Both sides in the social media and foreign-interference debate are arguing about content
what's true, who may speak, who counts as a foreign agent.
But the problem is also about the channel.
Every channel has finite capacity and a noise floor, and human attention is the receiver.
Sending is now nearly free while verifying costly, reception has limits, so a hostile actor doesn't need to persuade anyone or even start a fire.
They just add noise to an already saturated channel, which French riots show. we get networks exploiting and amplifying unrest rather than clearly causing it.
Content takedowns fight noise at the source and can't scale, and attribution is slow and contested.
"More speech" assumes listeners have spare capacity to hear the correction, and when they're saturated, counterspeech is just more noise.
Question ideally shld not be abt content but about channel design ie friction on virality, rate limits, enforcement against coordinated behavior. This what we do with radio/tv/cell spectrum.
These rules are content-neutral, so they sidestep the censorship-versus-freedom fight, though who sets the thresholds is were the debate shld be.
Russian, Israelis, whoever, cant add noise to saturated channels because no one is sitting and listening to saturated channels in radio land. But in social media land no one is given any signal channel is saturated. Its like a mass delusion engine.
Unlike in radio, where listeners abandon a jammed channel a feed keeps serving the most triggering items from the noise, so "bad" actors don't need to outshout anyone, only to feed the allocator/social media algo, and much of what they feed it is already domestic.
(no points for realizing HN works the same way and the fact it hasnt changed is a bad sign)
Both sides in the social media and foreign-interference debate are arguing about content what's true, who may speak, who counts as a foreign agent.
But the problem is also about the channel.
Every channel has finite capacity and a noise floor, and human attention is the receiver.
Sending is now nearly free while verifying costly, reception has limits, so a hostile actor doesn't need to persuade anyone or even start a fire.
They just add noise to an already saturated channel, which French riots show. we get networks exploiting and amplifying unrest rather than clearly causing it.
Content takedowns fight noise at the source and can't scale, and attribution is slow and contested.
"More speech" assumes listeners have spare capacity to hear the correction, and when they're saturated, counterspeech is just more noise.
Question ideally shld not be abt content but about channel design ie friction on virality, rate limits, enforcement against coordinated behavior. This what we do with radio/tv/cell spectrum.
These rules are content-neutral, so they sidestep the censorship-versus-freedom fight, though who sets the thresholds is were the debate shld be.
Russian, Israelis, whoever, cant add noise to saturated channels because no one is sitting and listening to saturated channels in radio land. But in social media land no one is given any signal channel is saturated. Its like a mass delusion engine.
Unlike in radio, where listeners abandon a jammed channel a feed keeps serving the most triggering items from the noise, so "bad" actors don't need to outshout anyone, only to feed the allocator/social media algo, and much of what they feed it is already domestic.
(no points for realizing HN works the same way and the fact it hasnt changed is a bad sign)