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

(I'd love said logs)

Personally, I just try to explore what I can. I regularly post on HN because these are computer related investigations or things I find interesting. I was hoping it would lead to interesting discussion about how to validate this stuff, or someone to point out I'm wrong (and thus I could improve my analysis). Don't we all want discourse and to improve our understanding of reality.

I'm just the super curious, I have to know the world to make it better. I also love when I hear some confusion I do FOIA requests, pull data and dive in. I don't care about the results at the start. Exploring the data helps me make informed decisions.

Why can't I ask someone at the government directly exactly what their policy is on blocking websites, which sites are blocked, and what the legal basis for blocking is? And get a real, detailed, authoritative answer? And contest that answer if it does not meet legal standards?

The current standard is far, far removed from that. They can block a site or surveil you without any realistic accountability. The legal system is technically a recourse, but that works only in horribly egregious cases like NSA spying revealed by Snowden, and after years of delay after the case has faded from public consciousness. Even that didn't change anything about how the government acts today. And we would not have known about it if it hadn't been for "illegal" whistleblowing.

When the average person can't even get straight answers from the government about how they govern, let alone influence that policy, that is a failure of democracy. We are trying to solve problems in the democratic functioning of government using technology, but that will only ever be a cat and mouse game. These f decided on their own that mass surveillance & censorship is okay, and we are left trying to use technology to hide when we should be able to demand a national conversation about what kinds of surveillance is okay.

Mike Wallace effectively gave the KKK a forum reaching everybody in the United States... That's much more effective than Twitter.

Your comment doesn't read any better.

The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.

You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.