‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

Post by treeman79 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 3:09 AM UTC

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #410

tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 rep…

Post by treeman79 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 3:12 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #265

newguy1234 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entertai…

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…

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

cortic wrote: post #367

tstrimple wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 repea…

Post by frankbreetz » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #436

hliyan wrote: post #434

I'm coming to the realization that misinformation has to be combatted at the ear and not the mouth. I feel the world needs to go through a learning period where everyone realizes that whatever they read on the Internet is default false and they need to verify before they believe anything. In the least they need to verify credibility of sources, if not individual articles or tweets. I suppose what we're experiencing n…

> I feel the world needs to go through a learning period where everyone realizes that whatever they read on the Internet is default false The world had 50+ years to learn this about the TV, but didn't. Don't hold your breath.

Post by doktrin » Thu, Nov 19, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

birktj wrote: post #331

na85 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 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. [1]: https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk