I believe the premise of the title. But the main question should be: why? And the article does not really answer that, well beyond censorship.<p>I think the reason why centralization is a danger to democracy, is because of lobbying. Lobbying is much easier in a centralized power structure. See how much lobbying goes on in and around the power centers of this world: DC, Brussels, London. Lobby is power for money, democracy is power for votes (at least it should be). Currently lobbies have more power in the decision process than voters (any political sciences professor will agree). So democracy is a hollow word, or worse: a facade, a lie.<p>Lobbies basically work in favour of the super rich. If we see the gap widening we see that they get what they pay for, and the for-sure-not-super-rich masses dont get what they vote for.
I think this is a very compelling point, and much better than most of the "fediverse is for freedom" talking points I have seen on HN:<p>> I have participated in many a public forum on Internet governance, and whenever anyone pointed out that social platforms like Facebook need to do more as far as content moderation is concerned, Facebook would complain that it’s difficult in their huge network, since regulation and cultures are so different across the world.<p>> They’re not wrong! But while their goal was to stifle further regulation, they were in fact making a very good argument for decentralisation.<p>> After all the very reason they are in this “difficult position” is their business decision to insist on providing centrally-controlled global social media platforms, trying to push the round peg of a myriad of cultures into a square hole of a single moderation policy.<p>I think if there was a more robust social media market instead of a Facebook/Twitter duopoly, we would have seen at least _some_ platforms move to restrict things sooner, and maybe even a majority of platforms. That would have kept us from hitting a moment so fraught that the President ended up banned from all social media overnight.
> "Centralization is a Danger to Democracy"<p>Ugh, I figured here we go again, some dumb
startup taking advantage of the current
political climate to pitch some new social network.<p>But then I looked, and turns out this
is really, really cool. I love it
when my expectations are greatly exceeded.<p>Definitely going to spend some time
kicking around this thing more. Cool stuff!
Centralised or de-centralised, why would make any difference? The lies are lies, if you don't have a centralised platform they will spread p2p as long as people can communicate.<p>What we need is a mechanism for breaking circuits of lies and propaganda. In real world social networks we have methods like labelling liars(You have one identity and you risk it every time you say something), right to defend yourself(You can actually identify and force your way to reach the people who are exposed to, or facilitate it) if you are being smeared for or accused of wrongdoing. You don't have these mechanism in the digitalised version of social networks. Social networks work like cults, your reply to an online mob at Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/FB etc. reaches no one else but your own cult(if you have one).<p>Oh and believe me, lies are dangerous. In istanbul there are many abandoned beautiful buildings in central locations, many these belong to Greeks who lived in Istanbul for generations but in 1955 were targeted by the Turks who were told by a newspaper that the Greeks bombed the Turkish consulate and Ataturk's birth house in Greece: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom</a><p>There was nothing centralised about this Progom, the newspaper was not the governments publication like in a Communist dictatorship. Yet, it caused so much pain to the Greek minority and Turkey lost so much as the Greek christian population declined from 120K to 7K in 20 years.<p>If anything, decentralised networks can be targeted very efficiently by a bad actor and the rest would have no recourse. There's nothing stoping (fascists/communits/liberals/$_YOURBOOGYMAN) to identify decentralised networks, connect to all of them, participate and run a propaganda campaign through a centralised unit that connects to all the decentralised networks.<p>If there were thousands of decentralised social networks, QAnon could have used Buffer to manage their presence in all of them.
I prefer the Web over the Fediverse. Blogs +RSS/microformats/Webmention are decentralized, and with much better support and accessibility. ActivityPub seems to me an overcomplicated restrictive implementation of blogging.
What we need is "diversity in unity and unity in diversity".<p>Let's take railroads for example: we want many constructors of rails and trains, but we want them to be interoperable - they need to agree on a common track standard. The internet - we want to have many independent websites, but they all need to use a common protocol in order to have wide reach. In politics we want multiple independent parties, but they should play fair with constitution and elections.<p>We need both the ability to centralize some aspects and diversify other aspects. For Google, FB and Twitter I'd like more diversity on the front end part - UI, personalisation of filtering and ranking, and on the user data storage part - portable user pods.
Judging by the comments on these and similar threads, it seems that the biggest danger to democracy is voters who have different ideas about how the country should be run.<p>The fundamental danger, of course, is money. Everything else is noise.
For the same reason, smallish countries seem to be much more democratic and closer to the people (e.g., Switzerland). The "sweet spot" seems to be between 5 and 10 million people maybe?
This piece does a good job reminding me of the larger context for what I've been feeling the past few weeks. Communications freedom is basically my main political issue, but I've had a really hard time caring about <i>The Purge</i>. It seems basically inevitable after what occurred.<p>What is happening with Big Tech is the same arc as many other instances of American exploitation - an industry springs up around some type of obvious exploitation, but everybody speaking out about it is ignored because they're preaching against business expedience (eg the handful of HN users talking about centralized webapps being a bad idea for the past decade, outnumbered by those with get rich quick startup dreams). Finally the externalities grow too great to ignore and the industry finds itself in an untenable position (financially and socially). The innovative exploiters retreat, while those that bought into the system fight to preserve the status quo, creating a pleb-vs-pleb political issue while the initial exploiters have simply moved on to creating a new manner of exploitation. Even <i>slavery</i> fits this general pattern, and we're still suffering its resulting mess today.<p>One question I've been pondering is if polarization/propagandization (foreign or domestic) is even possible at the scale we're observing without these centralized watering holes? It's really big tech "social media" that offers this promise of unsophisticated users connecting with socially-distant low-reputation nyms as if they are other good-faith individuals (ie non-Sybil), essentially filling in the companies own reputation in their place. High fanout bad faith actors (political demagogues) will always exist, but it takes an impedance-matching middle layer creating social proof to enable them at such scale. It feels like that would be harder to pull off if people were only connected to closer nodes by default. Although this is probably a hypothetical question now that such structure has already been created.
Counterpoint: Here in Germany there is relatively little centralization. For example, the government could not implement country wide corona measures, which in the end meant that much less was accomplished compared to centralized countries such as France. In France, one can just close borders and announce curfews. In Germany, such measures always end up as the minimum consensus between 16 states.<p>Frequently, federal politicians pursue policies beneficial for their home state. For example, the current government is dominated by Bavarian politicians, who channel funds and attention toward a state that is already doing well. Indeed this is likely to continue with the next chancellor being likely a right wing Bavarian.<p>By contrast, people from other states, especially ones with higher population like NRW, feel like they have little to none representation in a federal level. This gives an incentive to vote for opportunistic demagogues.<p>The same thing is probably happening on an EU level, where many people feel their local government has less power than before, but the EU institutions are dominated by countries with different interests. For someone from a relative minority, decentralization seems to be a one way street. If some countries do their own thing, then I would like my country to be separate entirely.<p>So I‘d say decentralization can also endanger democracy, as only complete separation can really be fair. In a centralized system, however, there is at least the chance that the central governance actually represents all of the population.
>Now, alt-right trolls and white supremacists are all but limited to a corner of the Fediverse almost nobody else talks to. While it does not prevent a dedicated group from talking hatefully among themselves on their own instance (like Gab), it does isolate them, makes radicalising new users harder, and protects others from potential abuse.<p>I don't follow this logic at all. This is effectively how QAnon spread, as a niche group on fringe websites, before it grew to millions of users. A federated network gives better moderation tools to communities who actually want to moderate, but it leaves the radicalised communities free to grow, even freer than on a centralised network.<p>Another example I heard of were so called "free birth" groups with tens of thousands of women shunning medical help for births, even bullying women who wanted to seek professional help. As a result, quite a few children and women died during labour[1]<p>Private/semi private anti-vax groups are of course another huge issue right now. They often have hundreds of thousands of members. On a designated fediverse instance there is no possibility to shut this down.<p>I see no evidence or reason at all how the decentralised internet stops radicalisation or misinformation. It honestly to me seems like it would make it worse.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-wanted-a-freebirth-at-home-when-the-baby-died-the-attacks-began" rel="nofollow">https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-wanted-a-freebirth-at-home...</a>
The problem, I feel, is that both centralisation and decentralisation are a danger to democracy.<p>Centralisation because it enables elites within the tech/media/state to conspire together to wield much more power within a "democracy" than such a system needs to run equitably.<p>Decentralisation because it allows foreign actors to more-or-less do military manouvres within social media in order to cause particular outcomes (e.g. polarisation, destabilisation, regime change, forming opinions within a population that are economically beneficial to the attacking country, etc).
Centralisation is completely compatible with Democracy. There is no plausible mechanism by which federation would prevent the kinds of issues we’ve seen when giving everyone in the world the ability to publish whatever they like at no cost.<p>There are many reasons to want a diffusion of power, but defending democracy is not one of them.
Centralization is a danger in an environment where there are a handful of individuals 100,000x more wealthy than everyone else.<p>It is extremely easy to take control of a centralized system when you have enough wealth; and unfortunately, our system has produced more than a few of these edge cases.
I started to try to understand this debate through a political lens, since it seems so many political people are interested in it's answer.<p>Centralization is a key tenant to progressivism, largely in the name of efficiency: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_...</a><p>> The progressives' quest for efficiency was sometimes at odds with the progressives' quest for democracy. Taking power out of the hands of elected officials and placing that power in the hands of professional administrators reduced the voice of the politicians and in turn reduced the voice of the people. Centralized decision-making by trained experts and reduced power for local wards made government less corrupt but more distant and isolated from the people it served. Progressives who emphasized the need for efficiency typically argued that trained independent experts could make better decisions than the local politicians. In his influential Drift and Mastery (1914) stressing the "scientific spirit" and "discipline of democracy", Walter Lippmann called for a strong central government guided by experts rather than public opinion.<p>At first I thought, well hell, of course these people are constantly at odds with each other. Then I discovered this on the dangers of decentralization:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism</a><p>> Other challenges, and even dangers, include the possibility that corrupt local elites can capture regional or local power centers, while constituents lose representation; patronage politics will become rampant and civil servants feel compromised; further necessary decentralization can be stymied; incomplete information and hidden decision-making can occur up and down the hierarchies; centralized power centers can find reasons to frustrate decentralization and bring power back to themselves<p>It turns out the answer to this has been studied and sounds like it's somewhere in the middle:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/61430/1/MPRA_paper_61430.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.un...</a><p>1. Social Preparedness and Mechanisms to Prevent Elite Capture<p>2. Strong Administrative and Technical Capacity at the Higher Levels<p>3. Strong Political Commitment at the Higher Levels<p>4. Sustained Initiatives for Capacity-Building at the Local Level<p>5. Strong Legal Framework for Transparency and Accountability<p>6. Transformation of Local Government Organizations into High Performing Organizations<p>7. Appropriate Reasons to Decentralize: Intentions Matter<p>8. Effective Judicial System, Citizens' Oversight and Anticorruption Bodies to prevent Decentralization of Corruption<p>How this translates to Fediverse hosts likely matters and is probably worth reading for anyone interested in hosting.<p>My takeaway from this is that the web does need to go back to being decentralized, but a loose yet robust framework, like the one described above, should be in place for providers and community maintainers alike.
I also don’t agree with this and might even argue the opposite. Nevertheless, I think in general de/centralization is orthogonal to censoring inflammatory actors. That always comes back to who are the moderators and what are their stances on censorship.
I was hoping this would be about the centralization of the power to govern in the federal government and the need to transfer much power back to the states.
There was a debate (not a formal debate but a theme I saw in numerous articles) in the 90's (or maybe early 2000's) among Middle East experts who were involved in pro-democracy movements, about whether or not cracking-down on radical Islamist movements was counter-productive even when they were close to, but not directly involved with, violent extremists.<p>The idea was that by including such violent-adjacent (but not directly violent) people into the political mainstream, they would be over time deradicalized even if they might praise violence abstractly, they would eventually become invested in the political process and participate.<p>Many of the articles discussing this talked about how socialist movements of the early 20th century often started out radical but then became centrist.<p>On the other hand, cracking down on the violent-adjacent would just further radicalize them and push them into the violent underground.<p>The debate became something of a moot point eventually, in the 90's it looked like democracy advocates in many Middle Eastern countries would gradually gain power and would need to make decisions about whether or not to crack down, of course that did not happen (except in Tunisia, where I think this debate still has some significance).<p>Anyways the current discussions about whether or not to "deplatform" the far-right remind me a little of these debates in the 90's. Of course, deciding whether or not to "deplatform" is very different than deciding whether or not to round-up and jail everyone, and so the parallels are strictly limited.
> After all the very reason they are in this “difficult position” is their business decision to insist on providing centrally-controlled global social media platforms, trying to push the round peg of a myriad of cultures into a square hole of a single moderation policy.<p>Facebook does have decentralized moderation. Every facebook group could in theory individually decide that Qanon conspiracies are unacceptable and remove them, and indeed most do. The problem is a minority won't, and the crazies just aggregate there. And the same principle applies whether the decentralized authorities are subreddit moderators or small site admins or what have you.<p>Moderation is fundamentally forced upon people against their individual will for the sake of the larger community. If the "baddies" self-censored, we wouldn't be having this discussion.<p>Decentralized authority can work in situations where people can't freely associate, for example if my town forbids me from putting a "Hail Satan" sign on my lawn, it's a significant burden to move to a town of satanists, and even if I did, it would no longer be a problem for the town I left. But online it's trivial to find some place that will let me post "hail satan" and ignoring its existence will just have to be good enough for those who don't like it. There is no "local" on the internet - there is no distance nor natural barriers over which the actions of others lose potency. You are never more than a few keystrokes away from the deepest darkest pits of the internet, and there is no way of ensuring any concept stays in those pits.<p>I am not in favor of global censorship as I feel the harm outweighs the good. Unfortunately, local censorship is not a way to have our cake and eat it too.
TL;DR: Centralization is a danger to democracy because we can more effectively silence people if we have decentralization.<p>Too bad the deplatforming did not stop the insurrection at the US Capitol. But I'm sure if you just do it harder it will work.
><i>After all, nothing really changed in President Trump’s rhetoric, or in the wild substance of QAnon conspiracy theories</i><p>What "rhetoric"? A sitting politician complained for fraud. Such complaints are a dime a dozen in elections all around the world. Heck, that's what the other side complained about too, in 2016, and has a long history in US politics.<p>And if he "orchestrated" a walk-in into the Capitol (where nothing much happened, and politicians were up to business as usual the very same day), the other side has organized and lauded dozens of protests, including some with looting and even burning of police departments and areas of cities, throughout 4 years.<p>As a European, I see a lot of cant on both sides, and a lot of pearl clutching by the side that gets all the legitimacy offered by the mainstream media and the "polite society". In other words, it's partisanship 101.<p>Downvote freely, it's a partisan country anyway
Decentralization and deinstitutionalization is dangerous to Democracy. Uncheck conspiracy theories, QAnon bullshit, Parler boys, 4chan anonymity are all dangerous to public, intellectual discourse.<p>Convince me. Your body has cancer, swift removal of it before it “decentralizes” is the only option.<p>I would be in favor of actual decentralization: Being able to broadcast 50km radius on the internet and improving communities, thriving local newspapers and localization of concerns. If you want to broadcast to state level, you must have education, journalism rigor, and standup to scrutiny, have to explain inconsistencies or your role is revoked.<p>“Decentralization”, the widely used term is a congregation of ill which cannot survive the scrutiny of public IMO.<p>Before you go touting for decentralization, ask yourself when was the last time you checked city news and county affairs? What happens at the National level has little effect on you locally. What Ted Cruz and AOC exchanged on Twitter has no bearing to your county. Internet gave everybody a centralized platform in the first place. Some good aspects (Wikipedia) and some horrifying consequences.
Decentralization describes my polticial philosophy pretty well. The challenge is: how?<p>Laissez-faire is a decent default, though obviously companies can cetralize power a lot.<p>Regulation seems reasonable, but it implicitly requires you to give some government power, and they tend to expand the scope of that power over time.<p>I think it's best when government is decentralized, and the smaller units of government can do what they want; while something as big as the US givernment would be highly constrained.<p>Allowing individual, smaller governments to regulate makes it harder for companies to take over. But if the government amasses too much power, you just move a few towns over.