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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

#621

Post by raxxorrax »

tootie wrote: post #612
raxxorrax wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass surveillance induces censorship and has a chilling effect on speech, so it is arguably true that security agencies violated the constitution they are sworn to protect.

Strong disagree. The potential damage done by mass surveillance would be against private communication, not public. Intelligence agencies can and do gather a lot of intelligence by just observing publicly-shared information. And considering the surveillance excesses observed since the war on terror has unfolded, there has been no discernible decrease in speech freedom nor has anyone ever been provably prosecuted or p…

I do think the chilling effect from big brother remains and we don't know if intelligence agencies collect about people, building profiles for example.

What I know is that agencies couldn't produce evidence of data collection helping with their mission. And it becomes a problem if the work too closely with political parties in my opinion.

What I do have seen is panicking about certain people that could gather some crowds and we do know that intelligence agencies like to disturb a civil right movement or two. I demand performance from people payed by taxes and they cannot deliver.

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

#622

Post by grillvogel »

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…

probably things are different now, but in the "old days" school assignments didnt consider internet sources to be "real" sources and you had to use books etc for your reports

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

#623

Post by dheera »

unishark wrote: post #494
dheera wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this age among democracies it also isn't just governments that are blocking content -- it's companies that play gatekeeper in communications between people. People have stopped reading traditional forms of interpersonal communication, so my only way to get messages out to friends is through platforms like Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook themselves like to play gatekeeper on what my friends see and don't see, whi…

Is this because you haven't confirmed your identity? I presume that is for stopping the alleged bot campaigns trying to affect elections. Or is there a setting somewhere to block political-looking posts? Because this would be awesome. I heard something about 3rd party software claiming such a feature but I wouldn't trust them.

I don't think so. I just notice that when I post something Facebook puts a election-related warning below the post, and that seems to be correlated with visibility. So I do various things like misspelling words to stump Facebook's AI and force them to treat it like a neutral post that they don't understand. I don't want their algorithms trying to understand my content or downranking external links. I want them to play the role of blind message passing between friends.

Here's one example of what I do on Facebook. Unicode upside down, misspelling deliberately, and blocking out parts of words in the image to stump their OCR algorithms.

https://i.imgur.com/OtPxeKA.png

It's essentially the same thing one has to do to get things through the China GFW, we now have our very own version in the US courtesy of FB.

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

#624

Post by chordalkeyboard »

raxxorrax wrote: post #590
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a way to vet information from official sources?

Yes, requesting evidence. If they say it is secret, you should conclude the info is false because it very likely is. If there is strategic need to hold it secret, which would probably be < 1% of cases, the public needs a trustable delegate witness. How much trust the witness has is decided by the public.

playing devil's advocate here: If they need evidence, they can just manufacture some, and you're not going to be the one who inspects it. a chosen expert is going to inspect it and go on television assuring everyone "yes this is genuine evidence." all they really need is the video of the expert and maybe a .pdf that 1% of us will read (and be unable to vet its claims).

The various members of the public may have different opinions on the trustworthiness of the witness which means that the government can just make sure that whatever action they are taking is to the benefit of one of these groups and surf on their approval.

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

#625

Post by chordalkeyboard »

raxxorrax wrote: post #553
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this means is having everything which lends itself to monopoly to democratic control, not private control, and to work together to make democratic control as efficient, localized and legitimate as possible. How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us? How do you feel about the notion that the rich and powerful are well acquain…

> How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us? Better than a warlord forcing their values on us, even if the majority often seems lacking and with the exception that you are the warlord. I agree that governments could do a better job at letting people pick their values themselves, especially with the current Victorian approaches edit…

> Better than a warlord forcing their values on us, even if the majority often seems lacking and with the exception that you are the warlord.

I agree that its better. Would you say its a coincidence that if that question was posed to the warlord he would give a similar answer? "better than starving to death, growing up in a chaotic anarchistic hellhole with no stable values imposed, or being murdered by a warlord because of who you are rather than what you did"

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

#626

Post by leanstartupnoob »

lliamander wrote: post #376
leanstartupnoob wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a private company with zero legal authority to enforce anything other than not sharing your tweets. Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.

I honestly think you should stop trying to read minds. You aren't very good at it. Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.

> All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.

Ergo, what you really want is government to enforce your version of free speech through "existing" contract law.

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

#627

Post by chrisco255 »

konjin wrote: post #317
fantod wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every lockdown entails tracking of individuals.

And 9/11 would have not been stopped by forcing everyone to take their shoes off before getting on the plane. Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.

Yeah, another 9/11 was basically stopped by adding locked compartments and training the pilots in self-defense techniques, some of which are even armed.

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

#628

Post by chrisco255 »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #174
chrisco255 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor". They've used all sorts of manufactured consensus techniques to get us into unjust wars or to give up our liberties (i.e. mass surveillance, lockdowns, etc) for over-blown threats. We aren't going to get education from the government. Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.

Not disagreeing with most of what you're saying here, just wondering if you mean manufactured consent, like the Herman and Chomsky book, not consensus.

Yes, I was referring to Chomsky's "manufactured consent", but I suppose consensus works as well here.

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

#629

Post by lliamander »

leanstartupnoob wrote: post #626
lliamander wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think you should stop trying to read minds. You aren't very good at it. Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.

> All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced. Ergo, what you really want is government to enforce your version of free speech through "existing" contract law.

Can you please tell me what "my version" of free speech is? Is this different from the normal understanding of free speech? Because I haven't actually said anything about "free speech" other than quoting Jack Dorsey.

While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:

* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.

* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.

* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS

Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.

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

#630

Post by chrisco255 »

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #402
CrazyPyroLinux wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda. I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censo…

. . . for example: "open debate" will accomplish nothing, if we are continually spending time debating whether or not racism and genocide are immoral. We fought wars over this. I am very much for "free speech" - but at some point, you have to shut certain topics out of reasonable debate, because at the end of the day, if we have to keep debating things like this, we've learned nothing.

You're not really for free speech if you're arguing that any topic is off limits. Sometimes even playing the devil's advocate for a "bad" topic can be illuminating and can help strengthen and deepen your own understanding of why racism or genocide are immoral.
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