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

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

#591

Post by bitwize »

easterncalculus wrote: post #347
bitwize wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ⓘ Claims about censorship in the United States are disputed. Click here for more info: https://xkcd.com/1357/

I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue. I've seen this argument come up all the time as justfication for the destruction of ideas in good faith and rarely ever for actual harassment or intimidation. It's ironcially almost always linked in bad faith, to misreprese…

> I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue.

Because we've learned in the past decade or so that the "marketplace of ideas" fallacy is false. Ideas aren't traded like market goods; rather, they spread like disease. And the way to prevent dangerous ideas like Nazism from threatening society is the same as the way we prevent diseases like COVID from threatening society: containment. Isolate the afflicted, and implement measures to limit the exposure of everyone else.

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

#592

Post by throw2011190740 »

chroem- wrote: post #463
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…

How should we handle misinformation from official sources? It wasn't that long ago the New York Times told the world they had evidence of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, setting off a chain of events that literally killed hundreds of thousands of people. In today's political climate, the misinformation that led to the Iraq War could never have been exposed. Edit: surely I'm not the only one who…

Well, even more recently there have been revelations that one of their sources about the Syrian war has been just some guy who made up all of his story. https://globalnews.ca/news/7350363/rcmp-arrests-abu-huzayfah...

With their recent breaking story of Donald Trump $750 tax, I've been reading through their published article, but have not found any solid evidence for this proposed figure, only just a bunch of links to their previous articles in past years. If anyone can find some actual evidence for the $750 tax bill from the NYT report, I would very much like to see it https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html

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

#593

Post by raxxorrax »

tptacek wrote: post #76
busterarm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism. And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".

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.

QAnon is irrelevant aside from the attention they are getting from their supposed political enemies. You seem to need an image of an enemy. Same with flat earthers. They existed 20 years ago and they were completely irrelevant. Antivax had a lot of people joining because they had partly reasonable objections or trust issues towards official sources and some hobby Don Quijotes with a slight inferiority complex needed to prove themselves by demonizing these groups as if they were the devil. As expected, these groups didn't shrink.

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

#594

Post by throw2011190740 »

fps_doug wrote: post #505
anticodon wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get what any government has to do with it. Almost all information now is consumed via Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. These are private companies that has their own censorship rules and push their own agenda aggressively. Government has no control over this, even USA government as was seen recently when Facebook blocked links to NYT articles and Twitter was censoring Trump twits. All other countries (exce…

Don't get the downvotes either. This is a somewhat valid point. I feel like many people, even here on HN really like to paint the world black and white in this regard. Everything bad we hear about Russia & China must undoubtedly be true, because it's reported by our press, and we have freedom of press, which means that our press never lies or has an agenda. At least when it comes to foreign affairs. So your Facebook…

Here's what I've been saying to my partner recently, "I hardly know what's going on up North of England, or even the other side of London (we live in London), but somehow what we hear about the other side of the world must be true". I find people who hold views whatever they hear in the media to be the absolute truth and that they are well informed because they read a lot of news to be extremely naive. This Mark Twain quote completely represents how I feel:

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

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

#595

Post by mzsmyk »

fomine3 wrote: post #337
blockmarker wrote: post #2

Interesting article. It doesn't look at corporate/social media censorship, but government and ISP censorship is still dangerous. I found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances. Also, ISP censorship on Norway. Corporate overreach, or unofficial cooperation between them and government?…

Really surprising. AFAIK Japan has strict free to speech by constitution. I never heard such censorship except child porn blocking. Any citations? I can't find any source even in Japanese.

That’s probably a false positive. In this thread you have multiple people denying that this ever happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/jwudsb/u_of_michigan...

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

#596

Post by luminary210 »

anticodon wrote: post #557
ordu wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know why Google blocks pro-russian sources, but I know why I'd blocked them, if I could. They are not "pro-russian", they are all "pro-Putin". Any "pro-russian" source that is not "pro-Putin" will become "anti-russian" in a short time, because of activity of other "pro-russian" sources. They just forcibly stick "anti-russian" label on such a source, and here we are. Putin do all he could, to draw an equality…

There's one clear sign that you can find on any Russian anti-Putin and/or pro-liberal blog or channel: that Russian people are lazy, stupid, alcoholics and drug addicts, that Russians never invented anything (all the technology at all times was stolen from Europe and USA), Russia never won any war (including WWII that was "won" exclusively by USA), etc. They go even as far as to declare Russian language "stupid and b…

You are making here general claims from specific cases. It's a logical fallacy. Moreover your claim about Gasan Gusejnov is taken out of context. He said: "кроме того убогого клоачного русского, на котором сейчас говорит и пишет эта страна", i.e. "apart from that sordid and cloacal Russian language in which this country speaks and writes now". It is clear that he didn't mean the Russian language as a whole but the form of Russian language used in oral and written public communication lately.

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

#597

Post by mzsmyk »

muyuu wrote: post #212
lxeiqr wrote: post #159

>Poland blocked human rights sites I'm Polish and although some gambling sites are blocked here (hazard.mf.gov.pl), I haven't heard of a single case of a human rights site being censored.

so maybe it worked flawlessly?

Or it didn’t happen at all

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

#598

Post by mzsmyk »

ed_balls wrote: post #211
natoliniak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is unclear from the article what sites were censored in Poland and by whom (and i couldn't figure it out in the sourced paper). However, if in fact the Polish govt has censored any human rights websites, I feel like that should be bigger news there. AFAIK Poland only blocks access to certain gambling sites, which are publicly listed here: https://hazard.mf.gov.pl/

so is it fake news then?

Yes, it is. Their claims about censorship in Norway and Japan have been confirmed to be false too.

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

#599

Post by throw2011190740 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #532
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, the technological tools for surveillance and censorship are far more effective and widespread today than before. Surveillance might have meant tapping your phone, reading your mail or following you and all the manual labor and cost that entails a few decades ago. Today its conceivable to run a search across every email, call, message, photo, bank transaction, location signal etc a person has quickly and chea…

Although this is fair, we do actually know what a state capable of this looks like. The East German Stasi ended up with records of about 5.6M out of a population of ~16M people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_Records_Agency

I wonder how many records Google hold. What's more is that the CIA has a stake in Google https://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/ I am pretty sure the Google/CIA operation make Stasi's capabilities look like child's play.

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

#600

Post by nzmsv »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #453

The big problem in todays age is we can no longer assume the government is accountable to us, or even get straight answers from the right people there. 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 s…

So Russia's censor meets your stated requirements, I think. There is an official publicly visible blocklist that includes a justification for each blocked site: http://blocklist.rkn.gov.ru/

There is a procedure for challenging a decision to block. All the content on that list is blocked in accordance with some law, it's just that the laws themselves are questionable...

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