And the dream and hope of a free and open internet suffers a death by a thousand cuts.
It seems like the powerful around the world are competing with each other to see who can censor and control the internet the most. And of course they all, to the last man, claim it is for the benefit of the people.
That's not exactly "powerful around the world" who are routinely vote for more censorship in democratic countries. There is no strict difference between "hate speech", "fake news" and "online rumours".
That’s because people want freedom of speech but only their interpretation of free speech, which is why freedom of spreech, with very narrow exceptions, is crucial.
To be fair, I have never seen this on HN. You may still be right, I've just never seen it. (Maybe those calls for censorship are themselves getting censored?)
Plenty of people on HN take the position that private companies should deny their platform to unsavory voices, and this position has its own spectrum of views about where those lines can/should be drawn.
HN has a long history of censoring particular groups of people based on identity. That’s why it’s become such a monoculture (a monoculture of people generally convinced than HN is diverse, however.)
Down voting things you disagree with despite being well articulated (in fact because they are well articulated) is a form of censorship here.
But of course it goes much further when shadowbanning is deployed to enforce the narrow and rigid views of the moderation team.
Yes, I know pointing this out means it will now happen to me.
Nothing a censor hates more than thwarting the narrative they are trying to enforce.
But that’s why you think it doesn’t happen here. This is the most harshly and hypocritically cultivated walled garden on the Net. (Moderators violate their own rules regularly with impunity.)
Alas, I cannot abide not pointing out these abuses.
Click a checkbox in your profile and you can see those shadowbanned posts just fine.
Very rarely are they well written or polite.
I have yet to see well presented, civil, arguments censored. I have however seen entire threads criticizing HN and YCombinator staff, by name, be left alone.
A "third" perspective; I think there's at least some self-censorship (In certain dimensions, don't let me paint this as some universal or even majority thing) from people who tend to write civil, well presented arguments. You can read my post history if you want, and I've _certainly_ had some of my posts get greyed with rapidity (Obviously I selfishly found them to be innocuous but others clearly disagree, I find in situations where the status quo is _aggressively_ in one direction, even expressing moderation is caught in the blast radius), so I avoid the really hot subjects with a ten foot pole; you learn that it just doesn't end well, especially for those of us who have associated our professional lives with this site.
You can notice this more obviously if you watch new, that certain topics reach and get to the front page VERY RAPIDLY and stay there, while others are flagged or fall off with prejudice. I'm not sure I'd call it a huge problem, and the parent post is probably a bit hyperbolic, (Certainly I give the mods benefit of the doubt, even though I've gently disagreed with dang via comment prior) but it's definitely present.
Clearly that's an overstatement - I take it you mean that they are all cases of people calling for limits to speech, but 'hate speech' has clear legal definitions in many jurisdictions. We shouldn't omit 'libel' and 'slander' which are restrictions on free speech as well, though they rarely seem to cause too much outrage.
Should the internet behind the great firewall be considered a part of the global network, considering how isolated it is? I don't really consider what happens in China to be indicative of global trends. There may be similarities, for sure, but the scale is very different.
A free and open internet is a great equalizer. Powerful people don't like that because it can cause them to lose power. I think it is actually that simple.
Tyranny, in all its shapes and sizes, comes wrapped in claims that it is for the common good.
In fact a good way to think critically about things you hear is to ask “how is the politician profiting from this law?” And noting what new powers the law gives government.
If government “needs” more power with the justification of “helping people”, it may be the case that helping people is just the excuse.
Government power is easy to monetize: threaten industry with worse regulations but forget the idea when you get campaign contributions, etc.
Now with the revelation of fake news and dis-information, Western countries are scrambling to tackle this problem through fact checking. But who is the authoritative source?
The west seems to believe that government should be the last candidate, but maybe China can prove it wrong and demonstrate having trust between citizens and their government.
Edit: I just want to have a discussion on the trust relationship between citizens and the government, but if people feel this is going into an ideological battle, feel free to flag this comment.
The most likely truth is one which is sourced from multiple, non-associated entities, or ones which don't have incentive to co-operate. This would rule out the government model because they are a single source and they have a vested interest in pushing a single "truth", not to say that they're always wrong.
Much like wikipedia, if you source from a diverse enough base of information and providers, you are more likely to land on the truth than not.
I don't think Wikipedia is a good example. It has suffered from vandalism and edit wars (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring). It will only get worse when more people rely on it and more people have incentives to vandalize it.
Also, it is not a source of truth, it is merely an aggregation service. So it doesn't effectively solve the problem where two sources claim the opposite and the reader doesn't know who to trust.
I do agree with this sentiment. When I saw pewdiepie jokingly claim his YouTube news program to be "the most trustworthy news source", I actually want to agree with it seriously.
I don't think that "so does everyone else" really covers it.
Some people are logically more trustworthy than others. People who are not under pressure to push a particular narrative, for example.
Say, tenured university faculty. Educated people who's livelihood does not depend on saying the right thing. They get a high trustworthiness rating, right?
>tenured university faculty. Educated people who's livelihood does not depend on saying the right thing. They get a high trustworthiness rating, right?
No. They are just as biased and have just as selfish an agenda as anyone else. Consider this, all of the scientific papers out there that we are finding to be erroneous lately had been "peer reviewed". Well, guess who those "peers" were?
We all have biases and agendas that leave us open to potentially compromising our integrity. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not claiming to know how we should go about establishing authority in an environment devoid of trust. I'm just saying that I don't think it would be wise to simply assign automatic credibility to the government, or tenured academics, or police, or the clergy, or whatever else.
It depends on what subject area. Tenured or not, folk who depend for their salaries, pensions and grants on funds provided by the taxpayer might perhaps, understandably, be much in favor of big government and state, generally supported by the Left. Not many right wing academics around.
Doesn't really even have anything to do with "left" or "right". In reality "left" and "right" only serve to provide a convenient categorization method for sorting the groups and people that will tend to agree with a particular ideology. But all of those groups and people are not to be trusted, because they all have biases and agendas that lead to compromised integrity.
(In the case of people and groups on the "left" or the "right", the bias and agenda is clear. They are compromising in support of their ideologies.)
There are borderline content that’s hard to judge, but also tons of content that’s undoubtedly fake. For years there have been tons of articles floating around WeChat (Chinese social network) that’s completely made up stories and yet causing bad influence. As an example, there was a very popular article claiming seaweeds sold on the market are often made of plastics. Eventually the author of was identified and basically said that was what he felt like, but the impact of this article was real.
The government is in the best position to stop this by establishing laws against creating and spreading such misinformation.
Why do people trust a random article over some statement issued by the government?
If a government is trustworthy then you need no laws to prevent disinformation. If its not trustworthy then the last thing you want is laws that allow them to clamp down on information.
The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...
This is also why western societies are democratic.
> The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...
That won't solve the immediate problem of caused by fake articles circling around; and it will just bias towards hurting less educated people (who, btw, are exactly the target of those articles)
If there are laws against false information, of course this would need to go through proper law enforcement process, e.g. There must be proof that the articles are made up with intentional lies and the person should go through a trial.
The western societies never solve this problem and there's nothing to be proud about.
I would agree that western societies never solved this problem directly however they did try an indirect approach. Universal education slowly grew till a peak at around the 80s. They tried to arm the average person with Reason as well as practical skills like general literacy and exposure science. You combine that with low corruption and a general trust in authority and you have a very functional society.
But again in all seriousness why would the public believe a random article over any statement by government or other authoritative body?
The bulk of rumours in China that is causing issues are the ones that claim some kind of emergency (impending landslide, new virus in certain type of meat). They prey on the "宁可信其有，不可信其无＂mindset, which means "better to believe in something than not believing and suffer as a consequence". Like people will not eat chicken if there's a rumour about chicken being infected, because they will be guaranteed safe if they believe the rumour and don't eat it. That's just how average Chinese citizen thinks. Older generations don't bother to do fact checking.
On top of that, the rumours sometimes claim to be from an official source. Like it will start with "Latest news from the CCP", or "Breaking news from CCTV (national TV channel)". And people trust those sources so they are more likely to believe the rumour without verifying if the source is fake or genuine.
Bottom line is, Chinese people in general have higher degree of trust in government as compared to west. But they are less informed and easier to be tricked by rumours (more gullible), especially people with lower level of education.
People won’t usually believe random articles over statement from government or other authorities body. But most often, the articles never gets debunked since there are so many, and even if they are, it could be too late to repair the damage already done - business getting hurt etc., and the authorities statement may not reach everyone that believed the fake stories.
If there are no laws and there are no consequences making up such stories, nothing can really stop this.
>but maybe China can prove it wrong and demonstrate having trust between citizens and their government.
It's difficult to believe this comment was made in good faith when the Chinese government is known to already strictly control and prune the information available to its citizens online and elsewhere.
They'll consider those facts rumors and remove them.
The function of this "platform" is so vague that I don't think anyone is under any illusions that this isn't another way for the government to control public discussion.
This is precisely why it is dangerous to let someone other than yourself decide what meets the criteria for "fake news." It gives the decider an opportunity to manipulate public discourse.
“Hate speech” is actually a great example. I’m a fan of the fact trans people are getting better treatment in today’s society, but if some obnoxious jerk says “there are only two genders” or “Chelsea Manning is a dude”, that may make him an asshole but it’s not a crime, it’s not aggresssion or violence.
Yet “hate speech” is literally a phrase created to justify oppression against people for having opinions you don’t like.
I may choose not to associate with a jerk like in my example, but the perpetrators of “hate speech” concept want to deny him basic human rights, and often do violence against him.
Ironically for the “crime” of being different.
Basic human rights s are rights for everyone.
Genuine liberals used to advocate for the right of the KKK to march. The ACLU even filed a lawsuit Withings the past ten years defending their right to make white robes fools of themselves.
When “liberals” stopped defending human rights, you lost the plot and the whole point of being liberal.
You guys talk about "left" and "right" as if there is a difference.
Both are characterized by marked intolerance. A small minority of both are what I would term "Violently Intolerant". You can get yourself killed for being a congressman at a baseball game, or for being black and going to bible study or walking up a street. The "Left" and the "Right", particularly their extremists, are just bad business all around when it comes to what we would typically term "tolerance".
No one said it's the same. This is the problem, you take an extreme case and you say, "See! Since this [insert ridiculously extremist case here] is obviously bad then my [insert more reasonable case here] is good!"
No one's talking about the obvious stuff here. Like Nazis, or forcing blacks back into slavery or something. I'm talking about being intolerant of reasonable ideas.
It's perfectly reasonable for a bunch of congressmen to get together for a baseball game without being shot.
It's perfectly reasonable for young black military officers to walk up a city street without having a knife stuck in his chest.
Don't even get me started on how reasonable it is for little old ladies to go to churches.
Who are “the liberals”? You surely cannot think that all “liberals” or even a majority I think we should be banning speech. If you do think that I’d love some data because as a self identified liberal I don’t want to ban hate speech. I think you’re painting a straw man here.
More critically, it's to protect that speech from the government. Because you don't really need protection from anyone else, as no one else has a monopoly on violence.
The violence of an online mob is not protected by the government. So who cares? Arrest the mobsters and move on with life.
A boycott is not even violence. So, again, who cares? We're not even in physical danger in the case of a boycott. In fact, the boycott is actually free speech. (Or, more precisely, free expression).
But consider, if the government comes after you, who will you arrest? Who can you get to defend you? In this case, the Constitutional protections of our freedoms are essential.
The threat from the government is the danger that the Founders were insistent on mitigating. And they were right to do so. The government is the main entity that we need protection from vis-a-vis restriction of rights.
From the video promoting the platform: "Rumours violate individual rights; rumours create social panic; rumours cause fluctuations in the stock markets; rumours impact normal business operations; rumours blatantly attack revolutionary martyrs"
One of these is not like the others... You'd think that "attacking revolutionary martyrs" would be in the government's list of pros about rumors, not cons. Or at least so I've heard
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIt seems like the powerful around the world are competing with each other to see who can censor and control the internet the most. And of course they all, to the last man, claim it is for the benefit of the people.
Down voting things you disagree with despite being well articulated (in fact because they are well articulated) is a form of censorship here.
But of course it goes much further when shadowbanning is deployed to enforce the narrow and rigid views of the moderation team.
Yes, I know pointing this out means it will now happen to me.
Nothing a censor hates more than thwarting the narrative they are trying to enforce.
But that’s why you think it doesn’t happen here. This is the most harshly and hypocritically cultivated walled garden on the Net. (Moderators violate their own rules regularly with impunity.)
Alas, I cannot abide not pointing out these abuses.
Very rarely are they well written or polite.
I have yet to see well presented, civil, arguments censored. I have however seen entire threads criticizing HN and YCombinator staff, by name, be left alone.
You can notice this more obviously if you watch new, that certain topics reach and get to the front page VERY RAPIDLY and stay there, while others are flagged or fall off with prejudice. I'm not sure I'd call it a huge problem, and the parent post is probably a bit hyperbolic, (Certainly I give the mods benefit of the doubt, even though I've gently disagreed with dang via comment prior) but it's definitely present.
In fact a good way to think critically about things you hear is to ask “how is the politician profiting from this law?” And noting what new powers the law gives government.
If government “needs” more power with the justification of “helping people”, it may be the case that helping people is just the excuse.
Government power is easy to monetize: threaten industry with worse regulations but forget the idea when you get campaign contributions, etc.
China loves bureaucracy.
Now with the revelation of fake news and dis-information, Western countries are scrambling to tackle this problem through fact checking. But who is the authoritative source?
The west seems to believe that government should be the last candidate, but maybe China can prove it wrong and demonstrate having trust between citizens and their government.
Edit: I just want to have a discussion on the trust relationship between citizens and the government, but if people feel this is going into an ideological battle, feel free to flag this comment.
Much like wikipedia, if you source from a diverse enough base of information and providers, you are more likely to land on the truth than not.
Also, it is not a source of truth, it is merely an aggregation service. So it doesn't effectively solve the problem where two sources claim the opposite and the reader doesn't know who to trust.
What is required is a re-assertion of reputation.
People have become far too willing to believe facebook posts, etc, and even respectable media has become far too willing to echo them.
Reputable media sources need to re-assert their credentials, or even individual bloggers etc, need to step up to stand behind their posts.
With a cadre of trustworthy sources, individuals can then take steps to exclude internet chum.
So does everyone else.
That's the Great Aporia here.
How do we establish credibility in an environment that is 100% free of trust?
Some people are logically more trustworthy than others. People who are not under pressure to push a particular narrative, for example.
Say, tenured university faculty. Educated people who's livelihood does not depend on saying the right thing. They get a high trustworthiness rating, right?
No. They are just as biased and have just as selfish an agenda as anyone else. Consider this, all of the scientific papers out there that we are finding to be erroneous lately had been "peer reviewed". Well, guess who those "peers" were?
We all have biases and agendas that leave us open to potentially compromising our integrity. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not claiming to know how we should go about establishing authority in an environment devoid of trust. I'm just saying that I don't think it would be wise to simply assign automatic credibility to the government, or tenured academics, or police, or the clergy, or whatever else.
(In the case of people and groups on the "left" or the "right", the bias and agenda is clear. They are compromising in support of their ideologies.)
Yet they are the only entity that can make laws against it
You dont need discussion, you need a clearer picture of enlightenment values. You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6qYjisp51M
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Kelvin.html
The government is in the best position to stop this by establishing laws against creating and spreading such misinformation.
If a government is trustworthy then you need no laws to prevent disinformation. If its not trustworthy then the last thing you want is laws that allow them to clamp down on information.
The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...
This is also why western societies are democratic.
That won't solve the immediate problem of caused by fake articles circling around; and it will just bias towards hurting less educated people (who, btw, are exactly the target of those articles)
If there are laws against false information, of course this would need to go through proper law enforcement process, e.g. There must be proof that the articles are made up with intentional lies and the person should go through a trial.
The western societies never solve this problem and there's nothing to be proud about.
But again in all seriousness why would the public believe a random article over any statement by government or other authoritative body?
The bulk of rumours in China that is causing issues are the ones that claim some kind of emergency (impending landslide, new virus in certain type of meat). They prey on the "宁可信其有，不可信其无＂mindset, which means "better to believe in something than not believing and suffer as a consequence". Like people will not eat chicken if there's a rumour about chicken being infected, because they will be guaranteed safe if they believe the rumour and don't eat it. That's just how average Chinese citizen thinks. Older generations don't bother to do fact checking.
On top of that, the rumours sometimes claim to be from an official source. Like it will start with "Latest news from the CCP", or "Breaking news from CCTV (national TV channel)". And people trust those sources so they are more likely to believe the rumour without verifying if the source is fake or genuine.
Bottom line is, Chinese people in general have higher degree of trust in government as compared to west. But they are less informed and easier to be tricked by rumours (more gullible), especially people with lower level of education.
If there are no laws and there are no consequences making up such stories, nothing can really stop this.
You've got to be kidding me. The Chinese dictatorship wants no 'conversation' with its citizens. it wants brainwash and obedience at all costs.
- Former inmates of China’s Muslim ‘reeducation’ camps tell of brainwashing, torture https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inm...
- Detention of Hong Kong pro-democracy activists when visiting mainland China must be investigated https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/08/hong-kong-det...
- Tibet: New Chinese Regulations Treat Tibetan Cultural and Social Activities as ‘Organised Crime’ http://unpo.org/article/20998
Are you seriously a Chinese engineer who's worked in US and have seen the world? And you are still that brainwashed as well? Disgusting.
It's difficult to believe this comment was made in good faith when the Chinese government is known to already strictly control and prune the information available to its citizens online and elsewhere.
Yet “hate speech” is literally a phrase created to justify oppression against people for having opinions you don’t like.
I may choose not to associate with a jerk like in my example, but the perpetrators of “hate speech” concept want to deny him basic human rights, and often do violence against him.
Ironically for the “crime” of being different.
Basic human rights s are rights for everyone.
Genuine liberals used to advocate for the right of the KKK to march. The ACLU even filed a lawsuit Withings the past ten years defending their right to make white robes fools of themselves.
When “liberals” stopped defending human rights, you lost the plot and the whole point of being liberal.
Both are characterized by marked intolerance. A small minority of both are what I would term "Violently Intolerant". You can get yourself killed for being a congressman at a baseball game, or for being black and going to bible study or walking up a street. The "Left" and the "Right", particularly their extremists, are just bad business all around when it comes to what we would typically term "tolerance".
No one's talking about the obvious stuff here. Like Nazis, or forcing blacks back into slavery or something. I'm talking about being intolerant of reasonable ideas.
It's perfectly reasonable for a bunch of congressmen to get together for a baseball game without being shot.
It's perfectly reasonable for young black military officers to walk up a city street without having a knife stuck in his chest.
Don't even get me started on how reasonable it is for little old ladies to go to churches.
A boycott is not even violence. So, again, who cares? We're not even in physical danger in the case of a boycott. In fact, the boycott is actually free speech. (Or, more precisely, free expression).
But consider, if the government comes after you, who will you arrest? Who can you get to defend you? In this case, the Constitutional protections of our freedoms are essential.
The threat from the government is the danger that the Founders were insistent on mitigating. And they were right to do so. The government is the main entity that we need protection from vis-a-vis restriction of rights.
So, cool that you have decided what's fake, but if the mob thinks otherwise you're toast.
See anti-vaxxers and their effects on innocent children, both their own and others.
One of these is not like the others... You'd think that "attacking revolutionary martyrs" would be in the government's list of pros about rumors, not cons. Or at least so I've heard