Interesting article. It doesn't look at corporate/social media censorship, but government and ISP censorship is still dangerous.
I found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances.
Also, ISP censorship on Norway. Corporate overreach, or unofficial cooperation between them and government? They really need some Net Neutrality.
>I found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances.
No, but they would have covered the protests against it.
Corporate/social media censorship is now the en vogue censorship and the one we are most problems with, at least in the western world. Or maybe it's the one with most publicity. In comparison, government/ISP censorship seems to have died out and be pretty mild.
However, something like China's censorship is much worse than social media.
I thought we luckily would be free of such, but I do consider Poland western, and Japan a reputable democracy. It is still dangerous because a threat we thought dead or dormant is still active.
Really surprising. AFAIK Japan has strict free to speech by constitution. I never heard such censorship except child porn blocking. Any citations? I can't find any source even in Japanese.
There is a great tool called OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference) that you can use to test your own network and see if commonly censored sites are censored for you.
It is extremely dangerous to our democracy to have unlimited free speech.
1. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
2. Corporations aren't the government, so the first amendment doesn't apply.
3. Haven't your heard of "fire in a movie theater"?
4. Hate speech IS violence.
5. Reading disinformation from un-check-marked, non-fact-checked sources is anti scientific. Since all scientists have check marks, we should only listen to check marks.
6. Do you really want to be disturbed by Plumpdfth tweets from his prison cell?
Pfff - our laws are trampled all the time and don't exist for the Elites. Legality will soon become like objectivity or fact and just be lost completely to whatever they dictate is truth.
>> Censored Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.
I'd be fine just getting the minute back of my life that I spent reading it. I don't think that reading off a list of contemptuous claims and insults is in any way productive, even when they are intended as satire. Are we not divided enough?
dang I would like to see posts like this effect bans, there’s simply no value here and little chance of redemption for someone who writes something like this
Where does the line between blocking illegal content vs censorship go?
In the western world we would probably allow ISPs to block sites that promote traditions that we do not see as normal. For example; in some east asian countries they eat dogs during festival. Websites selling dog meat shipping to western countries would be blocked in my country.
Why can't India censor websites than promote values they dont agree with? Or Russia?
Every country and people are unique and they have different values. We shouldnt try to assimilate those.
Im totally against Social medias. And believe they have caused mental health damage to large section of the population.
but lets talk about general censorship vs freedom without Social medias in the equation.
You could argue that freedom of speech is a sacrosant right, like the right to live, that no law(not even the constitution) can overrule. You will lost that battle, with reason, because things like child pornography or slander must not be protected.
So the second approach is to say, ok, some things are better censored, let the laws to clearly define that. If something must be appended or removed, do it through the appropriate channel, sponsor a bill, vote it, make it law, create the precedent.Rinse and repeat. A tedious game, but a needed one.
What you cannot do is to let the techno-barons to decide themselves what should or shouldnt be said, when they are managing platforms that are quasi-monopolistic.
If there is one thing about laws is that they're messy and complex, a reflection of the world we live in. Our culture and values constantly evolve, and the laws are normally following those so something legal or illegal at this moment might not be in the future.
And that's why there is a full branch of government dedicated to that work, a branch that at least in theory is at the service of the nation. Totally opposite to the XXI century digital Rockefellers.
Social media outlets are publishers, I have no problem with them editorializing. I wouldn’t have a problem with a book store not carrying a book or a newspaper not publishing a crank opinion piece, why should I have a problem with twitter banning someone (or whatever else)?
Because then you will have to shut your mouth when Google delists you, youtube deplatforms you and Amex/Visa/MasterCard refuse to do business with you just because something, perfectly legal, that you said. Maybe it is OK for you, for me it is bone chilling scary.
However some are upset at what one nation's laws and courts block as compared to another. The Zuckerberg's and Dorsey's of the world however are intimidated into doing such censorship on the behalf of politicians who cannot do it themselves.
They accomplish this simply by attacking the organizations on another front. Never underestimate the coercive nature of politicians whose own countries forbid censorship they can get another to do for them.
The simple fact is, our western values are not the world's values.
"state censorship" at least in The USA, is pretty limited.
So yes, I would prefer the existing system, where state censorship is extremely limited, to a situation where instead censorship is much more broad and effects more people.
If the speech is legal, then it should be allowed on major communication platforms.
There is even existing laws for this, that we could expand to cover new forms of media.
Those existing laws are called common carrier laws, and they currently apply to the phone network, and they could be changed to include many of the major new platforms.
Common carrier laws are pretty uncontroversial. I would hope that you do not think as they apply to the phone system, that they are some huge example of unfairness.
By wanting to use legal measures to force publishers to carry certain speech, you're not only drastically limiting the organizations' own free speech rights, but very quickly opening up a short path to punishing those who refuse to carry certain messages. Another word for that is (literally) propaganda.
This whole movement of people begging the government to prevent companies from curating their content, under the guise of fucking free speech of all things, is so deep into doublespeak territory that it just leaves me in awe.
Do you think it is some huge infringement that phone companies are required to follow common carrier laws?
Common carrier laws are pretty uncontroversial. Those existing laws could be updated to include communication networks that are more relevant in the modern day.
There are such things as good and bad in the world.
Cultural relativism is brain poison. It is very important to define and fight for universal human rights, such as the right to date and marry someone regardless of gender.
Right on cue, a propagandist tries to turn this into a china-relate issue. What's with you people? Almost every other thread that has nothing to do with china, you people show up?
It's an article about government censorship and China is one of the most strict censorship and surveillance states on the planet. Bringing it up is on point and relevant to the topic.
Fits well with the current wave of authoritarianism/nationalism that has taken root all over the world. A free and open internet represents everything that a government that wishes complete control over its people would be afraid of.
> Fits well with the current wave of authoritarianism/nationalism that has taken root all over the world.
Autoritarianism often goes hand in hand with nationalism, but not always. In recent history, it is the non-nationalists who seem to be most pro-censorship, does it not?
Unfortunately, due to the extremely dynamic and high velocity nature of current times, this article wasn't able to get into the new flavor of micro-censorship - hopefully they address that in the future.
The interesting thing about this is that nationalism is in general associated with right-leaning politics, and the censorship is far and away being applied more aggressively to those very same right-leaning nationalist groups.
You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.
What we LOVE is a market free of force and fraud, and we love rule of law. Within that there are very nuanced conversations to be had about when the threshold for force or fraud has been reached.
Enforcement of contracts is essential to a healthy society, but is it good to enforce a contract where one party either lied or coerced the other to sign? No, or at least not necessarily.
The nature of the contract between social media platforms and their users (both explicit and implicit) has changed dramatically since the days that Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party". Users have sacrificed a increasing amount of privacy for less and less obvious benefit. In the meantime, many people have come to depend upon these services for connecting with others, for their livelihoods, and for news independent of corporate media.
Have the social media companies deceived their users? Or have they forced unconscionable terms upon their users? Have they violated consumer protection laws?
I am not a lawyer. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do know that there are some lawyers and judges who do think that some of these social media companies have overstepped. We don't necessarily need a civil rights case, or a constitutional amendment, or even to repeal Section 230. All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.
This kind of action would benefit both left and right, and I think is more constructive than opportunistically deciding that "businesses can do whatever they want" when you think it only hurts people on the right.
Twitter is a private company with zero legal authority to enforce anything other than not sharing your tweets.
Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.
I honestly think you should stop trying to read minds. You aren't very good at it.
Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.
Can you please tell me what "my version" of free speech is? Is this different from the normal understanding of free speech? Because I haven't actually said anything about "free speech" other than quoting Jack Dorsey.
While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:
* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.
* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.
* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS
Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.
From the article:
> "Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites"
Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not.
Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?
Amusing how when it's aligned with your viewpoints (suppression of speech for rightwing groups), it's partisan. Otherwise, it's "anyone can get away with it".
I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.
But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?
The whole discussion is sapir-whorfed hard by the fake left-right nomenclature. Old-school-leftists, such as communists and socialists are catching ban-hammers, yes that's true. "Pronoun-left" on the other hand is not.
> You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.
* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"
Huh? It's the exact opposite. In the US sites like Facebook & Twitter routinely refuse to censor conservative content even if it is against their policies because they are afraid of pissing off Republicans in Congress.
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Since my experience is the complete political reverse of what you describe (liberals getting away with things that conservatives assume they never could), I think the real answer is that probably there is less censorship in general than people assume.
And I suppose that's probably a good thing.
> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.
However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.
Are you intentionally trying to gaslight people? This is just straight up false. See Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trump - a tweet which she’s retweeted multiple times.
I think that the right has moved the Overton Window so much to the right that they see things that most of the world would see as mainstream (Black Lives Matter, Abortion, Medicare for All, Defund the Police, Anti-Fascism etc) as extreme.
None of those things, properly understood[1], were in any way mainstream until very recently. And arguably still aren't mainstream.
[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".
And the fact that people apparently can’t stand to hear this shows how far left the tech overton window has shifted. As if we all were not already aware.
That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable. If you describe those things are mainstream, they're by definition inside the Overton Window. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you're more likely to be fired for being a nationalist rather than a communist, so that's another indicator that the Overton Window is actually on the left.
I don't keep track of this, but there is a lot of "canceling" going on recently. If we talk strictly about politics, I did saw a couple of left-leaning people who got fired for politics, because the angry mob went after their employment. But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people. And what I never saw was anyone on the left got kicked off platforms like PayPal for example. Though it's within the realm of possibility that the social media just gave me the impression that this is the case. However, considering the fact that basically every corporation and even some of the smaller companies are changing their logos in support of BLM, LGBT Pride etc., I think it's quite reasonable to assume that.
> But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people.
And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?
Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.
I'm not the one you're replying to, but here's how I think the Overton Window works.
Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.
For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.
Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)
The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.
> That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable
"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.
Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".
That's funny that you say that because those who find themselves right of center generally say the same thing. The mainstream media, hollywood, and academia, have become so liberal that the center feels like extreme right to them.
A number of countries have ripped up their police force and started again, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last few decades. The RUC would be a mild case, the Stasi an extreme one.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the criticisms of those. You might also want to familiarize yourself with what those organizations and ideologies are actually about beyond their slogan (which in most cases has nothing to do with what the slogan is).
But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.
I could bet money that the opposite of what you're saying is true. But I think that illustrates a much bigger problem. The society is so polarized, that we can't even agree on basic facts. Something went terribly wrong with the internet and the media and now we're living in two completely different realities, that are fundamentally incompatible with one another.
You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.
Yes I think Facebook allowed the Fauci threats as PR to make themselves look neutral. Mark Zuckerberg and his employees have been playing good cop bad cop with us since the beginning to make the public perceive Facebook as a neutral bystander when in fact they're in a large part responsible for the whole mess and are not neutral at all.
OP is probably referring to the Steve Bannon's recent statement calling for the beheading of Dr. Fauci. This has been very widely covered, even by Trumpist media. See:
This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.
I have no idea how you can keep telling yourself that when the top 10 shared links on Facebook have been nothing but conservative conspiracy theories for over 12 months straight.
That is irrelevant to the claim. Facebook doesn’t share links, the users do. The allegation of bias are associated with inconsistent and/or incorrect applications of their rules.
From the article: > "Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites"
What you are complaining about is that right-wingers are sometimes banned by private sites in the US because they advocate genocide and other contemptible actions.
A free and open internet also allows propaganda and hate to flourish which are two bedrocks of most authoritarian and nationalist regimes. It isn't as simple as ending censorship will allow everyone to be free.
> A free and open internet also allows propaganda and hate to flourish
I disagree. Sure there will always be some amount of misinformation on the internet, but a fully state-controlled media and internet (see - China) is far, far more effective at spreading propaganda and controlling the narrative.
This isn't a binary choice between a fully state controlled internet and a fully free and open internet. There is a spectrum. I believe the ideal internet rests much closer to the free and open side than the state controlled side, but existing at the extreme of free and open would be come with its own set of problems. Just look at all the most popular places on the web that champion their lack of censorship or moderation. Most of them end up as cesspools.
Is it possible that they become cesspools because poop isn't allowed to flow everywhere else? Is there a finite quantity of poop that could be diluted if it were spread out evenly, or is the supply unending?
The problem isn't quantity, but risk. There's a reason we restrict literal poop to a few designated places - while there's only a finite amount of excrement deposited any given time, you don't want every place you visit and interaction you're a part of to carry a chance of you witnessing someone defecating.
Exactly and this is the dirty little detail that people don't want to realize. People think you can just censor right wing misinformation but guess what happens? The right wing movements simply create their own websites and start blocking anything that is a counter argument. Biggest example is reddit which has focused on blocking right wing groups. /r/thedonald used to be big on reddit but they got banned. So they went on to create their own version of reddit and now that website has exploded in popularity. It is apparently in the top 500 most visited websites in the USA now.
It is very likely that moving forward, many right wing people will shift away platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. In fact, these platforms already exist. Gab is a replacement for facebook and parler is a replacement for twitter.
Propaganda is vulnerable to open discourse, promoters of false information are handicapped by the flaws in their arguments. The only way it can flourish is censored away into manipulative misdirection and secretive groups.
There is also the immunity to bad ideas aspect; Its important that the propaganda is heard openly and argued against in public, as this makes people immune to these arguments. Censor these bad ideas and we make the next generation vulnerable to them.
I don't think we can offset this with education, as with drugs, we never give the kids the very best bad idea - argument when we try to teach the dangers of drugs, this is why so many are vulnerable to the dealers quiet persuasion. I really feel like the more we silence movements like the alt right, the more vulnerable our society becomes to their bad ideas.
>Propaganda is vulnerable to open discourse, promoters of false information are handicapped by the flaws in their arguments. The only way it can flourish is censored away into manipulative misdirection and secretive groups.
This is repeated so much it is practically a meme at this point, but is there anything to actually back it up? Especially when users have the ability to control what they see. If someone is in a bubble of disinformation, it doesn't matter how many voices outside the bubble try to debunk those claims.
It seems like a more effective approach would to be to work on preventative measures so people are never exposed to these harmful beliefs rather than wait until these beliefs are heard and then try to convince them they are wrong.
The censorship of the good information is the problem. And it probably started with censorship of bad information that lead to the bubble in the first place.
>work on preventative measures so people are never exposed
This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you want to protect people from themselves, you must immunize them from the bad ideas they could come up with. We know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.
We also have the problem that if you set up a perfect system of blocking bad ideas, the people who run it can have bad ideas of their own. Hell the mechanism we have to even tell the difference between bad ideas and good ideas in society (open free discourse) will have been destroyed.
There are plenty of examples of people trying to do this around the world, tyrants and hell-holes created with the best of intentions.
>The censorship of the good information is the problem. And it probably started with censorship of bad information that lead to the bubble in the first place.
There is nothing nefarious about bubbles. They happen automatically when people are in control of what they consume. Imagine I join Twitter and I am given a list of people to follow. I don't like to hear from people with viewpoints that I think are crazy so I unfollow someone if they say something I disagree with. If some gets retweeted into my feed saying something I agree with, I might follow them regardless of the validity of their comment since I don't have the time or motivation to fact check everything. Wouldn't you know it, I am now in a bubble despite there being zero censorship of anything. If one of the people in my bubble repeats some false claim, am I going to see someone dispute that claim or will the disputing occur outside my bubble?
>This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you can't protect people from themselves, you can only immunize them, we know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.
Ideas do have virality to them. Something like QAnon is a prime example. Is isn't like "wealthy democrats drink the blood of children" is some random idea that multiple people reached through parallel thinking. It was a particular conspiracy theory that spread from one person to another. Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach than trying to retroactively unconvince people who have already bought into the conspiracy.
I agree with the rest of your comment about the dangers of censorship. That is why I said I would have a preference for something that is closer to free and open than not, but that doesn't mean we can't recognize the specific situations in which completely free and open systems can go wrong.
Nothing about QAnon is inherently viral, there's no real rhyme or reason to QAnon theories and they contradict each other half the time. QAnon is just the latest adaptation of solipsistic, uncritical, and delusional thinking that started long before the internet and will continue long after it dies. Ever wonder what happened to flat earth theory? That used to be the "viral" bad idea of the time, but if you look around now it's practically dead. It's dead because flat earthers have moved on to QAnon [1]. "Wealthy democrats drink the blood of children" is literally a random stupid idea that only spreads because these idiots all talk to each other. It could be anything; In a different decade they would instead be talking about the Freemasons, or a flat earth, or the Jewish agenda. The common theme is not the idea or the politics, it's the broken mentality that creates a worldview in which nothing is your fault, everything bad is caused by inhuman others, and you are one of the few smart enough to see what others cannot.
It's foolish to think that censoring these people actually solves anything. Because you never addressed the broken psychology that attracts them to this garbage in the first place, they'll continue finding other outlets, your attempts to censor them only feeding their delusions further. Censorship might help you avoid them on the internet, but let's see if you can avoid them at the polls.
> Propaganda is vulnerable to open discourse, promoters of false information are handicapped by the flaws in their arguments. The only way it can flourish is censored away into manipulative misdirection and secretive groups.
This is so false it's bordering on the absurd. Anyone with even a little experience with debate and techniques like Gish gallop, which are widely employed, know that rational arguments simply do not convince most people of things. Humans aren't purely rational beings. It's dangerous to assume we can just talk away propaganda because all evidence points to the contrary.
More than 80% of Trump supporters believe the election was rigged against their candidate despite there literally being no evidence supporting this claim. We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter. You've got literally millions of people who have been conditioned to label everything that contradicts their views as "fake news". There is a reason why Fox News viewers score lower on current information than people who don't watch any news at all. Their propaganda works and talking about it and pointing it out isn't helping at all.
Think of the last hundred years, the countries that supported some form of free expression and discourse are now the most progressive rational societies on the planet. And the ones that enforced moral standards and 'ministries of truth', usually religious, are the most regressive.
It doesn't matter whether you can change someones mind on the spot, it matters that your argument is superior and the public tend to repeat and re-argue the superior argument. And yes, things like election fraud, that might be possible, and has happened before, is harder to argued against than a flat earth. But these positions are also the ones where we might be wrong.
> More than 80% of Trump supporters believe the election was rigged against their candidate despite there literally being no evidence supporting this claim.
This is not accurate. Many non-Trump supporters also do not trust the results. I suspect you have not paid a lot of attention to the legitimate concerns.
> We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter.
This is true, but as of late, it’s going the opposite direction. It’s not that anything that contradicts their views is fake news, it’s the stuff that contradicts reality. See finepeoplehoax.org for a great example.
I'm curious -- what are you hoping that argument will accomplish?
Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.
Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.
I was responding to a comment that stated an authoritarian/nationalistic movement would fear a free and open internet. I was pointing out that a free and open internet can be a tool of an authoritarian/nationalistic movement. I was hoping to open some people's eyes to how openness can be abused.
Also I don't know if this was intentional, but just letting you know that your phrasing of this post comes off as needlessly confrontational. You can ask for clarification without asking "what are you hoping that argument will accomplish" which sounds accusatory as it implies a nefarious motive.
That is why we need the education to identify and expose propaganda. Something most governments have either completely ignored or severely neglected in public education because of how useful and successful their own propaganda has been in shaping public ideas and narrative.
How about the wave of 'I won't change, I won't work on myself, so I'll change / sensor you under the pretense of virtue" that's taken hold in SV echochambers?
USA PATRIOT Act was from Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It incorporated material from 3 earlier bills, one of which was also by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the others by Sen. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Oxley (R-OH).
Weird is that in the US the liberals want to censor and the conservatives argue for free speech. They are at their throats so much that is probably doesn't really matter anymore.
Emmanuel Macron has been getting newspapers to pull down their articles in the past few weeks (the FT usually never removes articles but they did too). I bet barely anyone notices.
Interesting that politico sent one straight to print today without an online article first.
I'd prefer the newspaper to highlight the "factual errors" rather than withdraw the article, but they do need to do one of those things to maintain their editorial integrity.
> I bet barely anyone notices.
It took a single search to find plenty of articles covering this.
> ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.
I have no trouble accessing hrw.org and match.com in Norway. I wonder is it specific to some ISPs? I also couldn’t find any law that was passed to block certain pornogrpahic websites in Wikipedia [1] and I don’t know where else to look.
Does Norway not publish its corpus of law online? Even in Canada where our government motto is "yesterday's technology today" we have websites where you can look up all legislation and read it.
It probably does but it’s not easily searchable or finding this specific law with the information they provide in the article is very hard. Like the law jargon etc. it’s the job of the article to cite the link.
It does, they even have a selection that is translated to english [1]. However I don't know what kind of terms I would search for. I tried "DNS", but it didn't give me anything. I also tried "internet blocking", no luck there either.
If I'm inferring correctly from the wiki page on Norwegian internet, the DNS blacklist is not made public as they mention it was posted to wikileaks back in 2009. At the time I believe this was exclusively a CP blacklist [1]
The mandate to block torrent sites came about as a result of a court order following a lawsuit brought forth by Hollywood studios against Norwegian ISPs [2]. I tried to find the specific text on lovdata, but came up empty as they don't have a comprehensive list of local court decisions. [3]
I believe it is the court case with ID TOSLO-2015-67093 [1]. Trough my old university account I still have access to lovdata pro so I was able to search for it and view it. I am to lazy to reupload it tonight, but if you are interested I could do it tomorrow.
> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.
There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)
> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).
They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.
When I read that, I immediately dismissed the whole article.
Both HRW and match.com are available on the 4/5 ISPs I have access to ATM. Home (Telenor), mobile (Telia), server host (domeneshop), my office (Telia, wired) and a customer network (Not sure about the downstream ISP). On the last one match.com is blocked by a firewall not the ISP.
They should really check thier sources. My guess is that they tested on a network that has a filtering firewall.
Now that that is said. Norway is not perfect. The biggest ISPs use a easy to bypass DNS blocklist by the judiciary. The list contains CP-sites, gambling, piracy, terrorism. This is bad enough. Why lie about match.com and hrw.org? Jeez.
Probably. After reading the paper I'm pretty sure they messed up their testing.
The problem is that they blow it up HUGE both in the paper and the article without cursory checking. That is as bad as lie. Maybe even worse.
From The paper 7.1.2:
"Censored Planet data reveals extremely aggressive DNS blocking of many domains in Norway, with many blocks being consistent in all of our vantage points. During the four month period of increased censorship, 25 ASes observed blocking of more than 10 domains in at least six categories. We observed the most rigorous activity in AS 2116 (CATCHCOM) where more than 50 domains were blocked."
Blocking more than 10 domains in 25 ASes I have no reason to doubt. As I said there is extensive DNS blocking. So they write in a way that makes it sound like all the ASes are blocking hrw.org and match. But it's probably only on CATCHCOM. This is a ISP for mostly huge corporate environments where blocking may be by customer demand. So they take one single source of "anomaly" and blow it up. Pretty much a lie.
I agree. I mean, were I not a skeptic I'd be walking around dropping the interesting tidbit that "Norway blocks match.com" - it's as bad as the info-memes with nonsense on them people quote from facebook.
> During the G20 period, we observed increased blocking of domains in the news media and E-commerce category in Japan. DNS blocking was observed in both categories while Echo blocking was seen in the E-commerce category to a smaller extent. The domains being blocked during this time period included popular news domains such as online.wsj.com and washingtonpost.com under the news media category and kickstarter.com and marketwatch.com under the E-commerce umbrella.
Lol. Blocking kickstarter.com for G20? It must be false positive or ISP's DNS server is just suck.
Yeah, the article mentions some news sites being banned temporarily in Japan, but as someone who reads those sites near daily, I never noticed it happening.
What's interesting is the Prime Minister made it explicitly legal for ISPs to do this. Couldn't find the exact news on this but a search turned up the following article which is sort of what I remember https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/04/soci-a04.html .
I checked as well (Globalconnect wired; Telenor mobile). It's a fairly ridiculous claim, one which if true would have attracted instant media attention.
I'm pretty sure it never happened. This would have been big news here. The technology press went ape when thepriatebay.org was added to a DNS blocklist. I have searched around and can not find any references to hrw or match being blocked by accident or not.
Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.
Ok, so your gut feeling vs some scientific research? Could you try to debate the facts instead of a strawman journalist?
Why do you say this journalist is lying, but lack of evidence from other journalists must mean this one is wrong?
Pirate Bay is a big site, and journalists and the population would notice. But they might not know to look for other sites being censored. Just food for thought. I don't know whether to believe it either, but I'm willing to leave it to others to fact check more rigorously.
A perfectly reasonable explanation that obeys all the facts could be that a single telecom blocked access for a short time by mistake, was alerted, and silently fixed it before journalists noticed. I doubt many people are visiting hrw.org on a daily basis, and an outage like that could be mistaken for temporary website issues. A journalist would probably not assume it was a country-wide block and so wouldn't think to write an article about it.
I know that in the Netherlands there is a specific very small ISP which caters to a certain religious crowd and blocks all sorts of "offensive" content (which is its main selling point).
This reminds me of the disinformation smear campaign against the Canadian health care system run by US insurance companies since the nineties to prevent single payer health care laws from being passed...
My guess is that they think DNS resolution failures are consorship. There where some insane numbers like 95% unavailability of pcgamer.com and worldofwarcraft.com in the article as well. It makes no sense.
Cue conversation about overreach of Facebook and Twitter. Cue defense of freedom of speech in response to the incitement to violence argument. Cue downvotes of said defenses and upvotes of 'more should be done.'
Cue hand wringing about how we elites can deal with the armies of the naive, the prone to conspiracy theories, viral false information needing correction.
it is unclear from the article what sites were censored in Poland and by whom (and i couldn't figure it out in the sourced paper). However, if in fact the Polish govt has censored any human rights websites, I feel like that should be bigger news there.
AFAIK Poland only blocks access to certain gambling sites, which are publicly listed here:
https://hazard.mf.gov.pl/
I'm Polish and I am not aware of any website blocking. While censorship on government website may occur, and the pro-government media may omit certain facts, I don't think any websites were actually blocked.
Social media should be regulated and forced to federate to combat their monopoly, for one. People spend years and years building up followings on these platforms, and since users themselves are the creators of the content that Facebook and Twitter are selling, they should have more legal protections of their rights. Like the 20th century labor movements, there needs to be a 21st century user/consumer movement. Users should have certain rights protected by law, including the right to transfer to a compatible and competing service (just as users have the right to retain their cell phone number when transferring carriers) and the right to consume content from compatible services in their social media feed.
As for filtering content, users should have the power there, too, just as they do their spam filter in their email account. They should have the ability to set their own parameters and leave it at that. Unless its blatantly illegal content, it should be protected, period, or the platforms should be classified as publishers and be subject to all the same legal liabilities that publishers are.
An internet user's bill of rights would be a good first step here. Define the requirements up front and then let the companies adapt to them. I really, really don't want the government dictating technical specs to the broader community.
Look to the requirement for phone number portability as an example. The providers weeped and gnashed their teeth, and then got together and implemented a working system.
I find I don't think of hackernews as a community anymore, haven't in a long time. To me what I read here is 50-75% of intentional argumentation and spreading of what's essentially FUD by people who are drawn here by the sites popularity, and who are just a likely to be on a payroll or otherwise promoting an agenda.
It's the small percentage of genuine people with reasonable, coherent things to say that keep me coming back. It's a trope, but the quality of discourse has declined markedly in recent years (imo).
The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public. It seems like governments still want to manipulate people, so censorship in their mind is the only way out of this.
Unfortunately it is like having an aching tooth and taking pain killers hoping it will pass instead of going to dentist.
My only hope that in the end this will make politics more honest and people will learn how they are being exploited.
I don't accept that someone should have a power over what I can or cannot read and preventing me from forming my own opinions.
I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education. But I hope I am wrong. Is there any evidence it is possible?
I don't think you can educate an above average person either. Unless you've done in depth study of the techniques, and most educated people haven't either. In addition, some of the techniques work even if you know them.
Finland has specific curriculum in schools teaching kids how to critically evaluate information they find online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fict... They study historical propaganda campaigns, how to lie with statistics, and critical thinking.
I can say that having been through a similar curriculum in high school (implemented on the initiative of a very thoughtful literature teacher) it has been one of my most valuable mental tools I possess throughout my adult life. Being able to understand and identify logical fallacies has helped me critically evaluate the information I consume many times over.
Of course, any program like this has the problem that it needs to be implemented by a trusted source, or it will be attacked as "indoctrination" (whether or not that is the truth). I can see that as a major challenge in the US where 50%+ of the population is convinced that the government is out to get them at any one time.
It’s like a more complicated version of teaching people to recognize phishing attacks, I think a belief that the median human isn’t capable of learning about their weaknesses seriously underestimates humans.
> I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education.
A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.
Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).
Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.
I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.
It has been done studies of education and gullibility. Sadly enough people who has some education, like a masters degree, was more gullible then people who lacked education. It was first at PhD-level that education seemed to help.
The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.
We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.
And saying that something is "the (very) definition of" something is a colloquialism drawing comparison that dates back at least to James Madison and the Federalist Papers.
You can wait to wake up to a totalitarian government biting you on the nose, but some of us remember that Mussolini was a journalist and rose to power in the media and don't want to let it get that far.
Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Newton can be credited as being substantially the inventor of Newtonian Physics. That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics, despite the fact that Newton wrote numerous treatises on alchemy.
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
> Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
So then why not take Mussolini's own words on what fascism is and isn't? His definition required it to be totalitarian: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer
I'm not so sure, I think if GP had expanded on it a little it's an interesting take.
Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).
You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.
First of all this, but even in the very definition of feudalism it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.
Not in the literal sense of land, but in the economical/capitalistic sense. In capitalism theory, the basic idea behind the growth of capitalism is defined as "land grab", i.e. the system ingests what is foreign and makes it its own. So land in that sense can mean anything that binds people to you. Nowadays this means money in order to pay rent, food, bills etc.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.
So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.
Walled gardens (read fiefdoms) run by megacorporations is decentralised, I don't have to accept Alphabet's TOS if I don't want to. They just have so many people who do want to that they can dictate pretty crazy terms.
Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?
It has never in the history of western civilization been easier for people to inject random claims into the public discourse. Neither Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes nor Otis Chandler at the LA Times would have given an inch of space for QAnon or antivax, but the "giant corporations" you allude to today do so happily, and at a scale no newspaper publisher would have imagined 50 years ago.
Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?
If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.
Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.
If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered
I think it would be more sensible to fix the education system than to appoint uneducated people to government positions just to increase the representation of poorer people.
It's more about education and a skeptical but not paranoid and nihilistic mind, than about "rich and powerful". You should be "this tall to ride". In this case, "this tall to broadcast your thoughts to millions of people".
That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.
It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.
A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".
It's worse than that, the algorithms these companies use sometimes purposefully promote these random claims because they lead to more user engagement.
For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.
As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.
Conversely, it has never been easier to inject true claims that are inconvenient for gatekeepers. What tilts the balance of equities in favor of censorship for you?
Because it takes far longer to confirm if a claim is true or not than it does to make a claim.
The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.
"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
Seems like it should be TRIVIAL; (if backed up by legal authority of governments - and that's the REAL trick) - to cause all claims to be properly categorized.
Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?
Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.
I object to the claim that I've tossed out any "core enlightenment principles" by observing that we have drastically fewer gatekeepers now than we did in 1980.
It is my understanding that toleration, free association, and free expression are core enlightenment principles that enable a civilization to be governed by reason. These are threatened by the censorious attitude of boomers and aging gen-xers with home equity to protect.
It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]
You can watch the Eldon Edwards video right now, with a single Google search, to see how untrue it is that the KKK had in 1957 anything resembling the access to the discourse they have today.
If you think the KKK is stronger today than in the 1950s, then you are so ludicrously out of touch that I can't continue this conversation.
They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.
As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.
I had my first Internet Account in the 1980's via PLATO.
When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.
I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.
QAnon is irrelevant aside from the attention they are getting from their supposed political enemies. You seem to need an image of an enemy. Same with flat earthers. They existed 20 years ago and they were completely irrelevant. Antivax had a lot of people joining because they had partly reasonable objections or trust issues towards official sources and some hobby Don Quijotes with a slight inferiority complex needed to prove themselves by demonizing these groups as if they were the devil. As expected, these groups didn't shrink.
The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies.
The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.
I don't know if you've been under a rock for more than a decade, but, no, Bush the Younger is not President of the United States. (Sure, some of the bad acts under his administration prefigured bad acts under this one.)
"The president of the United States has been using [...]" is present perfect continuous tense (expressing an action continuing in the present that began in the past), not past tense.
>> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
I think there may be some legitimate truth to this statement that you are not seeing.
Donald Trump is far from the only bad actor we've had in our history, and things weren't running smooth as silk before he arrived on the scene, but you sure wouldn't know it from the way people talk.
I do agree with that to some degree. In fact I do find some of the pan rattling about how social networks "must combat disinformation" about the potential Covid vaccines troubling.
However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
> However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
So censor what they see to ensure they only receive the information you approve of correct?
I don't think platforms (or governments) should ban content they disagree with, but I think platforms should be structured to emphasize compact social groups over viral content. It's irresponsible to have a UI like Twitter, with a "What’s happening" tab deliberately looking for the most controversial topics it thinks you'll like.
No, but the 30 thousandth time a meme resurfaces proporting to show guns being delivered to terrorist refugees it would be nice if Facebook automatically tagged it with the information that actually it's a scene from some movie or where ever it really came from.
> The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources
I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?
I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?
I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.
Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.
Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the other nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not. Meanwhile, one-to-many communications services, like broadcast TV, by their nature require editorial decisions. If you're only broadcasting one stream someone has to decide what the content is, and thereby becomes responsible for that content.
Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.
Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.
> Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the others nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not.
Unfortunately this same logic isn’t used when discussing the PLCAA or gun manufacturers in general.
Cells phones are not comparable to an online service.
Property rights are a thing and those who own the servers can determine what they will store and present to other users.
Conservative groups that don't spread misinformation and hatred are thriving on FB and Twitter. Change the law to make them store and publish anything not already illegal will turn them into cesspools like the various *chan sites inside of a month and advertisers will leave as will people with a conscience.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)
“Literally fascism” is a little overused. I’m not saying governments and corporations teaming up is a good thing, but let’s not use fascism here, that will only make it harder to recognise actual fascism.
If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.
Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.
Good point about the Volk. To be noted, contemporary Anglo culture has constructed the photo negative of Volk. Everybody of the Volk is intrinsically broken, worthy of contempt and deameaning. Everybody not of the Volk is intrinsically virtuous, worthy of praise and elevation.
History will tell what the consequences of corporatism + negative Volk will be.
If thats your litteral definition of fascism I suggest you get yourself a dictionary. Please dont make blanket statements to describe complex phenomenons.
You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor". They've used all sorts of manufactured consensus techniques to get us into unjust wars or to give up our liberties (i.e. mass surveillance, lockdowns, etc) for over-blown threats. We aren't going to get education from the government. Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.
Not disagreeing with most of what you're saying here, just wondering if you mean manufactured consent, like the Herman and Chomsky book, not consensus.
> Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.
I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censorship will be helpful.
It takes time, but it does cure it. The biggest problem with censorship is it locks a state into conservatism. What is conservative now was liberal 20-50 years ago. When you censor new ideas, you're stuck 20-50 years ago.
. . . for example: "open debate" will accomplish nothing, if we are continually spending time debating whether or not racism and genocide are immoral. We fought wars over this.
I am very much for "free speech" - but at some point, you have to shut certain topics out of reasonable debate, because at the end of the day, if we have to keep debating things like this, we've learned nothing.
You're not really for free speech if you're arguing that any topic is off limits. Sometimes even playing the devil's advocate for a "bad" topic can be illuminating and can help strengthen and deepen your own understanding of why racism or genocide are immoral.
Some people debate the ROI of pandemic controls. Also, not all lockdowns are pandemic lockdowns. There have also been curfews unrelated to the pandemic and in some cases predating it.
Yeah, another 9/11 was basically stopped by adding locked compartments and training the pilots in self-defense techniques, some of which are even armed.
(1) Identification of potential dissidents. Those who violate lockdowns or mask orders are most likely to resist state control.
(2) Normalizing control over common activities. It takes four weeks to normalize a new habit. "Two weeks to stop the spread" has been going on since March (that's thirty-two weeks and counting). Americans are now habituated to state-controlled social behaviors.
(3) Destruction of in-person social channels outside the sphere of state electronic surveillance.
(4) Normalizing fear of non-conformists ("you're killing grandpa").
(5) Destruction of non-sanctioned economies. Global companies have effectively been part of the state for decades, and can easily weather the storm. Smaller businesses can not, which dries up cashflow outside of state-approved channels.
I keep asking people to explain why they downvote posts like yours and nobody wants to. I guess they know the reasons aren't good, they just can't help giving in to the desire for control.
Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.
I don't think that really holds up. I'm in a part of Australia that had a lockdown and we've rolled back most of the restrictions because we're successfully basically eliminated the virus in our state (in the community that is - we have a few cases in quarantine of people arriving internationally every couple of days).
The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic. I feel absolutely no sense that people are more willing to submit to Government control now or anything like that, and it's the same even talking to people down in Victoria that had a big second wave and way longer lockdown than we did. Their willingness to comply was to stop the spread of the virus so they could get out of lockdown, and it worked, and now the restrictions are being rolled back.
It's frustrating to hear people in the media here crowing on about 'authoritarianism' and 'government control' over this, especially because the State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus. But at the same time, these conservative commentators who are aligned with our right-wing Federal Government happily ignore actual authoritarian, draconian laws that the Feds are passing to give police and intelligence services unprecedented powers for warrantless mass surveillance etc. over the last decade...
I'd even go as far as saying that the pandemic would actually be a really bad time for a Government to try and 'normalise' increased government control, because there's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over (if we get a vaccine for instance). The desire to throw off all the restrictions once the virus is gone is just too strong.
First: thank you for replying, and not just downvoting.
> The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic.
It is highly debatable that lockdowns ever were, or currently are, either necessary or effective.
> State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus.
The US is in the thirty-second week of "two weeks to stop the spread".
Credibility went right out the window when the powers-that-be decreed weddings and funerals as too risky, but protests and riots as totally fine.
Not to mention the long list of politicians whose personal lives seem to be an exception from the rules they have imposed on others.
> There's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over.
I remember airports before 9/11. Hell, I remember the US before 9/11.
The ironically-named Patriot Act represented a massive seizure of power and a wholesale trampling of American civil rights. None of the airport security measures introduced were necessary or effective, and yet they continue to this day.
Since 9/11, the United States has been at war in the Middle East for twenty years, squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to achieve... nothing.
This was neither legitimate nor logical. But it did make a bunch of politicians and their friends very powerful and very wealthy.
I also remember, at the time, the moral frenzy that enveloped the nation after the fall of the twin towers.
The government isn’t a magic entity or intelligent AI that wants or doesn’t want things. The government is people. And a certain breed of people are magnetically attracted to power, which is part of human nature that goes back to the beginning of humanity. The benefit leaders get out of lockdowns is power, which regardless of its legitimacy or necessity is one of the most intoxicating and addictive things on Earth.
I don't think they were trying to make the case that the government wasn't a bad actor. I read it more to mean that they liked it better when they were the only bad actor.
You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor".
I think a close reading of the OP would show they aren't portraying the state with great friendliness. Some run the show for the benefit of powerful forces and to various extents try to think about long term goals. "Bad Actors" is a decent shorthand for group trying also serving the wealthy and themselves but with a destructively short term agenda.
The key point the GP makes and I think you're missing is that stop manipulation isn't a matter of removing "tyrants" but creating an active, educated population.
>The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques
I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students.
And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.
Ah, but that was intentional! We didn't want people to really understand statistics, because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. ;-)
You hit the nail on the head there. And it's not just K-12 math, either. I don't know about Australia, but I can see what it's like here in the US.
I moved here 7 years ago, and my son has gone through a public elementary school and is currently in the last year of a public middle school. If it was just one year or just one teacher or even just one school (or one district), I could write it off to bad luck. Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the whole system is abysmal.
Agreed on k-12 maths, but the analysis of persuasive techniques was actually taught quite well and comprehensively, at least when I went through school (finished in 2011).
As someone currently tutoring an 8th grader in math: The curriculum is not really much different than what I went through in the 80's and 90's. They're still learning Algebra going into High School, and lots of work with fractions, percentages, interest rates, area, volume and so forth leading up to it. The kids still loathe word problems.
The Murdoch's have been influencing Australia Earlier then the 60's. It goes back to WWI, Keith Murdoch - Rupert's father made his name reporting on World War I, especially The Gallipolli campaign. He was hugely influential in shaping how the campaign was viewed and received in Australia.
In Australia, Gallipolli and the ANZAC mythos became part of our national identity. It is hard to explain to non-Australians the impact of the "Anzac legacy" on our culture it was like Australia's Gettysburg or Waterloo etc. Anzac Day is still celebrated and observed more than 100 years later it is a major patriotic celebration.
Murdoch also tried to use his influence to block the advancement of Sir John Monash (arguably the greatest allied general of WWI and the last person to ever be knighted on the battlefield).
I experienced similar topics in curriculum here in the US in English and history classes in middle/high school as well as the English class I took in college (part of the liberal arts requirement for basically every degree at my school).
I remember those classes in VCE. Unfortunately a lot of people interpreted it as a class on "how to be persuasive" (as a writer) rather than "how to avoid being persuaded by propagandists" (as a reader).
We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason in a way that avoided those fallacies.
Its impossible to not be fallacious in any meaningful discourse that goes on long enough, and that's okay.
Every single invocation of an expert is an argument from authority.
Every single invocation of logic like "it is more like nature therefor it is more good" is a naturalistic fallacy.
Do we even need to get to other ones like "appeal to emotion"?
Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality (given that there are an infinite number of possible logics based on which axioms you start with), and that being worried about and trying to avoid "logical fallacies" in our reasoning does not help us see reality more closely to how it is.
There's obviously levels to it, its not "This is a fallacy/incorrect argument" and "This is a good argument".
Invocation of expert is not the end of all discussion, as there are non-truthful experts and authorities (such as Government) which are more obviously less trustworthy. That doesn't mean that you should ignore all authority (I've never seen that argued).
Naturalistic fallacy really depends on how much you value the natural state of things, but it is usually used to point out that just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it is good or sensible to do/continue.
Appeal to emotion. Appeals to emotion are often used to incite people without them thinking through. "They killed our people!" sounds a lot more convincing/inciting than, "They had an altercation which unfortunately escalated, leading to the deaths of several people that we knew". Using emotion to obscure or not properly think about how it came to be to that point and what should be done from then on.
I think you're conflating logic (ex: mathematical logic, or far less rigorous careful reasoning) with an overly strict definition of a logical fallacy.
All I'm trying to say is that high school students should be taught "how to reach a logical conclusion" rather than "how to be persuasive in an amoral way".
> Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but it sounds a dangerous path to go down. People have already discarded facts - I think discarding logic as well would make things even worse.
I liked the stance in Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach by Douglas Walton, wherein "logical fallacies" are thought of as more the consequence of an argument which inappropriately shifts from one argumentative context to another.
For example, if during a formal debate you were to threaten to harm your opponent if they didn't agree with you (an "Appeal to Force" fallacy), this wouldn't be an appropriate argument for this context. But in, say, a contract negotiation between a union and a business, the union could threaten to strike if the business doesn't agree to terms, and it can be part of a valid argument. Thus appeals to force (and, as Walton argued, all "informal fallacies") aren't inherently fallacious in all contexts. Rather, the threat of harm was an inappropriate change in context from a formal debate to a negotiation, and it's the change in context which creates these fallacies.
Can I ask for some kind of documentation or reference for the causal relationship you are asserting here? Specifically a documented example of a democratic government that has deliberately restricted education on manipulation techniques because it might make their own use of it less effective.
Did you or the responders read the article? This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation. It's not.
The part about the United States says this:
> While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.
And you say:
> Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.
The first major heading in the article is this:
> Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites
Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?
Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.
HN really needs a way to force people to have at least clicked on the article before posting. Maybe something where the article has to be clicked on, and then a X minute timer is started so that people will be strongly incentivized to read the article before commenting.
Of course you will, but the point is that many people like you will find such a process more of a hassle than it's worth. My solution would reduce the amount of this happening significantly, even if it won't stop every do-badder...
A lot of people aren't interested in discussing linked material and therefore reading it, they just want to have a discussion on the topic of the title.
And in the process turning this site in to a predictable talking-point forum that just gets triggered by random title keywords.
A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.
But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.
Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.
So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.
First and foremost thanks for reddit, Ive had an account for 14years, and pretty much hit the site every single day for 14 years
With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.
I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.
Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.
I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.
But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.
I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.
Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.
If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.
HN self-policed fine back when caustic takedowns of incorrect comments were normal/expected/rewarded. But in the dang era of "comments must be nice" you get more upvotes by regurgitating HN-friendly views quickly based on the headline than by reading the article, so of course people respond to that incentive.
> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”
What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.
I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.
>This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation.
I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.
The source article is about countries forcing ISP-level bans on accessing certain sites, while the parent comment is about misinformation. Nobody's blocking gambling content, pornography, or Match.com because they're worried about misinformation.
Sorry for being curt in the last reply. To expand on this, I think a key line might be
>bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage.
which I interpret broadly as enticing people to do things not sanctioned by the status quo morality. Some governments aren't happy about sexual liberty, others about certain religious or political belief. The internet with the liberation of information also liberated a certain relativism that is corrosive to the epistemic fundament of established power.
The behavior of tech companies in the US was certainly a template for governments around the world to block their own content as corporate censorship wasn't criticized and instead hailed because it censored the right people. Heck, they have validated Chinas censoring attempts or that of any dictatorship really.
Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.
Agree. Another big problem I've noticed is that there are so many partisan news sources. If you are liberal, you go to CNN which has a liberal spin to it. If you are conservative, fox news. The problem is each one is adding their own biases to it.
I saw this clear as day when I was watching live streams during the Portland federal courthouse protest. I would watch these for several hours per day as a form of entertainment. When I read the news articles written the following day, I was completely shocked at how much bias was present in the mainstream news media.
During these protests it essentially went like this: during the day, the protest was 100% peaceful, hardly any police. Literally a perfect 100% peaceful protest. As night came, the crowd would shift. The peaceful people would leave and then a new group would start showing up, dressed in all black and start doing full blown violence against police. Starting fires, destroying private property and many similar illegal and dangerous stuff.
The following day I read articles on CNN that said there was very little violence and it was almost entirely peaceful. This was false because there was tons of violence at the night. When you read articles in fox news they say the protest was mostly violent. This was also false because the day time protest was 100% peaceful.
This type of news reporting is pushing division politics and social media further fans the flames because people can confirm their narrative and also get false reporting from idiots on twitter/facebook which spreads misinformation.
I could also tell this is heavily influencing people's view on the world because I would debate people on reddit. For liberal people, they would link me CNN and washington post articles to support their arguments. If I argued with conservatives, they would link me fox news and breitbart articles. This is what they're linking to me as their "proof" to support their argument. If I responded by saying that fox news/cnn is biased reporting, they would jump to personal attacks at me, almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.
This is hardly new. "60 Minutes" was infamous in the 1960s for the egregious slanting of their segments. It was so bad that the smarter people being interviewed by them would demand that the interview be simultaneously filmed by their own people.
As for riots, my dad remarked to me that the TV media would represent the crowds as large or small simply by where they pointed the camera and the zoom level used. And they would, depending on their agenda.
Yeah very true I guess. I guess the big eye opener now is that cell phones are cheap and high speed mobile data is cheap so that allows anyone to become a "citizen reporter" so to speak. If something serious is happening, it is very likely someone will be live streaming it to facebook, youtube or similar platform so that is a complete game changer at breaking away from main stream media.
I think an even bigger eye opener for me is that we seem to have agreement on both sides that there is bias and it’s creating division, but we don’t see any catalyst for change it. If a true ly neutral news org came out (or exists already) would people give up their biased soap operas for the good of the country?
There is way too much money to be made in biased "news" sources. And they're all biased. I think the only one we MIGHT be able to rely on is AP since it's a non-profit. But I don't know if that is any guarantee.
It's a real shit situation. The fact that we cannot agree on facts in politics is truly frightening and I cannot see an easy way out of it.
Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.
Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.
I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue. I've seen this argument come up all the time as justfication for the destruction of ideas in good faith and rarely ever for actual harassment or intimidation. It's ironcially almost always linked in bad faith, to misrepresent the weight of whatever being replied to.
> I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue.
Because we've learned in the past decade or so that the "marketplace of ideas" fallacy is false. Ideas aren't traded like market goods; rather, they spread like disease. And the way to prevent dangerous ideas like Nazism from threatening society is the same as the way we prevent diseases like COVID from threatening society: containment. Isolate the afflicted, and implement measures to limit the exposure of everyone else.
Crude ideas are like snakes and the more you struggle against them, the more allure they have for others. Or just use some Nietzsche quote, I don't care.
People disputing the marketplace of ideas want to be authoritative voices in my experience. If we had been a little more relaxed in the face of objection, we might have fared better.
Anyway, if you are correct, we would need an authority on truth and I see a lot of problems already. Frankly, literature is full of examples why this is a bad idea, but don't let me stop you.
> The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.
That is by FAR the best summary of the issue I have read.
Analogy:
It's as if we've been living behind castle walls and now those walls are gone. We can now be directly attacked by enemy armies, whereas before we could only be practically reached by our own government's police and military. Having been sheltered for so long, we don't know how to hold our own without those walls.
Remember how the usefulness of the internet and social media was championed by media during the Arab Spring movement? Now it's suddenly a threat to our democracy.
I mean, in that article, he makes a pretty coherent point:
> Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
I don't think that's out of place in a conversation about today's internet/media landscape. He's not saying "the internet is bad," or even "social media is bad"; he's saying that the internet clearly has the potential to amplify disinformation to a point that becomes harmful, something I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with.
Disinformation assumes the average person is stupid though. Whose to say the inherent undisputable (because you can't prove or deny) conspiracy theory someone believes is true? Why is the onus on media companies to police how we want to live our lives and believe in whatever nonsense we want to? I play videogames and watch tv shows, because it inspires me to think a particular way outside of the norm, should it be banned? This is literally the same argument about banning and burning books.
Yes but those types of people are not looking for truth, they're looking for information that supports their bias. So if you tell them to shut up and take it, now they internally fabricate a conspiracy theory. What's worse is you have no idea what they're thinking or planning now.
The only people who care about "truth" in capitalism are shareholders and affluent individuals. It binds them to the culture and when a bunch of lowlifes and poorer people tell them "fuck off" essentially, they get pissy and upset that the people don't like the status quo.
> The only people who care about "truth" in capitalism are shareholders and affluent individuals.
These are the people that care about stability, in order to enjoy their wealth. A country that cannot agree with one another on objective reality isn't one that can be governed, and is destined to fall.
Which might be why so many of the "disinformation" fighters come from the establishment, and so many proprietors of distortions and lies are those with grudges (Greenwald, Bannon, etc.) or nothing to lose (QAnon/MAGA types).
It comes down to a difference between people that benefit from a stable status quo, and those (for whatever reason) that want to tear it down.
What an incredibly paternalistic and disappointing quote from Obama. “If we don’t have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from false”.
So clearly we need the gov’t to step in help the rabble who are clearly unable to figure out the “truth” on their own.
Does he realize this is the exact argument authoritarian gov’ts give for censorship? We need to censor to avoid “social disharmony” or stop those “fomenting discord”.
Mainstream press also has the ability to publish and amplify disinformation, and they do[0]. The internet is a hugely important tool that can be used to shed light on actual power structures and their atrocities. This good of exposing evil and corruption far outweighs the potentially bad outcome of a minority of individuals believing incorrect information.
If we don't have the capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false, then nothing works. Putting the government (or any other third party) in charge of censorship for the sake of filtering out what's false just moves the decision elsewhere - but it's still made by some people somewhere. Whether those people are determined directly or indirectly through some democratic process, or self-appointed, the same problem applies recursively.
I read that article earlier today, and gotta say I was pretty disappointed that Vox chose the title "Obama: The internet is “the single biggest threat to our democracy”" based on this exchange:
> Obama: Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring...I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.
> Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
> Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.
The second paragraph in the article is more in line with what he actually said:
> Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
There's a big difference between saying that the internet is the single biggest threat to society, and saying that it (and more specifically, social media) has helped some people communicate disinformation and "fake news" - which is what Obama see as the threat to society in this context.
My cynical take is that had Cambridge Analytica targeted Putin/Lukashenko/Morales/Maduro instead of Brexit/Trump we would celebrated Cambridge Analytica as a hero of democracy and open society.
I have to wondered how we "fix" our current internet situation.
On the one hand, censorship appears to be appealing to stop the tide of misinformation. Anti-vaxx garbage is a prime example of something that should be censored into oblivion. It is actively harmful to the public.
But, on the other hand, who pulls the levers of censorship is equally terrifying. I don't want a world where a dissenting opinion is censored because it doesn't fall in line with whoevers ideology. For example, Chinese censorship of the Tiananmen square incident.
How on earth can we fix this? Social media has created a world of bubbles. Some of which are FILLED TO THE BRIM with misinformation. Penetrating those bubbles is nearly impossible. They've always sort of existed, yet somehow it feels like they are more extreme now-a-days.
Just musing. I really don't have a solution to this but am certainly interest to hear any proposals.
Perhaps the solution is really as simple as better public education?
That sounds like saying we cant have laws which forbid things I don't like, and no laws against things I do like.
We have final arbitrators of truth, they are laws, judges and juries. It isn't a perfect system, and it might not scale, but I see no need to abandon the idea some things are fundamentally incorrect, and get rid of those things.
The US has fallen a great way from the spirit of the first amendment when laws, judges and juries are not just a necessary component of a well ordered society, but are the "final arbiters of truth" on political questions.
Then there's all the law enforcement agencies, the FBI, CIA, TSA, DoD, NSA, and more.
Then there's the side effect of laws, how many problems are we dealing with presently from supposedly good gov't laws from years or decades ago? A whole lot.
Social engineering via laws and judges is a simple minded solution and should never be considered the best or final solution.
The problem is that the scales are completely unbalanced when it comes to information vs misinformation.
There is political and financial incentives at play to spread misinformation. It isn't as simple as "the best ideas win" as most social media platforms make it REALLY easy to manipulate the narrative.
For example, if some politician will negatively impact my business, I can hire a BUNCH of people to go out and write nasty comments about that politician. I can create fake media pages to support whatever narrative I want against that candidate. I can do all of this for relatively little money. We see this phenomenon come up time and time again when it comes to review websites. Most people "in the know" don't trust amazon reviews because they know companies astroturf them like crazy.
Climate change is a place where this also happens a LOT. Man made climate change is a nearly undisputed fact in the scientific world, yet roughly half of Americans either don't believe in it or are unsure about it. Why? Because there's big incentives behind the fossil fuel industry to spread FUD and misinformation about climate change. On the flip side, there's just not the money or resources available to climate scientists to correct that narrative.
I can buy that "some censorship doesn't work" however, it appears that a free for all is equally broken.
Population size and distrust of authority have a fairly linear relationship. The bigger we get, the further from power and decision-making we feel we are. This makes a great case for no censorship.
Of course, the gremlins created by the above scenario makes a great case for some censorship.
Until authority can be coaxed into becoming more transparent and, thereby, creating trust, we will keep having this conversation.
personally, I don't think there is a fix to the fact that people will be interconnected and seek stuff that fits their worldview one way or another - draconian eavesdropping and censorship will only make those circles tighter and more extreme
I think we have to embrace the fact that there are layers of informational warfare and hope for some degree of stability once hyper-connectivity has seen off a couple generations
people have to be more willing to debate ideas they find crazy and be patient because the opposite strategy is a losing one
of course governments and big tech will suppress information and even prosecute people for saying the "wrong" things, but this has a limited scope and the backlash is more of that stuff happening in closer circles/bubbles
As great as free press and democracies are, they also come with huge weaknesses. Those make it easy for foreign propaganda to influence the public and hence run the countries from outside.
Thanks to The Great Firewall and the CCP rule, China is mostly immune to foreign propaganda. At the same time, China is using a lot of effort to affect countries with democracy and free speech, like India and the U.S.
China is obviously not alone in using propaganda to influence the politics of other countries. All big countries and corporations use it in their countries of interest all the time... in fact, they have been doing it for much longer. Everything from bribes to politicians to "human rights organizations", "foreign aid organizations" to social causes in universities... everything is used to undermine national interests and put pawns for outside powers in governments.
Citizens of many democratic nations have been feeling this for a very long time... which explains nationalist sentiments rising in many countries... but that's another story.
China is in a unique position in that it limits or prohibits foreign press, foreign media, foreign internet services, foreign aid organizations, human rights organizations... i.e. anything and everything that it can to stop foreign influence... but it uses a lot of those against its rivals.
The only defense against it is following China's footsteps. India has recently banned several Chinese apps and websites. It has also kicked out Amnesty International. Other countries will have to do the same if they want to protect their national interests.
Seeing free speech as an impediment to nationalist competition is rich. Nationalist competition appears to corrode every civil liberty and thing that makes life worth living that we have. What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match? I guess certain business people would not make as much money.
> What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?
competition is at the heart of our economies at a deep level, both within and without... i suspect this wont change until internally our economies are more cooperative than competitive (im not holding my breath)
What do you mean by nationalist competition? Nations competing against each other?
>What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?
Cooperation for what? Different people value different things. Different cultures even more so. You cannot have cooperation unless everyone is on the same side of every issue in the same degree.
If we had that level of agreement, we would not survive, not for long anyway. Let me explain:
Almost all of politics (or religious sects for that matter) is about how we use the resources we have. If there are multiple ways of using the resources, there have to be people who disagree and want different ways of using the resource. That slows us down, which helps us understand the cost/benefits of different ways of doing things. That also keeps options open... so if we find problems with the prevalent way, we won't have to start over. Other groups will already have understood the alternative ways and made some progress that others can join... once they sacrifice the leader who led them the "wrong way", of course.
Nations are just another level of doing this thing on a global scale. Nations should do things differently, so that the world as a whole is more robust.
>I guess certain business people would not make as much money.
Ironically, it's certain business interests which have tried to make the world homogenous. That helps them scale their business in the most efficient way. They value efficiency more than robustness. George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, is an example of a person who religiously believes in removing all inefficiencies due to nation states... and has been using his billions of dollars for that cause. I think that is dangerous. It's not different from finding "superior people", inbreeding them and killing everyone else for being inferior. That wouldn't make them superior. That would make them fragile. It's the same for nations.
> Those make it easy for foreign propaganda to influence the public and hence run the countries from outside.
Foreign propaganda is a problem. But it's tiny compared to propaganda by domestic actors. There's huge amount of disinfo, gas lighting, demoralizing perpetuated by mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia.
If you are concerned about propaganda, you have to mention the elephant in the room. Or else, you yourself are propagating and amplifying the dangers of foreign propaganda and minimizing the huge blame mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia should get.
The US runs propaganda on its citizens and the citizens of other countries as well. China's propaganda arm prays every night to be as competent as the US' one day since most people dont even recognize it as propaganda while even Chinese citizens can tell their propaganda from a mile away.
Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.
"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States. It very obviously got us into WW-1 (the British -a largely untold but very obvious info ops campaign for something that served no US national interest), it got us into the middle east (nothing the US does there happens but for foreign interference from Saudis, Emirates and Israelis, who overtly bribe our think tanks and politicians), and it fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people (thanks, China).
None of the above happened because of dipshits saying things on twitter or facebook or sharing Russia Today articles. None of the above will go away if the CIA, the political center and the tech oligarchs censor the internet to protect us from meaningless internet bugaboos.
It's a naked power grab, and anyone who supports it because of "muh democracy" is a collaborator with tyranny.
> to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people
Fake News. The U.S. used to have a huge stockpile of surgical and N95 masks as part of their pandemic preparedness plans. The stockpile was gradually depleted and not replenished adequately. It was pure complacency on the part of government; please let's not blame trade openness for this.
"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States
Agree. Not as effective as today. But yes.
Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.
Agree. I think Democracy has failed because the tools of propaganda have become very effective.
Democracy died in the U.S. a long time ago... the Deep State was formed and it had a monopoly on propaganda, not only for keeping the citizens in line but also using it to control many other countries. The major competitor was Soviet Union, which wasn't very successful for long. Fast forward to today, there are many countries which are powerful enough and have competitive tools for propaganda.
While many countries are well equipped for offence, only China has very good defense against it. If other countries don't take actions to strengthen their defense, it's going to be very difficult for them.
You're mostly right in everything, except that 'the Deep State' is not that deep and is not that much part of the state - most US propaganda is actually pretty transparently done by the corporate sector. We call it PR and marketing now, but it is exactly propaganda, used to great effectiveness everywhere in the world. Teb other major leg of US propaganda is the entertainment industry, which is also extremely effective at selling grand narratives, and has a very favorable lens from which it always presents the US and its allies, whether it be in gaming, mass market films, or even critical darlings (see the fawning reception the extremely pro-American, pro-militaristic 'The Hurt Locker' got everywhere in the critical press).
most US propaganda is actually pretty transparently done by the corporate sector
Agree, but I'm not talking about most. I understand there is "cholesterol bad" or "anti-vaxx, stupid, amirite?" from pharmaceuticals or "almonds make penis hard" from nutrition "science" funded by the food industry. That is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the Deep State, which is comprised of ex-military, the CIA and weapons industry people. They're pretty deep into everything.
This doesn't take away too much from your general point, which I agree with, but I think this is important to mention in itself:
> ["foreign interference"] fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities [...] (thanks, China).
'free trade' is definitely not a product of outside interference, it is a product of American company owners' interests - the easier it is to own manufacturing plants in other countries without giving up your IP (the key items of most 'free trade' agreements), the easier it becomes for corporations to manufacture everything where labor is cheapest.
> Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.
David Atkins, Regional Director, CA Dems / Elected DNC Member:
"No seriously...how do you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?
We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South." [0]
I,ve watched this happen on reddit, with new moderators removing anything against the mainstream views on Corona. Then they complained about me to reddit and had me removed as mod of community I had started.
Have you recently used Google to search for something slightly out of accepted-by-mainstream compared to search engines like Yandex? I'm not saying Russian propaganda is not real, but it's a helpful guide to compare and contrast the results specially relevant results that is being omitted by Google[0]. Of course this is mainly because we have hate speech societal norms, hate speech laws and such, but how do we know the countries on this map with low "Freedom Score" don't have their own reasons for removing content? Are we to judge their actions but our standards? If so why don't we just declare the world must obey our rule of law or else! Since there cannot in principle be any justifiable deviation from it. Unless we want to only give the _perception_ of tolerance for others' points of view, but not a real one.
[0] I'm not going to provide an example, shouldn't be too hard to come up with a slightly controversial example yourself.
> Ensafi’s team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world’s freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights.
Freedom House is a non-profit that is almost entirely funded by the US government. The only ones who would find it "unexpected" that US allies rank high on the "freedom index" but practically have problems with freedom of speech would probably buy a bridge in Brooklyn.
This is more of a direct response to Internet as a political weapon, which matured in the weaponized social media in Arab Spring [1] as the regime-changing tool used by Hilary Clinton, who eventually becomes the victim in the 2016 presidential election.
Thanks to its long-standing "controlled by CCP in order to do business" practices, China enjoys a very strong position to be less vulnerable to potential external Internet propaganda.
CCP learned this, and start to use various online forum to spread its own world view and alternative reporting on various Chinese domestic and international affairs. So far it looks like it actually helps to supply diverse views on issues like eliminating poverty, development strategy for poor country, etc. I still not see much hard evidences of proactive propaganda campaign from CCP towards foreign nations.
Have you recently used Google to search for something slightly out of accepted-by-mainstream compared to search engines like Yandex? I'm not saying Russian propaganda is not real, but it's a helpful guide to compare and contrast the results specially relevant results that is being omitted by Google[0]. Of course this is mainly because we have hate speech societal norms, hate speech laws and such, but how do we know the countries on this map with low "Freedom Score" don't have their own reasons for removing content? Are we to judge their actions but our standards? If so why don't we just declare the world must obey our rule of law or else! Since there cannot in principle be any justifiable deviation from it. Unless we want to only give the _perception_ of tolerance for others' points of view, but not a real one.
[0] I'm not going to provide an example, shouldn't be too hard to come up with a slightly controversial example yourself.
I've noticed the discrepancies too. Even Bing and DuckDuckGo (vs Google) will return drastically different results, particularly that aren't in line with 'mainstream' thinking.
I know Google did not start out like this - 'don't be evil' - but this is how they ended up... Curating truth. It's really sad.
I don't believe in unlimited free speech, but the bar should be set as low as what is permitted by the 1A, at least in the United States which grants maximum freedom under the law.
I tried "us election fraud" on both sites in private mode. The results are certainly very different but I don't see any indication of google omitting anything. You're already using a throwaway so you might as well provide some specifics.
You know throwaway accounts can get banned and their comments "dead" too, right?
Try the founder of Vice, let's say you want to listen to his Podcast by just searching for his name, good luck doing that on Google, on Yandex it's the 5th result down.
I looked up "Suroosh Alvi". The results are a little different but IMO pretty similar content-wise, nothing jarring. I do see the 5th result you mentioned on yandex missing on google's front page, but all of the google results seem pretty relevant, and the link you mentioned seems to be hosted on vice.com, so I'm not sure if I buy the idea that they're trying to hide that link. Has this guy recently done something controversial? Searching his name on both engines he just seems like a regular guy? Why do you think google would be censoring him?
I tried Tim Pool and Gavin Mcinnes both have pretty similar results on both search engines. Besides, google is totally fine with Tim Pool, that guy has one of the biggest political channels on YouTube.
Tbf, I know very little about Tim Pool. I did see the viral tweet where he claimed the reason he was voting for Trump was because of the Kenosha shooter, which reads very "right accelerationist" to me.
I've found the opposite. Google promotes stalking sites[0] to the very top of results for their targets in a way that no other search engine does. Not Bing, no Yandex, not any of the little indie engines. You have to go dozens of pages into results to find them, but they're always on the very first page with Google despite being tiny sites compared to the results they displace.
[0] also not going to name them and give them promotion
The most offensive thing is not even the censorship, but how awful and almost completely useless search engines have become. Years ago I used to be able to find almost anything, no matter how obscure it was, if I tried hard enough. Today I most often just give up, because it sometimes seems like you can't find the answers to even really basic questions. I don't know what they did, but every search engine is now a complete garbage. They're now basically just shortcuts to the actual search features on websites that everyone already knows, when you're too lazy to type in the URL or click on a bookmark to the actual website.
644 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances.
Also, ISP censorship on Norway. Corporate overreach, or unofficial cooperation between them and government? They really need some Net Neutrality.
No, but they would have covered the protests against it.
Is a company having policies about what users can store on the company owned servers actually censorship?
I find it weird that you used “still dangerous” to describe government/ISP censorship. To me that is the most dangerous form a censorship.
A good thing, but for all the wrong reasons (shutting down criticism of govt by anon accounts).
https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/430811/solo...
See https://ooni.org/ and https://ooni.org/install/.
Superficially give moderation to users, then continually ban users when other users complain about them.
In this way with just a few dozen accounts anyone can control the narrative in their niche while Reddit claims they have no control.
Recently an independent chinese reporter has been banned from reddit using this technique.(0)
(0) https://www.google.com/search?q=the+china+theu+dont+want+yoi...
1. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
2. Corporations aren't the government, so the first amendment doesn't apply.
3. Haven't your heard of "fire in a movie theater"?
4. Hate speech IS violence.
5. Reading disinformation from un-check-marked, non-fact-checked sources is anti scientific. Since all scientists have check marks, we should only listen to check marks.
6. Do you really want to be disturbed by Plumpdfth tweets from his prison cell?
Before you respond in anger, first consider that:
1. You are a bigot
2. It isn't my job to educate you
3. Venmo me for my labor
speech is not violence, no matter how many times this lie is repeated.
/s
I'd wager that there's a not insignificant group of Americans that actually think hate speech is illegal (hint: it isn't).
>> Censored Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.
Downvoting off-topic.
Ironic given the context
> redemption
I'm actually in the confession booth right now, so consider my sins redeemed!
In seriousness, what do you find so horrible about this post? I thought it was fun.
In the western world we would probably allow ISPs to block sites that promote traditions that we do not see as normal. For example; in some east asian countries they eat dogs during festival. Websites selling dog meat shipping to western countries would be blocked in my country.
Why can't India censor websites than promote values they dont agree with? Or Russia?
Every country and people are unique and they have different values. We shouldnt try to assimilate those.
You could argue that freedom of speech is a sacrosant right, like the right to live, that no law(not even the constitution) can overrule. You will lost that battle, with reason, because things like child pornography or slander must not be protected.
So the second approach is to say, ok, some things are better censored, let the laws to clearly define that. If something must be appended or removed, do it through the appropriate channel, sponsor a bill, vote it, make it law, create the precedent.Rinse and repeat. A tedious game, but a needed one.
What you cannot do is to let the techno-barons to decide themselves what should or shouldnt be said, when they are managing platforms that are quasi-monopolistic.
If there is one thing about laws is that they're messy and complex, a reflection of the world we live in. Our culture and values constantly evolve, and the laws are normally following those so something legal or illegal at this moment might not be in the future.
They accomplish this simply by attacking the organizations on another front. Never underestimate the coercive nature of politicians whose own countries forbid censorship they can get another to do for them.
The simple fact is, our western values are not the world's values.
So, we should rely on state censorship in preference to the free marketplace of ideas competing for private support to relay them?
So yes, I would prefer the existing system, where state censorship is extremely limited, to a situation where instead censorship is much more broad and effects more people.
If the speech is legal, then it should be allowed on major communication platforms.
There is even existing laws for this, that we could expand to cover new forms of media.
Those existing laws are called common carrier laws, and they currently apply to the phone network, and they could be changed to include many of the major new platforms.
Common carrier laws are pretty uncontroversial. I would hope that you do not think as they apply to the phone system, that they are some huge example of unfairness.
This whole movement of people begging the government to prevent companies from curating their content, under the guise of fucking free speech of all things, is so deep into doublespeak territory that it just leaves me in awe.
Common carrier laws are pretty uncontroversial. Those existing laws could be updated to include communication networks that are more relevant in the modern day.
If the answer is "you can't do anything on the internet that you couldn't do before" then that changes the headline.
Cultural relativism is brain poison. It is very important to define and fight for universal human rights, such as the right to date and marry someone regardless of gender.
Autoritarianism often goes hand in hand with nationalism, but not always. In recent history, it is the non-nationalists who seem to be most pro-censorship, does it not?
Unfortunately, due to the extremely dynamic and high velocity nature of current times, this article wasn't able to get into the new flavor of micro-censorship - hopefully they address that in the future.
You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.
Enforcement of contracts is essential to a healthy society, but is it good to enforce a contract where one party either lied or coerced the other to sign? No, or at least not necessarily.
The nature of the contract between social media platforms and their users (both explicit and implicit) has changed dramatically since the days that Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party". Users have sacrificed a increasing amount of privacy for less and less obvious benefit. In the meantime, many people have come to depend upon these services for connecting with others, for their livelihoods, and for news independent of corporate media.
Have the social media companies deceived their users? Or have they forced unconscionable terms upon their users? Have they violated consumer protection laws?
I am not a lawyer. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do know that there are some lawyers and judges who do think that some of these social media companies have overstepped. We don't necessarily need a civil rights case, or a constitutional amendment, or even to repeal Section 230. All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.
This kind of action would benefit both left and right, and I think is more constructive than opportunistically deciding that "businesses can do whatever they want" when you think it only hurts people on the right.
Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.
Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.
Ergo, what you really want is government to enforce your version of free speech through "existing" contract law.
While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:
* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.
* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.
* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS
Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.
Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not. Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?
Really just seems like anyone that can get away with it is censoring people with differing opinions.
Seems like something that will surely end well /s
Hypocrisy on display
What I actually said is "anyone who can get away with it"
And obviously they would be doing it for partisan reasons.
No, I wouldn't.
https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-t...
I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.
But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?
because the right is full of complete and total liars who lack even the tiniest shred of integrity.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.
* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
And I suppose that's probably a good thing.
> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.
However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.
[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".
I see no evidence that that is the case.
And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?
Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.
Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.
For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.
Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)
The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.
"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.
Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".
Again, goes to show the polarization of the US.
But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...
You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-calls-fauci-beheading-154528...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/steve-bannon-makes-beheading...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/steve-bannon-s-twitter-acc...
https://nypost.com/2020/11/06/twitter-bans-steve-bannon-for-...
This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.
What you are complaining about is that right-wingers are sometimes banned by private sites in the US because they advocate genocide and other contemptible actions.
You must be joking? Twitter, Google, FB, the blatantly partisan censorship?
I disagree. Sure there will always be some amount of misinformation on the internet, but a fully state-controlled media and internet (see - China) is far, far more effective at spreading propaganda and controlling the narrative.
It is very likely that moving forward, many right wing people will shift away platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. In fact, these platforms already exist. Gab is a replacement for facebook and parler is a replacement for twitter.
There is also the immunity to bad ideas aspect; Its important that the propaganda is heard openly and argued against in public, as this makes people immune to these arguments. Censor these bad ideas and we make the next generation vulnerable to them.
I don't think we can offset this with education, as with drugs, we never give the kids the very best bad idea - argument when we try to teach the dangers of drugs, this is why so many are vulnerable to the dealers quiet persuasion. I really feel like the more we silence movements like the alt right, the more vulnerable our society becomes to their bad ideas.
This is repeated so much it is practically a meme at this point, but is there anything to actually back it up? Especially when users have the ability to control what they see. If someone is in a bubble of disinformation, it doesn't matter how many voices outside the bubble try to debunk those claims.
It seems like a more effective approach would to be to work on preventative measures so people are never exposed to these harmful beliefs rather than wait until these beliefs are heard and then try to convince them they are wrong.
The censorship of the good information is the problem. And it probably started with censorship of bad information that lead to the bubble in the first place.
>work on preventative measures so people are never exposed
This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you want to protect people from themselves, you must immunize them from the bad ideas they could come up with. We know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.
We also have the problem that if you set up a perfect system of blocking bad ideas, the people who run it can have bad ideas of their own. Hell the mechanism we have to even tell the difference between bad ideas and good ideas in society (open free discourse) will have been destroyed.
There are plenty of examples of people trying to do this around the world, tyrants and hell-holes created with the best of intentions.
There is nothing nefarious about bubbles. They happen automatically when people are in control of what they consume. Imagine I join Twitter and I am given a list of people to follow. I don't like to hear from people with viewpoints that I think are crazy so I unfollow someone if they say something I disagree with. If some gets retweeted into my feed saying something I agree with, I might follow them regardless of the validity of their comment since I don't have the time or motivation to fact check everything. Wouldn't you know it, I am now in a bubble despite there being zero censorship of anything. If one of the people in my bubble repeats some false claim, am I going to see someone dispute that claim or will the disputing occur outside my bubble?
>This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you can't protect people from themselves, you can only immunize them, we know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.
Ideas do have virality to them. Something like QAnon is a prime example. Is isn't like "wealthy democrats drink the blood of children" is some random idea that multiple people reached through parallel thinking. It was a particular conspiracy theory that spread from one person to another. Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach than trying to retroactively unconvince people who have already bought into the conspiracy.
I agree with the rest of your comment about the dangers of censorship. That is why I said I would have a preference for something that is closer to free and open than not, but that doesn't mean we can't recognize the specific situations in which completely free and open systems can go wrong.
Its still censorship, but i see what you are getting at.
> Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach
Your example would be stopped whether true or false, as it would likely be the wealthy in charge of whats deemed true.
How? The bubble is purely a result of my own choices in what I see. Is CNN being censored if I don't tune in to watch every night?
>Your example would be stopped whether true or false, as it would likely be the wealthy in charge of whats deemed true.
I'm not sure if you are familiar with QAnon, but I was referencing an actual real world conspiracy that hasn't been stopped.
It's foolish to think that censoring these people actually solves anything. Because you never addressed the broken psychology that attracts them to this garbage in the first place, they'll continue finding other outlets, your attempts to censor them only feeding their delusions further. Censorship might help you avoid them on the internet, but let's see if you can avoid them at the polls.
[1] In Search Of A Flat Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
This is so false it's bordering on the absurd. Anyone with even a little experience with debate and techniques like Gish gallop, which are widely employed, know that rational arguments simply do not convince most people of things. Humans aren't purely rational beings. It's dangerous to assume we can just talk away propaganda because all evidence points to the contrary.
More than 80% of Trump supporters believe the election was rigged against their candidate despite there literally being no evidence supporting this claim. We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter. You've got literally millions of people who have been conditioned to label everything that contradicts their views as "fake news". There is a reason why Fox News viewers score lower on current information than people who don't watch any news at all. Their propaganda works and talking about it and pointing it out isn't helping at all.
It doesn't matter whether you can change someones mind on the spot, it matters that your argument is superior and the public tend to repeat and re-argue the superior argument. And yes, things like election fraud, that might be possible, and has happened before, is harder to argued against than a flat earth. But these positions are also the ones where we might be wrong.
Eventually regressive nations LOSE economically, politically, and in warfare. They are not convinced through debate.
This is not accurate. Many non-Trump supporters also do not trust the results. I suspect you have not paid a lot of attention to the legitimate concerns.
> We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter.
This is true, but as of late, it’s going the opposite direction. It’s not that anything that contradicts their views is fake news, it’s the stuff that contradicts reality. See finepeoplehoax.org for a great example.
Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.
Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.
Also I don't know if this was intentional, but just letting you know that your phrasing of this post comes off as needlessly confrontational. You can ask for clarification without asking "what are you hoping that argument will accomplish" which sounds accusatory as it implies a nefarious motive.
Lets not pretend that liberalism doesn't come with a jackboot on the neck of the people either.
No, he didn't.
USA PATRIOT Act was from Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It incorporated material from 3 earlier bills, one of which was also by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the others by Sen. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Oxley (R-OH).
https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162...
I should have said draft instead of original.
Interesting that politico sent one straight to print today without an online article first.
> I bet barely anyone notices.
It took a single search to find plenty of articles covering this.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20201105/france-is-not-fighting-isla...
I have no trouble accessing hrw.org and match.com in Norway. I wonder is it specific to some ISPs? I also couldn’t find any law that was passed to block certain pornogrpahic websites in Wikipedia [1] and I don’t know where else to look.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway
Does Norway not publish its corpus of law online? Even in Canada where our government motto is "yesterday's technology today" we have websites where you can look up all legislation and read it.
[1]: https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk
The mandate to block torrent sites came about as a result of a court order following a lawsuit brought forth by Hollywood studios against Norwegian ISPs [2]. I tried to find the specific text on lovdata, but came up empty as they don't have a comprehensive list of local court decisions. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway#Internet_ce...
[2] https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-nor...
[3] https://lovdata.no/register/dommer
[1]: https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015...
https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-g...
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politic...
> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.
There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)
> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).
They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway
They should really check thier sources. My guess is that they tested on a network that has a filtering firewall.
Now that that is said. Norway is not perfect. The biggest ISPs use a easy to bypass DNS blocklist by the judiciary. The list contains CP-sites, gambling, piracy, terrorism. This is bad enough. Why lie about match.com and hrw.org? Jeez.
The problem is that they blow it up HUGE both in the paper and the article without cursory checking. That is as bad as lie. Maybe even worse.
From The paper 7.1.2: "Censored Planet data reveals extremely aggressive DNS blocking of many domains in Norway, with many blocks being consistent in all of our vantage points. During the four month period of increased censorship, 25 ASes observed blocking of more than 10 domains in at least six categories. We observed the most rigorous activity in AS 2116 (CATCHCOM) where more than 50 domains were blocked."
Blocking more than 10 domains in 25 ASes I have no reason to doubt. As I said there is extensive DNS blocking. So they write in a way that makes it sound like all the ASes are blocking hrw.org and match. But it's probably only on CATCHCOM. This is a ISP for mostly huge corporate environments where blocking may be by customer demand. So they take one single source of "anomaly" and blow it up. Pretty much a lie.
I'm sure you got it wrong and what they actually block is Ninja sites.
Lol. Blocking kickstarter.com for G20? It must be false positive or ISP's DNS server is just suck.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/isps-in-au-and-nz...
What's interesting is the Prime Minister made it explicitly legal for ISPs to do this. Couldn't find the exact news on this but a search turned up the following article which is sort of what I remember https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/04/soci-a04.html .
It's possible that it was a mistake, and corrected, but it should still concern you that it was done to begin with.
Telecoms should not be the arbiters of what content you view.
Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.
Why do you say this journalist is lying, but lack of evidence from other journalists must mean this one is wrong?
Pirate Bay is a big site, and journalists and the population would notice. But they might not know to look for other sites being censored. Just food for thought. I don't know whether to believe it either, but I'm willing to leave it to others to fact check more rigorously.
A perfectly reasonable explanation that obeys all the facts could be that a single telecom blocked access for a short time by mistake, was alerted, and silently fixed it before journalists noticed. I doubt many people are visiting hrw.org on a daily basis, and an outage like that could be mistaken for temporary website issues. A journalist would probably not assume it was a country-wide block and so wouldn't think to write an article about it.
"Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"
Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India
google "internet kill switch india" for numerous examples.
Cue hand wringing about how we elites can deal with the armies of the naive, the prone to conspiracy theories, viral false information needing correction.
Cue dystopia.
My bet - we will fail.
I'm completely lost on how we should approach this for various social media like fb or twitter where the platform is ubiquitous.
As for filtering content, users should have the power there, too, just as they do their spam filter in their email account. They should have the ability to set their own parameters and leave it at that. Unless its blatantly illegal content, it should be protected, period, or the platforms should be classified as publishers and be subject to all the same legal liabilities that publishers are.
Look to the requirement for phone number portability as an example. The providers weeped and gnashed their teeth, and then got together and implemented a working system.
It's the small percentage of genuine people with reasonable, coherent things to say that keep me coming back. It's a trope, but the quality of discourse has declined markedly in recent years (imo).
I can say that having been through a similar curriculum in high school (implemented on the initiative of a very thoughtful literature teacher) it has been one of my most valuable mental tools I possess throughout my adult life. Being able to understand and identify logical fallacies has helped me critically evaluate the information I consume many times over.
Of course, any program like this has the problem that it needs to be implemented by a trusted source, or it will be attacked as "indoctrination" (whether or not that is the truth). I can see that as a major challenge in the US where 50%+ of the population is convinced that the government is out to get them at any one time.
You just need to frame it correctly.
A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.
Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).
Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.
I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.
The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.
We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".
Edit: And when he did it, most of the western world/press fawned on him and praised him as a genius until he went and allied himself with Hitler.
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.
No. 47, if you'd like to read it.
It is a technique used by fascist regimes, communist regimes, dictatorships (basically totalitarian regimes of all stripes.)
It is a separate concept from fascism.
EDIT downvoters seem to have weak English skills...
Chemistry isn't a sub-field of Physics either.
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
Chemistry is just applied Physics.
And yes, for all you mathematicians out there, Physics is just applied math. :)
Oh but it does. (The force of gravity is essential for some (al)chemical techniques.)
No, but it does make it part of "Newtonism."
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
Its really, really not feudalism, which is highly de-centralized.
Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).
You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
Except there is no “holding of land in exchange for labor”, the only concrete element of the description you quote.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.
So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.
Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.
That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?
It'll be the end of civilization.
Everyone should agree with the rich and powerful.
If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.
Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.
If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered
That genie is out of the bottle.
My interpretation of the allegory is that it suggests that everyone "should" employ epistemic humility.
That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.
It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.
A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
sure, you could cheaply print stuff, but you had to (pay people to) stand on a lot of street corners to get your message out there.
For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.
As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.
You won't find anyone on this board more quick to defend censorship along political lines.
The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.
"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?
Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.
It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/democratic-enlightenment-philosophy-r...
And Ayatollah Khomeini.
Mike Wallace effectively gave the KKK a forum reaching everybody in the United States... That's much more effective than Twitter.
Your comment doesn't read any better.
They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.
As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.
When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.
I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.
Holy shit was I wrong.
Plus a ton of guys arguing about free beer or speech, and me having zero understanding of why any of it was a big deal.
The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.
"The president of the United States has been using [...]" is present perfect continuous tense (expressing an action continuing in the present that began in the past), not past tense.
I think there may be some legitimate truth to this statement that you are not seeing.
Donald Trump is far from the only bad actor we've had in our history, and things weren't running smooth as silk before he arrived on the scene, but you sure wouldn't know it from the way people talk.
However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
So censor what they see to ensure they only receive the information you approve of correct?
I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?
I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?
I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.
Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.
F this.
Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.
Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.
Unfortunately this same logic isn’t used when discussing the PLCAA or gun manufacturers in general.
Property rights are a thing and those who own the servers can determine what they will store and present to other users.
Conservative groups that don't spread misinformation and hatred are thriving on FB and Twitter. Change the law to make them store and publish anything not already illegal will turn them into cesspools like the various *chan sites inside of a month and advertisers will leave as will people with a conscience.
Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)
If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.
Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.
History will tell what the consequences of corporatism + negative Volk will be.
Words have meanings beyond "things I don't like".
“who controls the past controls the future. who controls the present, controls the past”
I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censorship will be helpful.
I am very much for "free speech" - but at some point, you have to shut certain topics out of reasonable debate, because at the end of the day, if we have to keep debating things like this, we've learned nothing.
Sounds insane?
So did the patriot act in the 90s.
Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
One guy later was the underwear bomber. Thank God that didn't take.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab
(1) Identification of potential dissidents. Those who violate lockdowns or mask orders are most likely to resist state control.
(2) Normalizing control over common activities. It takes four weeks to normalize a new habit. "Two weeks to stop the spread" has been going on since March (that's thirty-two weeks and counting). Americans are now habituated to state-controlled social behaviors.
(3) Destruction of in-person social channels outside the sphere of state electronic surveillance.
(4) Normalizing fear of non-conformists ("you're killing grandpa").
(5) Destruction of non-sanctioned economies. Global companies have effectively been part of the state for decades, and can easily weather the storm. Smaller businesses can not, which dries up cashflow outside of state-approved channels.
Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.
The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic. I feel absolutely no sense that people are more willing to submit to Government control now or anything like that, and it's the same even talking to people down in Victoria that had a big second wave and way longer lockdown than we did. Their willingness to comply was to stop the spread of the virus so they could get out of lockdown, and it worked, and now the restrictions are being rolled back.
It's frustrating to hear people in the media here crowing on about 'authoritarianism' and 'government control' over this, especially because the State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus. But at the same time, these conservative commentators who are aligned with our right-wing Federal Government happily ignore actual authoritarian, draconian laws that the Feds are passing to give police and intelligence services unprecedented powers for warrantless mass surveillance etc. over the last decade...
I'd even go as far as saying that the pandemic would actually be a really bad time for a Government to try and 'normalise' increased government control, because there's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over (if we get a vaccine for instance). The desire to throw off all the restrictions once the virus is gone is just too strong.
> The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic.
It is highly debatable that lockdowns ever were, or currently are, either necessary or effective.
> State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus.
The US is in the thirty-second week of "two weeks to stop the spread".
Credibility went right out the window when the powers-that-be decreed weddings and funerals as too risky, but protests and riots as totally fine.
Not to mention the long list of politicians whose personal lives seem to be an exception from the rules they have imposed on others.
> There's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over.
I remember airports before 9/11. Hell, I remember the US before 9/11.
The ironically-named Patriot Act represented a massive seizure of power and a wholesale trampling of American civil rights. None of the airport security measures introduced were necessary or effective, and yet they continue to this day.
Since 9/11, the United States has been at war in the Middle East for twenty years, squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to achieve... nothing.
This was neither legitimate nor logical. But it did make a bunch of politicians and their friends very powerful and very wealthy.
I also remember, at the time, the moral frenzy that enveloped the nation after the fall of the twin towers.
Things now feel the same from where I sit.
Sweden managed to just ask their citizens to behave properly and it worked.
I think a close reading of the OP would show they aren't portraying the state with great friendliness. Some run the show for the benefit of powerful forces and to various extents try to think about long term goals. "Bad Actors" is a decent shorthand for group trying also serving the wealthy and themselves but with a destructively short term agenda.
The key point the GP makes and I think you're missing is that stop manipulation isn't a matter of removing "tyrants" but creating an active, educated population.
I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students. And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.
consider (for example) k-12 mathematics pretty much anywhere...
I moved here 7 years ago, and my son has gone through a public elementary school and is currently in the last year of a public middle school. If it was just one year or just one teacher or even just one school (or one district), I could write it off to bad luck. Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the whole system is abysmal.
The basics are just being taught differently.
It would later come out that there was exaggerations and embellishments in his reporting (https://insidestory.org.au/the-myth-of-keith-murdochs-gallip...)
In Australia, Gallipolli and the ANZAC mythos became part of our national identity. It is hard to explain to non-Australians the impact of the "Anzac legacy" on our culture it was like Australia's Gettysburg or Waterloo etc. Anzac Day is still celebrated and observed more than 100 years later it is a major patriotic celebration.
Murdoch also tried to use his influence to block the advancement of Sir John Monash (arguably the greatest allied general of WWI and the last person to ever be knighted on the battlefield).
We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason in a way that avoided those fallacies.
Every single invocation of an expert is an argument from authority.
Every single invocation of logic like "it is more like nature therefor it is more good" is a naturalistic fallacy.
Do we even need to get to other ones like "appeal to emotion"?
Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality (given that there are an infinite number of possible logics based on which axioms you start with), and that being worried about and trying to avoid "logical fallacies" in our reasoning does not help us see reality more closely to how it is.
Naturalistic fallacy really depends on how much you value the natural state of things, but it is usually used to point out that just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it is good or sensible to do/continue.
Appeal to emotion. Appeals to emotion are often used to incite people without them thinking through. "They killed our people!" sounds a lot more convincing/inciting than, "They had an altercation which unfortunately escalated, leading to the deaths of several people that we knew". Using emotion to obscure or not properly think about how it came to be to that point and what should be done from then on.
I think you're conflating logic (ex: mathematical logic, or far less rigorous careful reasoning) with an overly strict definition of a logical fallacy.
> Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but it sounds a dangerous path to go down. People have already discarded facts - I think discarding logic as well would make things even worse.
For example, if during a formal debate you were to threaten to harm your opponent if they didn't agree with you (an "Appeal to Force" fallacy), this wouldn't be an appropriate argument for this context. But in, say, a contract negotiation between a union and a business, the union could threaten to strike if the business doesn't agree to terms, and it can be part of a valid argument. Thus appeals to force (and, as Walton argued, all "informal fallacies") aren't inherently fallacious in all contexts. Rather, the threat of harm was an inappropriate change in context from a formal debate to a negotiation, and it's the change in context which creates these fallacies.
The part about the United States says this:
> While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.
And you say:
> Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.
The first major heading in the article is this:
> Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites
Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?
Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.
A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.
But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.
Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.
So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.
I always click on the comments first myself to see if the article is even worth reading.
I think that was the idea and it quickly devolved into horse shit.
I would love a site that was like Read-It but forced people to "read-it" first.
If it’s an interesting title and the score and qty of comments is high, i go to the comments.
I’m pretty much in /all and I hide tons of subs using RES...
So my feed on /all is pretty clean and tailored to things I’m open to.
With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.
I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.
Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.
I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.
But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.
I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.
Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.
If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.
HN just works, so it's a lot less work just to read the discussion here.
> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”
What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.
I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.
I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.
>bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage.
which I interpret broadly as enticing people to do things not sanctioned by the status quo morality. Some governments aren't happy about sexual liberty, others about certain religious or political belief. The internet with the liberation of information also liberated a certain relativism that is corrosive to the epistemic fundament of established power.
Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.
I saw this clear as day when I was watching live streams during the Portland federal courthouse protest. I would watch these for several hours per day as a form of entertainment. When I read the news articles written the following day, I was completely shocked at how much bias was present in the mainstream news media.
During these protests it essentially went like this: during the day, the protest was 100% peaceful, hardly any police. Literally a perfect 100% peaceful protest. As night came, the crowd would shift. The peaceful people would leave and then a new group would start showing up, dressed in all black and start doing full blown violence against police. Starting fires, destroying private property and many similar illegal and dangerous stuff.
The following day I read articles on CNN that said there was very little violence and it was almost entirely peaceful. This was false because there was tons of violence at the night. When you read articles in fox news they say the protest was mostly violent. This was also false because the day time protest was 100% peaceful.
This type of news reporting is pushing division politics and social media further fans the flames because people can confirm their narrative and also get false reporting from idiots on twitter/facebook which spreads misinformation.
I could also tell this is heavily influencing people's view on the world because I would debate people on reddit. For liberal people, they would link me CNN and washington post articles to support their arguments. If I argued with conservatives, they would link me fox news and breitbart articles. This is what they're linking to me as their "proof" to support their argument. If I responded by saying that fox news/cnn is biased reporting, they would jump to personal attacks at me, almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.
As for riots, my dad remarked to me that the TV media would represent the crowds as large or small simply by where they pointed the camera and the zoom level used. And they would, depending on their agenda.
Mass media has always been heavily agenda based.
News almost completely ignored it.
And there you have it.
Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.
Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.
Because we've learned in the past decade or so that the "marketplace of ideas" fallacy is false. Ideas aren't traded like market goods; rather, they spread like disease. And the way to prevent dangerous ideas like Nazism from threatening society is the same as the way we prevent diseases like COVID from threatening society: containment. Isolate the afflicted, and implement measures to limit the exposure of everyone else.
People disputing the marketplace of ideas want to be authoritative voices in my experience. If we had been a little more relaxed in the face of objection, we might have fared better.
Anyway, if you are correct, we would need an authority on truth and I see a lot of problems already. Frankly, literature is full of examples why this is a bad idea, but don't let me stop you.
That is by FAR the best summary of the issue I have read.
Analogy:
It's as if we've been living behind castle walls and now those walls are gone. We can now be directly attacked by enemy armies, whereas before we could only be practically reached by our own government's police and military. Having been sheltered for so long, we don't know how to hold our own without those walls.
https://saidit.net/s/Solutions/comments/50i5/how_to_investig...
The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.
Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.
And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/obama-interne...
> Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
I don't think that's out of place in a conversation about today's internet/media landscape. He's not saying "the internet is bad," or even "social media is bad"; he's saying that the internet clearly has the potential to amplify disinformation to a point that becomes harmful, something I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with.
A lot of people are ok with lies if they confirm what they already believe.
The only people who care about "truth" in capitalism are shareholders and affluent individuals. It binds them to the culture and when a bunch of lowlifes and poorer people tell them "fuck off" essentially, they get pissy and upset that the people don't like the status quo.
These are the people that care about stability, in order to enjoy their wealth. A country that cannot agree with one another on objective reality isn't one that can be governed, and is destined to fall.
Which might be why so many of the "disinformation" fighters come from the establishment, and so many proprietors of distortions and lies are those with grudges (Greenwald, Bannon, etc.) or nothing to lose (QAnon/MAGA types).
It comes down to a difference between people that benefit from a stable status quo, and those (for whatever reason) that want to tear it down.
So clearly we need the gov’t to step in help the rabble who are clearly unable to figure out the “truth” on their own.
Does he realize this is the exact argument authoritarian gov’ts give for censorship? We need to censor to avoid “social disharmony” or stop those “fomenting discord”.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI
> Obama: Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring...I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.
> Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
> Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.
The second paragraph in the article is more in line with what he actually said:
> Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
There's a big difference between saying that the internet is the single biggest threat to society, and saying that it (and more specifically, social media) has helped some people communicate disinformation and "fake news" - which is what Obama see as the threat to society in this context.
On the one hand, censorship appears to be appealing to stop the tide of misinformation. Anti-vaxx garbage is a prime example of something that should be censored into oblivion. It is actively harmful to the public.
But, on the other hand, who pulls the levers of censorship is equally terrifying. I don't want a world where a dissenting opinion is censored because it doesn't fall in line with whoevers ideology. For example, Chinese censorship of the Tiananmen square incident.
How on earth can we fix this? Social media has created a world of bubbles. Some of which are FILLED TO THE BRIM with misinformation. Penetrating those bubbles is nearly impossible. They've always sort of existed, yet somehow it feels like they are more extreme now-a-days.
Just musing. I really don't have a solution to this but am certainly interest to hear any proposals.
Perhaps the solution is really as simple as better public education?
Religion could be classified as mis-information but that helps a lot of people.
Who is the final arbitrator of what is determined as misinformation?
If one religion took control that one religion could classify another religion as mis-information and censor them.
If one political actor took control they could qualify another political groups information as censorship.
SOME censorship doesn't work. It's either all information available and you trust people to be smart or you have a censored internet.
We have final arbitrators of truth, they are laws, judges and juries. It isn't a perfect system, and it might not scale, but I see no need to abandon the idea some things are fundamentally incorrect, and get rid of those things.
Then there's all the law enforcement agencies, the FBI, CIA, TSA, DoD, NSA, and more.
Then there's the side effect of laws, how many problems are we dealing with presently from supposedly good gov't laws from years or decades ago? A whole lot.
Social engineering via laws and judges is a simple minded solution and should never be considered the best or final solution.
There is political and financial incentives at play to spread misinformation. It isn't as simple as "the best ideas win" as most social media platforms make it REALLY easy to manipulate the narrative.
For example, if some politician will negatively impact my business, I can hire a BUNCH of people to go out and write nasty comments about that politician. I can create fake media pages to support whatever narrative I want against that candidate. I can do all of this for relatively little money. We see this phenomenon come up time and time again when it comes to review websites. Most people "in the know" don't trust amazon reviews because they know companies astroturf them like crazy.
Climate change is a place where this also happens a LOT. Man made climate change is a nearly undisputed fact in the scientific world, yet roughly half of Americans either don't believe in it or are unsure about it. Why? Because there's big incentives behind the fossil fuel industry to spread FUD and misinformation about climate change. On the flip side, there's just not the money or resources available to climate scientists to correct that narrative.
I can buy that "some censorship doesn't work" however, it appears that a free for all is equally broken.
Of course, the gremlins created by the above scenario makes a great case for some censorship.
Until authority can be coaxed into becoming more transparent and, thereby, creating trust, we will keep having this conversation.
Isn't Tor a tool made specifically for this?
I think we have to embrace the fact that there are layers of informational warfare and hope for some degree of stability once hyper-connectivity has seen off a couple generations
people have to be more willing to debate ideas they find crazy and be patient because the opposite strategy is a losing one
of course governments and big tech will suppress information and even prosecute people for saying the "wrong" things, but this has a limited scope and the backlash is more of that stuff happening in closer circles/bubbles
Thanks to The Great Firewall and the CCP rule, China is mostly immune to foreign propaganda. At the same time, China is using a lot of effort to affect countries with democracy and free speech, like India and the U.S.
China is obviously not alone in using propaganda to influence the politics of other countries. All big countries and corporations use it in their countries of interest all the time... in fact, they have been doing it for much longer. Everything from bribes to politicians to "human rights organizations", "foreign aid organizations" to social causes in universities... everything is used to undermine national interests and put pawns for outside powers in governments.
Citizens of many democratic nations have been feeling this for a very long time... which explains nationalist sentiments rising in many countries... but that's another story.
China is in a unique position in that it limits or prohibits foreign press, foreign media, foreign internet services, foreign aid organizations, human rights organizations... i.e. anything and everything that it can to stop foreign influence... but it uses a lot of those against its rivals.
The only defense against it is following China's footsteps. India has recently banned several Chinese apps and websites. It has also kicked out Amnesty International. Other countries will have to do the same if they want to protect their national interests.
Cooperation is hard because of the prisoner's dilemma etc. You don't need "certain business people" to malevolently prevent international cooperation.
competition is at the heart of our economies at a deep level, both within and without... i suspect this wont change until internally our economies are more cooperative than competitive (im not holding my breath)
What do you mean by nationalist competition? Nations competing against each other?
>What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?
Cooperation for what? Different people value different things. Different cultures even more so. You cannot have cooperation unless everyone is on the same side of every issue in the same degree.
If we had that level of agreement, we would not survive, not for long anyway. Let me explain:
Almost all of politics (or religious sects for that matter) is about how we use the resources we have. If there are multiple ways of using the resources, there have to be people who disagree and want different ways of using the resource. That slows us down, which helps us understand the cost/benefits of different ways of doing things. That also keeps options open... so if we find problems with the prevalent way, we won't have to start over. Other groups will already have understood the alternative ways and made some progress that others can join... once they sacrifice the leader who led them the "wrong way", of course.
Nations are just another level of doing this thing on a global scale. Nations should do things differently, so that the world as a whole is more robust.
>I guess certain business people would not make as much money.
Ironically, it's certain business interests which have tried to make the world homogenous. That helps them scale their business in the most efficient way. They value efficiency more than robustness. George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, is an example of a person who religiously believes in removing all inefficiencies due to nation states... and has been using his billions of dollars for that cause. I think that is dangerous. It's not different from finding "superior people", inbreeding them and killing everyone else for being inferior. That wouldn't make them superior. That would make them fragile. It's the same for nations.
Foreign propaganda is a problem. But it's tiny compared to propaganda by domestic actors. There's huge amount of disinfo, gas lighting, demoralizing perpetuated by mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia.
If you are concerned about propaganda, you have to mention the elephant in the room. Or else, you yourself are propagating and amplifying the dangers of foreign propaganda and minimizing the huge blame mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia should get.
All foreign propaganda is peddled by domestic actors. Otherwise, it wouldn't be effective.
2030: EU bans Google
Is that the point you were trying to make?
"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States. It very obviously got us into WW-1 (the British -a largely untold but very obvious info ops campaign for something that served no US national interest), it got us into the middle east (nothing the US does there happens but for foreign interference from Saudis, Emirates and Israelis, who overtly bribe our think tanks and politicians), and it fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people (thanks, China).
None of the above happened because of dipshits saying things on twitter or facebook or sharing Russia Today articles. None of the above will go away if the CIA, the political center and the tech oligarchs censor the internet to protect us from meaningless internet bugaboos.
It's a naked power grab, and anyone who supports it because of "muh democracy" is a collaborator with tyranny.
Fake News. The U.S. used to have a huge stockpile of surgical and N95 masks as part of their pandemic preparedness plans. The stockpile was gradually depleted and not replenished adequately. It was pure complacency on the part of government; please let's not blame trade openness for this.
Agree. Not as effective as today. But yes.
Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.
Agree. I think Democracy has failed because the tools of propaganda have become very effective.
Democracy died in the U.S. a long time ago... the Deep State was formed and it had a monopoly on propaganda, not only for keeping the citizens in line but also using it to control many other countries. The major competitor was Soviet Union, which wasn't very successful for long. Fast forward to today, there are many countries which are powerful enough and have competitive tools for propaganda.
While many countries are well equipped for offence, only China has very good defense against it. If other countries don't take actions to strengthen their defense, it's going to be very difficult for them.
Agree, but I'm not talking about most. I understand there is "cholesterol bad" or "anti-vaxx, stupid, amirite?" from pharmaceuticals or "almonds make penis hard" from nutrition "science" funded by the food industry. That is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the Deep State, which is comprised of ex-military, the CIA and weapons industry people. They're pretty deep into everything.
> ["foreign interference"] fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities [...] (thanks, China).
'free trade' is definitely not a product of outside interference, it is a product of American company owners' interests - the easier it is to own manufacturing plants in other countries without giving up your IP (the key items of most 'free trade' agreements), the easier it becomes for corporations to manufacture everything where labor is cheapest.
David Atkins, Regional Director, CA Dems / Elected DNC Member:
"No seriously...how do you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?
We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South." [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/DavidOAtkins/status/1328898661569363969
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-internet-and-the-third-esta...
[0] I'm not going to provide an example, shouldn't be too hard to come up with a slightly controversial example yourself.
Freedom House is a non-profit that is almost entirely funded by the US government. The only ones who would find it "unexpected" that US allies rank high on the "freedom index" but practically have problems with freedom of speech would probably buy a bridge in Brooklyn.
Thanks to its long-standing "controlled by CCP in order to do business" practices, China enjoys a very strong position to be less vulnerable to potential external Internet propaganda.
CCP learned this, and start to use various online forum to spread its own world view and alternative reporting on various Chinese domestic and international affairs. So far it looks like it actually helps to supply diverse views on issues like eliminating poverty, development strategy for poor country, etc. I still not see much hard evidences of proactive propaganda campaign from CCP towards foreign nations.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/10/09/655824435/the-weaponization-o...
[0] I'm not going to provide an example, shouldn't be too hard to come up with a slightly controversial example yourself.
I know Google did not start out like this - 'don't be evil' - but this is how they ended up... Curating truth. It's really sad.
I don't believe in unlimited free speech, but the bar should be set as low as what is permitted by the 1A, at least in the United States which grants maximum freedom under the law.
Try the founder of Vice, let's say you want to listen to his Podcast by just searching for his name, good luck doing that on Google, on Yandex it's the 5th result down.
[0] also not going to name them and give them promotion