#onlineabuse — Public Fediverse posts

Retail Gazette: Lush launches campaign highlighting harm caused by social media. “Lush is looking to spotlight the harm caused by big social media platforms in its new campaign, which is now live across all of its stores in the UK, EU, USA and Canada. The retailer left the major social media platforms, Snapchat, X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook almost five years ago. And since then, the […]

University of Edinburgh: Isolation drives lasting impact of cyberbullying. “Young people who experienced cyberbullying were more likely to develop emotional and behavioural problems over the following six months if the experience led to feelings of loneliness and difficulties managing their emotions, a study shows.”

Reuters: Judge dismisses lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X challenging New York hate speech law. “A U.S. judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s ​X seeking to void a New York state law requiring social media ‌companies to disclose how they monitor hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign political interference and disinformation.”

BBC: This man was abused for appearing on a Welcome to Heathrow poster. Then he met his trolls. “Driven by what he describes as his “Islamic values” and the teachings instilled in him by his parents, [Syed Usman] Shah replied to some of the people who had sent him abusive comments. ‘I don’t judge you for them, I don’t hate you for them,’ he told them. ‘Rather I forgive you for them.’ Shah […]

The Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToHide

The #NoPlaceToHide campaign has, as-ever, flushed out a lot of argument like this:

https://twitter.com/MCFcharityUK/status/1484191619595210754

This is pretty easily explained and dismissed; but first, a quick digression.

Metcalfe’s Law (and its nitpicks)

There’s a famous law of communications that the ‘value’ (whatever that means) of a ‘network’ increases as the square of the number of participants; this is Metcalfe’s Law, and it’s a rough and ready (if arguable and nitpicked) metric to express something intuitive about networking.

Most typically: if you have a social network with only 10 people on it, then the ‘value’ is 10-squared, or 100, as that’s the maximum number of direct communications relationships that the network can provide; however a network of 250 people can have 250-squared relationships, or 62,500, which is A LOT BIGGER than 100.

And a network of 1 million people has a value of one trillion, which is immensely bigger; and lo! — a social network containing 1 million people overall tends to be a lot more valuable to its participants — with more purpose and information — than a network containing only 10 people.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Children’s Safety and Privacy?

Basically, if we accept that there’s any meaning at all to Metcalfe’s Law, it means that we are content to measure the value of networks two-dimensionally — the square — which yields the number of relationships that it can hold.

However, there’s a third dimension which I have already mentioned — purpose — and that makes matters even more interesting for comparing relative values.

With Metcalfe’s law we assume and ignore that we are measuring the value of a general purpose network, but actually if we factor purpose into our maths — if we stop treating “purpose” as a continuum — then we get:

network value = square(participants) x (number of purposes to which the network can be put by users)

For a trivial example: when we consider “children’s safety” we are considering this revised Metcalfe’s Law by a large amount; for a network with 100 participants, of whom 33 are kids, and if we consider the kids safety to be 1 purpose, then the value is measured:

100 (overall participants) x 33 (kids) x 1 (safety) = 3,300

…but the network value as a whole is probably better measured as something like:

100 (participants) x 100 (participants) x 100 (purposes) = 1,000,000

…because there are hundreds, if not thousands of purposes to which a network can be put: sharing with friends, selling cars, charity collections, gig reviews, party invitations, etc; and as such we can see that (like it or not) the value of the network as a whole vastly outranks the restricted case of online safety for the subset of kids.

And the figure of 33% kids is not accidental — child safety advocates tend to quote numbers of one-fifth to one-third of internet users as being children:

Summary

So there you have it — to rephrase the challenge: “there is no such singular thing as ‘privacy’ to compare to ‘child safety’“ — because what you are weighing the relatively small set of one-or-a-few “child safety” requirements against is a never-ending list of purposes to which a network can be put:

• securely sending bank details
• organising a surprise birthday party
• sharing a cancer diagnosis
• looking for love
• exploring your sexuality and gender
• escaping an abusive partner
• booking travel tickets
• having an extra-marital affair
• organising an anti-government protest
• seeking abortion advice
• doubting your faith
• and many, many, more, including some which are terrible…

“Privacy” is a feature or quality that is innate to each and all of these purposes — rather than a thing in and of itself — and this is why the hydra-headed use-case that is “privacy” will always be more important than any singular, or small tranche, of circumscribed use-cases of any kind whatsoever, irrespective of how we feel about the matter.

Because the value of the purpose-space of a network is N-cubed, and any constraint on one-or-more dimension of that will massively diminish the value of the network.

And why is it effectively a binary issue? Because if the scores are 1,000,000 vs: 3,300 — or whatever — then the bigger number wins. And the number for ‘privacy’ will always be bigger, massively.

⊞

https://alecmuffett.com/article/15940

#endToEndEncryption #metcalfeSLaw #noplacetohide #onlineAbuse #onlineSafety