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I built ByteDance's censorship machine

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Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#71

Post by sudosysgen »

gnarbarian wrote: post #69
908B64B197 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what should we, western nations, do about this? Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?

Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.

That's simply not profitable. We're a society driven by the profit motive. There is a vanishingly small amount of profit to be made there.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#72

Post by 908B64B197 »

viklove wrote: post #70
gnarbarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.

"So how do we do it?" "Just do it." It's easy to say that, but it's obviously not working in the real world. You have to create incentive structures that reward the desired behavior.

Not only that but such a network would be pretty hard to moderate.

And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#73

Post by sudosysgen »

rchaud wrote: post #62
gumby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with ap…

> I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means. OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.

This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#74

Post by sudosysgen »

jryle70 wrote: post #56
throw373782 wrote: post #34

Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...

> Anonymous source? Check. > Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China, despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous source is the norm. It has to be.…

Isn't Chinese surveillance and censorship completely out in the open? Why would there need to be an Edward Snowden? There is already gobs of evidence of total surveillance, so why would someone risk their skin to expose what is already known and established fact?

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#75

Post by halfjoking »

reducesuffering wrote: post #67
halfjoking wrote: post #61

This is what corporate media wants in America. The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...

What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors…

I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-wing media.

He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals."

But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams.

Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#76

Post by gnarbarian »

sudosysgen wrote: post #71
gnarbarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.

That's simply not profitable. We're a society driven by the profit motive. There is a vanishingly small amount of profit to be made there.

Email itself isn't profitable either, but we pay for things that help us with it like spam blocking and outlook

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#77

Post by sudosysgen »

gnarbarian wrote: post #76
sudosysgen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not profitable. We're a society driven by the profit motive. There is a vanishingly small amount of profit to be made there.

Email itself isn't profitable either, but we pay for things that help us with it like spam blocking and outlook

Sure, but email didn't have to compete with anything before it. And even then today email has turned into a surveillance nightmare, not the ideal of the comment above.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#78

Post by [deleted] »

vmception wrote: post #41
xwolfi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

Correct, its not binary. Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets. We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to diss…

[deleted]

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#79

Post by AntiImperialist »

zepto wrote: post #43
throw373782 wrote: post #34

Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...

> Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence here? How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of those who don’t express them ?

He's obviously talking about those who express them.
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