Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 243 posts

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#171

Post by ionised »

patrick5415 wrote: post #168
ionised wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power. You're free to think that if it helps you sleep at night. You would be mistaken though. Some may have been just as bad as those they were replacing, but considering many of them were democratically elected governments that the US chose to overthrow in favour…

Lots of accusations here with zero citations.

I'm in work and don't have the time to type up an essay for you. This was meant to be an off-the-cuff comment during my lunch that ended up dragging on a bit.

Honestly, a lot of what I've mentioned is pretty common knowledge, just not among Americans it seems. These aren't obscure conspiracy theories, they are things that actually happened.

A cursory Google search will present you with reams of information on each of these. You can make up your own mind (as you should).

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#172

Post by Jommi »

tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

This is the core problem.

And it's just natural. These platforms have a tendency to be natural monopolies. That means it requires government interference.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#173

Post by erentz »

saiya-jin wrote: post #72
ben_w wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.

Yet in reality British colonialism was, being equal to other european countries colonialism (France, Spain, Portugal, Dutch, Belgium, Germany a bit), one of the greatest evils in mankind's history, probably the worst if you count all direct and indirect casualties. I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. Much of the mess we…

> I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck.

I think it’s pretty obvious why people aren’t ashamed. Because they didn’t do the act. Take your expectation of shame to it’s conclusion: It’s very selective to only call out European colonialist countries as being ones where shame should be expected. If we are looking at crimes across history everyone on the planet must end up ashamed of their ancestry as there are few innocents. Not like the current borders and genetic make up of countries in Europe has been static throughout history, let alone every other plot of land in the world.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#174

Post by j-c-hewitt »

I think the whole notion of war as a whodunnit crime is pretty moronic at a fundamental level. #1, you don't have jurisdiction. #2, if you hoped to gain jurisdiction, the most important thing is not piecing together the facts of the case, but winning the war.

If you want to go after the Libyan National Army for doing bad things, you have to go to war with Libya and defeat their army.

The trouble with going to war with Libya if you are the United States is the Atlantic Ocean and the absence of a real driving interest such as self defense that would lead Americans to support a war with Libya.

In order to goad Americans into a war with Libya, the best hope for doing so is to wave bloody shirts at them and somehow convince them that Libyans are going to blow them up at any time now unless we go to war with Libya ASAP.

Facebook and the rest of them don't have a duty to simultaneously prevent the wrong people from viewing Ogrish-style execution videos while also preserving them.

So they want Americans to be radicalized in favor of war against Syria and Libya (causing far more deaths than the typical radicalization which just results in teens posting lots of pepe memes), but not radicalized in favor of Islamic terrorists. That is just an impossible propaganda requirement that cannot be met.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#175

Post by wybiral »

jtr1 wrote: post #129
52-6F-62 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you claiming is being censored? The media regularly investigates and reports on itself. The press is far from perfect, but you’re alleging a vast and deep conspiracy when reality is likely far simpler: The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Sales and business have little impact on editorial. Editorial flies by the whims of a wide variety of strong personalities. Politicians and rele…

These do not have to be mutually exclusive accounts. There does not have to be a secret cabal of shadowy deep state operatives pushing a unified message, there just needs to be a propensity for the rich and well-connected (by definition a small group) to find their way into positions of influence in rough proximity to major media outlets. As you've said: Politicians and relevant players get columnist and editorial ro…

> It's not difficult to see that wealth, status, and connection are self-compounding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to say that many people in this group hold views that are out of step with the majority of Americans, particularly when you are talking about the pro-military intervention crowd.

Yes, the wealthy certainly rig the system to stay wealthy and get more wealth. That's an easy thing to assert. But to then make vague connections to intelligence and relatives of presidents as though they posed some unseen censorship apparatus on media with some specific goals is where it gets into conspiracy theory zone.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#176

Post by tepidandroid »

freeflight wrote: post #119
ourlordcaffeine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>anybody who gets tired of anti-Chinese submissions constantly being pushed on the front-page It's not really anyone who gets tired, it's the accounts that revert to whataboutism whenever the communist party is criticised, flat out deny things like the Tienanmen Massacre, and spread a lot of hate when something happens that the CCP doesn't like, such as a Tibetan woman being elected president of a student union. >ant…

> flat out deny things like the Tienanmen Massacre I'm fairly active on Reddit and I've literally never seen that happen. That's because the Chinese people so deep in historic revisionism often don't even care to begin with and can't even access Reddit in the first place, at least not "easily". It's usually people with a "anti-China" position who bring up Tienamen square, to conflate it with whatever a given submissi…

I've never seen it happen either.

Redditors will gleefully jump on (by voting to the front page) anything even remotely critical of China. I suppose it fulfills some deeply-rooted sense of 'defiance' in them and gives them some sense of satisfaction. It's basically the childish game of "oh, you don't want me to touch this? I'm going to touch this over and over because of that".

The net effect is that they will judiciously post, for example, the anniversary of Tienanmen Square every year without fail, but fail to mark the dates of equally tragic, but unpatriotic or unflattering events. When was the last time the anniversary of the Mai Lai Massacre or No Gun Ri was upvoted to the front page? How about the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq?

Hint: Never.

It's ironic (and very telling of their motives) that the events they have complete freedom to discuss never receive equal attention or criticism.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#177

Post by behringer »

wnoise wrote: post #16
behringer wrote: post #3

I'm not interested in seeing war crimes on facebook. If you want to disseminate that stuff, use a public forum where that stuff is welcome. There are countless places. Facebook and the spin users give is not welcome by me and no doubt by others.

Facebook is millions , if not billions of tiny public forums. The problem is that people seem to want them all to have the same standards. If you don't want stuff like this on your wall or feed, it's easy to keep out. If the admins of a group don't want this showing up, they too can filter it out. But people seem to be demanding that not only do they not have to see content they dislike, but that no one else can eith…

I don't care what you do in your own groups. If you show me pictures of dead people I'm almost certainly banning you from showing up in my feed. And if my feed keeps showing me dead people or other crimes then I would just leave facebook.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#178

Post by joeseeder »

bilbo0s wrote: post #48
joeseeder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are completely missing the point why they are ending up on these platforms... Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement. Most of the people these sharing atrocities are aware only about platforms we call social media. For them these are the only w…

> Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement... I've lived in these nations, and if you can send via internet to Twitter, you can send to the UN. In fact, you can send to both at the same time.

And you know the UN address for submitting war crimes evidence by heart?

adding to that, does UN have a convinietly preinstalled app on every phone just for that purpose?

Just because it's reachable, doesn't mean that random witness will know how...

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#179

Post by dorfsmay »

brightball wrote: post #111
basetop wrote: post #106

Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic. Youtube, facebook, reddit, google search, etc have all been targeted by the atlantic, nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc and bullied into scrubbing content and direct their users to "authoritative sources". Ironically enough, in china, russia and most countries, "authoritative sources" are state p…

Stuff like this is why I still see value in own encyclopedias, history books, etc. I simply don't trust resources that can be edited/deleted at any time.

This is exactly why archive.org was created. They actually referenced Orwell's 1984 changing history theme when they created it.

Note that archive.org is run on donation, and people often overlooked it's importance and need for funds.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#180

Post by amanaplanacanal »

naasking wrote: post #143
0xADEADBEE wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting take on a place where they did their best to accommodate is Slate Star Codex's Culture War thread on Reddit [0]. I've wrestled with this for a while but as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter become ubiquitous, forcing views contrary to internal ones off the platforms is wildly irresponsible. On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. I do agree it's money-…

> On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. So you shouldn't have to provide services to people you find objectionable, even if those people are in a protected class? It's a common but mistaken belief that we have no obligations to society or to our fellow citizens. For hosting specifically, it depends on multiple factors: your ubiquity, the demographics of your au…

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

In this case, the Supreme Court made it clear that governments cannot prevent people from using social media. However other Supreme Court decisions have it that property owners don't have to allow others to use their property for speech, except in unusual cases like company towns.

It's not obvious to me that they will find these two ideas to be in conflict.

Post reply on HN