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Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

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Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#141
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship That is not what was described, > this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checke…

This gives me some weird feelings. I mean, if you ask a website to turn some content "unpreferred" without user consensus, isn't that also some type of censorship? In fact, many Chinese websites are doing it right now, and it's very effective in terms of censoring contents. However, I support the idea of content flagging, but instead of making them "unpreferred", maybe add a mark saying "Propaganda from XXX" so peopl…

I really like the "unpreferred" idea, but I think it should be just a setting. Sometimes the filtering/"unpreferring" should be opt-out (e.g. gore, porn), other times opt-in (left-wing propaganda, right-wing propaganda, ...), but at all times configurable by the user.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#143

For those that don't know, Audrey Tang was involved or wrote one of the early Perl6 VMs in Haskell iirc. I can't remember if it was Pugs or Parrot. The language still has Haskell roots.

It was Pugs. :-)

Haha. Always good to be corrected by the subject in question :)

Thanks for the hard work in helping to get that project off the ground btw. As a language user and not an implementor, I sometimes feel bad that I use so much open source software without giving anything back except word of mouth approval.

I haven't read the full article yet, but I'm sure it is an immensely complicated situation balancing individual freedoms versus the spread of "disinformation". That is what I got from skimming last night. In the US we have so much of this right now with anti-vaxxers and people turning against medical science in favor of fraudulent cures like "essential oils".

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#144
post #120
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship. Devotion, a small Taiwanese horror game, is an example of people abusing these types of control on steam >Devotion, which came under fire over the weekend because of the presence of a piece of art that appears to mock Chinese president Xi Jinping. That quickly led to a massive review-bombing c…

Anything that's crowdsourced and likely to be manipulated needs to have a plan for handling coordinated inauthentic activity. I imagine Steam's existing measures are designed more around preventing game developers from using fake positive reviews to promote their games rather than fake negative reviews as a form of censorship.

I wouldn't be so quick to imagine that. Especially recently, Steam has seen many legitimate, organic negative review bombs. The truth is likely closer to the fact that Valve is known to just not really care about the quality of their storefront

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah by making your own counter-message, you're being humble with respect to that possibility. Let there be two propagandas dropped at the same time and hopefully the truth will tip the scales.

If the truth was self-evident fake news would not exist... Often there isn't even one truth. And of course when you have two competing versions there is no guarantee that one is true, or that one is not true for that matter. I'm just saying to people should use caution and not take anything at face value.

> If the truth was self-evident fake news would not exist...

Note I saw saying "if there are two narratives". The "fake news" situation is often just one narrative. (US cable news has no narrative. Or brain.)

The government shouldn't assume it's correct. But if there is a wide variety of narratives it should be less difficult for the populace.

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