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The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

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Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#191

Post by toofy »

apostacy wrote: post #174
ntzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest

Who gets to decide who is a neo-nazi though? I've heard Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker called neo-nazis. Maybe you're a neo-nazi. Since neo-nazis always deny being neo-nazis, then your denials are further proof that you are a neo-nazi. B&

> Who gets to decide who is a neo-nazi though?

> I’ve heard jordan peterson and steven pinker called neo-nazis.

It still isn’t clear to me what this brings to a discussion. It seems like such a strange question.

Are any of us under the impression that label misapplication somehow means a label is no longer used? Of course not. After 30 years in the same house, my partners mother still calls the tree in her front yard an oak tree despite the fact it has always been and will remain a maple. Her misapplication of the label doesn’t mean oak trees no longer exist. Tree experts, dendrologists and arborists aren’t throwing their arms up and declaring their entire fields deprecated because a random person, in a casual setting, uses the wrong term.

My father still calls disk storage, RAM.

My partner still calls the serrano peppers she grows, jalapeños.

I regularly see politicians who lean to the right call obvious capitalist liberals, commies.

I still sometimes call giant ships, boats.

None of these misapplications matter, there are still an awful lot of people who rely on what words actually describe, despite a random old lady calling a maple tree an oak.

As always, casual conversations with casual people will at some point lead to casual use of words. It will continue to happen, for as long as we’re a species.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#192

Post by joe_the_user »

ppseafield wrote: post #176
ntzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest

I think it's worth discussing this comment instead of downvoting it. There was a lot of controversy around the copyright expiration of Mein Kampf in Germany a few years ago. The Bavarian government owned the copyright and refused to allow it to be printed. When the copyright expired, annotated versions were released, putting the book in context. There are certain disadvantages that not printing had: making the book m…

I think it's worth discussing this comment instead of downvoting it.

Fortunately, we can do both. Despite being nearly white, you can read the comment by highlighting it and it is still high the page, so it can be discussed. Seems like a model of how strongly oppositions should be treated.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#193

Post by apostacy »

krapp wrote: post #180
apostacy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide who is a neo-nazi though? I've heard Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker called neo-nazis. Maybe you're a neo-nazi. Since neo-nazis always deny being neo-nazis, then your denials are further proof that you are a neo-nazi. B&

I've never understood why people make this argument, or what they think it proves. Yes, the term "neo-nazi" is sometimes misapplied. That misapplication doesn't mean that neo-nazis don't exist, or that the term has no meaning. If the term didn't have an established, commonly agreed upon meaning that referred to a specific ideology and movement in the real world, then there would be no reason to quibble about its misu…

But people aren't usually quibbling about it's misuse. They are objecting to unjust censorship, regardless of whether someone is called a neo-nazi or a flarndingle.

If someone was being harassed and censored because they were accused of being a flarndingle, I would have a problem with that. If corporate America were calling for mass censorship of "flarndingle" literature, I would be opposed to that.

I would not like being called a flarndingle if I knew it would mean that I would be censored. It does not matter that flarndingle is a meaningless word.

The term neo-nazi is actually quite abstract. For many younger people and activists, it has just become a synonym for "person I do not agree with".

It has become a catch-all insult that can be applied to anyone. There is nobody who that insult won't stick to. You can be a Jewish academic with controversial opinions about society and have "anti-fascist" activists target you for being a neo-nazi.

So, obviously we can't ban anyone that is called a neo-nazi.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#194

Post by gwright »

krapp wrote: post #168
food_eater wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's currently in-vogue to be scared of and hate nazi's. For some reason though that sentiment never took root against communists. It did, there was plenty of paranoia and hatred of communists during the Cold War days, we just never fought an actual war against communists (edit: except in Vietnam and Korea, I forgot that for some reason...) Of course, a lot of that Red Scare stuff was just a thin coat of patriotic…

> What is in-vogue, however, is to be a nazi (little n, colloquial meaning, because I know sometimes people like to be pedantic) amongst the American right and alt-right, as the current American President's election has coincided with a revival of right-wing populism and white supremacist identity politics.

Can I offer a different perspective?

A vocal minority on the left likes to assert that everyone on the right is a bunch of nazis but that doesn't make it true nor does it make it "in-vogue". If you move past that broad group ("the right") and just consider the more vocal/visible/strident right-wing activists, they are almost all promoting western civ cultural values, which is not the same thing as "white-supremacy" but irks the multi-cultural crowd quite a bit as it requires making value judgements on other cultures and ideologies (which is not the same thing as making a value judgement on other races or people with particular skin colors). I think the visibility/growth of this group is more of a reaction to the identity politics, multi-culturalism, and intersectionality ideas of the left than to Trump's election.

And if you move past both of those groups to the remaining folks who are indeed advocating for some sort of race or blood based supremacy theory you are talking about a insignificantly small group that has no support anywhere, certainly isn't in-vogue, isn't being "revived" in any substantial way, and mainly serves as the bogeyman that the left uses to smear anyone who disagrees with them.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#195

Post by 5- »

hugh4life wrote: post #35

Extremely lame article... I remember back 10 years ago either google or the internet archive had a temporary search engine that went through the wayback machine... and a lot of interesting things were found. It was through this IIRC that it was discovered that Obama filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported same-sex marriage when that was not his public position at the time. I've always wondered why that…

You appear to be remembering Google publishing their 2001 search index that was briefly available in October 2008: https://www.cnet.com/news/who-were-you-in-2001-check-googles...

Extremely useful thing, I wonder how the legal side of things was managed, even for such a short exposure.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#196

Post by mirimir »

emilfihlman wrote: post #115
devmunchies wrote: post #104

> But Mr Graham argued that simply removing false information or offensive content isn’t necessarily the answer. Hateful material need not remain publicly available, he said, but certain researchers and politicians should be able to study it. They're planting the seed and seeing how the public reacts. This is ridiculous! Mark something "controversial", "possibly fake", but don't memory-hole us. An archive only archiv…

>An archive only archiving history they agree with is not worth the funding. 100%. It reduces the entire point to just voluntarily donating to your favourite think tank or political party, not an "archive".

> Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation.

I hate language like this. I mean, propaganda is not a new thing. And opinions about "misinformation" are extremely subjective. It's not at all uncommon for mainstream media to reflect mainstream biases. Or even biases of governments in power, media owners, etc.

For example, when I first heard of the NSA's Enigma program, mainstream media (if it even mentioned it) discounted it as "conspiracy theory". Or the CIA's Mk Ultra project.

> At a time when false and ultra-partisan content is rapidly created and spread, and social media pages are constantly updated, the importance of having an unalterable record of who said what, when has been magnified.

This I agree with. But access should not be restricted.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#198

Post by count »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #14
count wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't, they take things down if they get a notice, but the majority of their stuff is out of publish, and the company that published it is defunct or doesn't care at this point.

I feel like this can't be the whole truth? I wouldn't, for example, start reprinting bestsellers and merely stop when asked. Imposing an opt-out system on others isn't really how copyright works.

You're stretching the analogy in a whole bunch of ways. They're hosting old, out of print games, not the latest Call of Duty best seller. And the DMCA has a 'D' at the front, because it's different when content is digital, otherwise it'd just be 'copyright'. The DMCA explicitly allows for this method of operation: the Internet Archive, like HN or Reddit or IG or YouTube is a neutral 3rd party, hosting content that users provide. As long as they take that content down when legally notified appropriately of a copyright claim, then the DMCA explicitly says they're good to go. And as another user metioned, the games specifically have an exemption/carveout codified in law: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#199

Post by refurb »

ntzm wrote: post #117
emilfihlman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An archive only archiving history they agree with is not worth the funding. 100%. It reduces the entire point to just voluntarily donating to your favourite think tank or political party, not an "archive".

I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest

This argument is the same used by authoritarian countries like China.

They don’t say criticism of the govt is prohibited, they say that it’s necessary for the security of state. Doesn’t everyone want a secure state?

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#200

Post by abacadaba »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #111

9/11 in the Archive. Go look at all the news websites on September 10th, 2001... and back about a month or two. All empty until 9/11.

Na I remember pretty well, there was literally nothing in the news for months before that, top story was shark attacks or something.
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