you want despite you not being owed anything by them. Why is this a problem? And kerfuffle? Seriously?
Some Google autocompletes are almost comical. Enter "peni" and you get "penicillin", "peninsular", and "panistone paramount". Who would have known that a small town cinema would appear to be more important to Google than the male organ!
You can show any type of violence. You can't show any kind of nudity. And it's not the "digital culture" in general that imposes anything. It's the religious fundamentalists of the USA who are responsible. I think the world would be a better place if we allowed children to watch porn and didn't allow them to watch violence.
Captcha: morale
"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene."
- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Francis Ford Copolla's Apocalypse Now!
What about sexualised imagery (not just the videos; Some of the lyrics are plainly obscene) in pop music, when showing just a boob gets a show an adult cert in the US. Not a problem seeing real boobs at the beach, though!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The original idea behind free speech was that no one could prevent you from making a political statement.
Then, by popular demand, free speech got cheesed out to mean "any public statement," whether relevant or not.
This blurred the line between important speech and everyday raging around with emotions through words.
Now, we the people see all speech as a matter of flavor. Don't harsh my buzz with your unkind words, man.
As a result, the free markets are responding and are removing words that generate expensive customer complaints.
They're removing them whether there's validity to them or not.
Good work, We the People.
In parts of the Middle East, a woman showing her hair is considered harlotry, while in parts of Polynesia a woman going topless is not. In some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, women going topless is ok, but showing her thighs is obscene. If you're operating globally, who's cultural norms do you use for censorship? Because about the only pictures of women that are universally acceptable would have everyone in burqas.
It gets even more complicated than that: Do you allow Eve topless, but not the Virgin Mary? Do you allow Venus de Milo or Michaelangelo's David, but not modern nude art? If you allow nude sculptures or paintings, do you censor nude photographs? If you allow nude photographs, what's the line between works of art and porn?
I am officially gone from
That bared nipple in a cartoon thing? Not an algorithm (at least not one implemented on a computer) -- that was censored by a plain ol' minimum-wage human.
Many more people will complain about offences to their Victorian sensibilities than will complain about removing cartoon nipples. So, these policies keep their administrative costs lower. If you want this to change, attack their cost assumptions. Complain about their intolerance. I'm not typically one to advocate for being a complainer, but if these companies are putting in systems based on complainers, then those are the rules as constructed. Worst case: the rules about complainers are decommissioned.
The main problem with that strategy is that tolerant people tend to not be complainers. You won't find a Million Moms against Intolerance marching on the Capitol. But as the saying goes, "only be intolerant of intolerance."
The other approach is to accept that these services will reflect the Xth percentile opinion and the only way to change that is to change the X position in society. I can't see kids raised on today's Internet being particularly offended by cartoon nipples when they're in their 50's.
My hope is that we can move to a society where posting a war photo of a blown up baby isn't more socially acceptable than posting a picture a baby being born.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.
Silicon Valley is tech. It enables. But it is not in control. There is no such thing as a unified "digital culture."
Online communities --- like any other --- form around people who share the same interests and values. The geek is not always going to like what he finds out there.
Summary writer is clearly a progressive bomb thrower. Maybe not actually a progressive him/herself, but the whole summary is meant to be pot shot after pot shot at conservative ideals while trying lamely to appear as a real discussion on the topic. The use of the term kerfuffle sealed this assessment for me. Tries to sound like a terminally serious issue that evil people like Chik-Fil-A are on the wrong side of and then uses the term kerfuffle which, RIGHTLY, puts the topic back in the "no one really gives a shit about this because it's not actually an issue" category.
The un- Chick-fil-A?? Who did that company try to silence? No one at all.
Um, it's not just that. Me and my friends use FB for organizing social events - parties, performances, etc. The fire performance troupe I'm involved with does most of our organizing on Facebook too - we have jobs, and kids, and school, and live all over the area, so having quick discussions there makes life much easier.
Look, I go to Burning Man. I've seen more people naked than anyone short of a doctor or a nudist tour guide, and I have to say the ban on nudity on Facebook is a good thing. There are creepers out there who post pictures of people having a nude stroll. Without the subject's consent.
Being able to complain about it means that they get taken down.
Facebook is for real life, and some people (myself included) like having an area where there isn't soft-core porn all over the place. See, if I had to deal with that, I'd return fire with some of the better pictures from /r/gaybears - not everyone is into the same thing, and you get rather tired of being shown something you're NOT IN TO.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
The New York Times got caught in the same filter that catches everyone else while posting in corporate forum. Their problem is that, for some misguided reason, they, being the NYT, believe that they have some sort of free speech rights in a private space. Facebook is not a public space - it's corporate-owned and controlled. It's private space, open to some members of the public to post in, but with whatever restrictions FB feels like applying.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
...it happens to a New York media person, instead of by them like God intended.
The author has three examples for his "censorship" arguement: Facebook blocking a page containing cartoon nipples (but it was the New Yorker's page, so that's bad!), Apple asterixing out some letters in the name of a book, and various autocorrects not helpfullying filling out dirty words for you. That's it.
The first two are pretty damn obvious. iTunes and Facebook operate walled gardens. Monolithic control of the content, whether you like it or not, is exactly the problem with such systems. The only thing annoying about this is that Evgeny and his buddies at the Times saw no problem with this until it inconvienenced other New York media types like themselves. The obivious solution here, which I and a good portion of the rest of us here on Slashdot implement, it don't use them.
The third is just plain sillyness. Of course you don't want autocompletion software to fill out explitives for you. You have to look at how things fail here. Autocomplete is a prediction, but it isn't perfect, and the last thing you want is the damn thing changing innocuous words to one of the Carlin 7 when you are texting your family or employer. Duh.
If I want a "bad" word, I'll go through the effort to manually spell it. It's typically only 4 letters anyway. :-)