posts/trap of neutrality

related posts:

• Outline:
  • why do we crave being perceived as neutral?
  • why is it impossible to do that and why is it bad for us?
    • push for honestly partisan people. We all have opinions and it’s no use trying to hide and caveat them all the time. It results in what we have today which is institutions and individuals claiming to be neutral and people nitpicking them over everything as not being neutral when it is not in line with their own viewpoints. We can’t achieve perfect neutrality and the idolization of that ideal creates a world where we don’t trust anyone to tell us straight up I’ve always been the kind of person to do everything to avoid conflict, regardless of whether it is the most healthy outcome. my tendency to caveat things when I write and not commit to opinions
• Zuckerberg and Facebook’s constant struggle to be perceived as “neutral.” face

  • how this causes them to do things that are strictly not neutral in order to appear neutral. Perception of neutrality ー the buying of the story that they peddle is key and they have to be biased in order to achieve that because no one has perfect perception

  • The False Dream of a Neutral Facebook resources#media/article

    • Link:: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/the-false-dream-of-a-neutral-facebook/541404/
    • One of the foundational documents of the academic field of science and technology studies is a talk given by Melvin Kranzberg, of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In it, he declared six incisive, playful “laws” of technology. The first one is: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
    • He explains:
    • “Technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances.”

  • If we establish that technology strictly cannot be neutral under this definition, then how do we move forward?

    • how do we incent companies to stop trying to adopt the neutral stance (take away the legal protection). But what do they do if they can’t adopt neutral stance? Doesn’t seem like we can have transparently biased companies that everyone will use (even people who disagree with it) without the authority and institutional trust that we’ve lost in Fifth Wave
    • If we go way of current media companies, then they were perceived as neutral and perfect arbiters of truth in the past but now they’ve lost all authority and credibility and are lumped into different bias categories on the ideological and political party scale
      • Then, people consume different of these media companies based on matching their ideology. How can we keep people under the same company
      • How do we deal with financial incentive to keep people on the platform? -> save this for a diff post?
      • But i guess right now people don’t even think of Facebook as neutral anymore.. so what’s the point? They’re already being lumped into both sides by the other. Interestingly it is called as biased to both sides instead of just neutral
    • [[Zuckerberg on free speech at Georgetown University]]#media/article resources
      • Link:: https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg-stands-for-voice-and-free-expression/
      • very honest and upfront on the hard questions that he and the team has to decide on
      • Where the line is for free speech with regards to violence
      • stance that authenticity of person is what matters not authenticity of what they are saying (i.e. bots spreading facts is worse than real people spreading falsehoods)
        • Reasonable side to take but the secondary effects of this are big because falsehoods can spread fast if people are convinced by them
        • probably the best way to remain “neutral” though and avoid becoming an institution that arbiters truth
      • principle less is more or letting the system run is better than trying to control it in a fine-grained manner
      • can Facebook even do better given everythng?
      • what can complexity theory tell us about this? #Complexity, citizen engagement in a Post-Social Media time
      • “Increasingly, we’re seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous because it may lead to political outcomes they see as unacceptable. Some hold the view that since the stakes are so high, they can no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves. I personally believe this is more dangerous for democracy over the long term than almost any speech. Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down. It has to come from people opening up, sharing experiences, and developing a shared story for society that we all feel we’re a part of. That’s how we make progress together.”
• Brian Armstrong + coinbase coinbase mission blog post on being apolitical
  • providing a safe space without politics / focusing on realm of change
  • noble stance and from a pragmatic POV makes sense ー also helps people buy the story they put forth
  • can anything really be apolitical?
• The danger of a single story. We are living in a world where the most controversial things inherently have infinite sets of stories due to the explosion of information and access to produce instead of just consume information
  • these companies want to peddle the single story that makes most business sense to them (facebook is neutral, coinbase is an effective company)
    • These are both true to some extent … Policies will affect some PoC employees negatively and help some to not have to be always on but this might be (at least I hope it is) trivially true.
    • The question then goes to what the overall effect of an environment like this has and how we push for transparency in the major effects that result (i..e does it disproportionally affect PoC on their safety of mind)
      • These things are hard if not impossible to measure
      • Then it’s left for each person to judge themselves and the only proxy we can have is making it as easy as possible to understand the original intent