Given the expansion of the fed/state/local/corporate surveillance net, do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?
Absolutely. People have already gotten in trouble with US immigration just for posting negative opinions on social media, or simply speech that the government doesn't like (see all the recent pro-Palestine protestors whose visas were cancelled). The state department/homeland/etc. can choose or not choose to let people in based on just about any criteria they want. If they find out I said something critical of the government, I could either be denied entry, or kicked out, and both have already been happening to people in the last year and a half.
Even if what they're doing isn't legal, that doesn't stop them from potentially ruining your life in the process, maybe even getting away with it.
I think as I've gotten older, the fear of expressing myself has increasingly turned into a sense of duty to do it anyway. The more people feel pressured into silence, the more important it seems not to be.
Hmm, probably a little. I am a fairly public person but I wouldn't want to be one of the characters in So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. It's nice to see that Sacco got her job back eventually, but that grade of internet mob cancellation goes after some random person and then that's the end of it. Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.
From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.
> Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.
I think it's unclear whether the Brendan Eich case "worked out" or not, depending on what exactly your stance is with respect to his original political donation, and what you think about the trajectory of his career after he was forced to resign from Mozilla. I certainly know queer activist types who are not happy that he is still in tech, and still the CEO of a browser company.
Mostly with how easy it has become in a corporate setting.
Before they had an easy access to the data but the barrier was their capacity to go through it. Nowadays any middle manager with data access and an OpenAI subscription can potentially get a sentiment and summary of your public (or even private with some saas plans) conversations.
I've always used a pseudonym. I have never felt free to speak my mind on the internet under my own name, the cancel mobs scared me away long before the state did
Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.
In general, no. But I'd never make anything but anonymous throwaway posts here because this is the one place that doesn't let me delete my posts. (I know you can make manual requests, but if it's not self-service I can't rely on it.)
You do understand everything is continuously sucked up everywhere right ? (I mean the pentagon mysteriously unaccounted billions have to go somewhere...)
There are things I'd like to say on the web but which I haven't because I fear I could be arrested in some countries I am likely to visit in the future.
I started feeling that way around the time ICE illegally broke, entered and ransacked a low-income housing building in Chicago, terrorizing residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Once I realized that fear of reprisal was preventing me from expressing how I felt about it online, I resolved instead to get louder and more strident in my public speech than I had been in years.
The thing is, this forum often tells us that the government is not allowed to do that, it's against the law. So I'm curious why they did, and how they were able to?
Yes. AI makes it more trivial than ever to extract your sentiments, and when you combine that with a government that's eager to crush dissent then things get tricky.
The "less likely to express" isn't from surveillance, but from the professional shills that moderate every site which makes it worthless to put any effort into posting anything because it will just be removed with no justification.
"do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?"
No, because five years ago was probably the high point of online speech restriction. A time where people were banned from platforms like Twitter and Facebook for expressing political opinions or stating scientific facts
I semi-frequently discuss my opinions about government officials who should be sent to prison for their crimes, agencies who everyone should boycott, and laws that I no longer consider legitimate. I've never had anyone from the government talk to me about this or been punished in any other way. Perhaps I've gotten lucky, but I really do think that free speech protections remain strong in the US, despite the attempts from the aforementioned criminals to change that.
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[ 59.4 ms ] story [ 588 ms ] threadAre you referring to anything in particular?
If anything, you're more free to "express yourself" now.
Even if what they're doing isn't legal, that doesn't stop them from potentially ruining your life in the process, maybe even getting away with it.
(This joke would be funnier if HN allowed unicode Full Block characters)
From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.
I think it's unclear whether the Brendan Eich case "worked out" or not, depending on what exactly your stance is with respect to his original political donation, and what you think about the trajectory of his career after he was forced to resign from Mozilla. I certainly know queer activist types who are not happy that he is still in tech, and still the CEO of a browser company.
Before they had an easy access to the data but the barrier was their capacity to go through it. Nowadays any middle manager with data access and an OpenAI subscription can potentially get a sentiment and summary of your public (or even private with some saas plans) conversations.
I’m more careful with my words than I ever was.
Imagine if every email provider had an option to "publicize" next to the ability to star an email or email thread.
It's the private, anti-free speech stuff that would be interesting to see up close. And I'm just talking about email communications.
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No, because five years ago was probably the high point of online speech restriction. A time where people were banned from platforms like Twitter and Facebook for expressing political opinions or stating scientific facts