I recently commented on an article about the new Sapien social network which among other things is aiming to help stamp out "fake news" and preserve free-speech. While writing my comment about the difficulties of achieving that, and what has recently been occurring on Steemit I started to wondering if there is an equivalent of the distributed database CAP theorem. CAP theorem says that with a distributed data store you can only have two of data consistency, availability, or partitioning in the system.
My hypothesis (I just made this up) is in social networks we can only have two of three of the following factors:
- truthiness (consensus on truth)
- free-speech
- unity
Or to put it in negated conditions: fake-news , censorship, and partitioning
So:
- If you want truthiness and free-speech then you have to accept partitioning of your community so they can freely speak and form a consensus on “truth” they all agree on (what I call “truthiness”)
- If you want free-speech and unity then you have to throw out consensus on truth and let in the fake-news
- If you want truthiness and unity then you have to throw out free-speech and suppress the views of some to not count in the consensus on truthiness.
Update: after noodling on this I think it may be wrong to frame the first item as "truthiness" or "consensus on truth". Maybe it is just "consensus" or general agreement that won't be challenged. And one could even frame "consensus" as "happiness" with the community.
I think the more homogenous the overall population is in the social network the closer you will come to achieving all three factors - rather like if you have a perfect network and perfectly reliable nodes then the closer you are to getting CAP because partitioning of nodes becomes very unlikely (until you hit the once in a blue moon failure scenario like a meteorite or terrorist incident hitting a data center).
But in real life we (Americans at least) are not homogenous, we are deeply divided and unable to maintain happiness with a consensus without the absence of partitions to keep our diverse opinions apart. Previously we had social norms, editorial on bogus claims and behaviors that would never achieve consensus before, but now that is out of the window.
So maybe we could replace "unity" with "diversity" - at least in American society. Increase diversity and try and maintain free-speech and you'll get into hateful shouting matches where everything is challenged. To get consensus and free-speech you need to throw diversity out of the door. Have diversity and consensus and you'll have to censor some speakers and ideas which is exactly what happened before the rise of the Tea Party, AA movement (alt-Americans), and such.