Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship? • Hacker News Board

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#41

Post by LinuxBender » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #38

kingsuper20 wrote: post #37

The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up. Please go on.

This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.

If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add something like this to the My filters

  ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; )
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  ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; )
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  ycombinator.com##.cce:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.cdd:style(color: #000 !important; )

Change the color to match your preference.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#42

Post by bostik » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

soltero wrote: post #5

Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content. Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications".

>Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß]

Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate.

ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#43

Post by abnry » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

plerpin wrote: post #14

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and y…

The thing is, you've had Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling promote vitamin C as a panacea. Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something about philosophy/religion. Scientists using their credentials to give credence to whatever their particular argument in whatever domain is nothing new. In fact, it is part of what the Weinstein's general critique of the scientific realm is. Perhaps they lack the self-awareness to see when they do it themselves, but in my mind, no way are you going to somehow paint them as _worse_ than any other PhD scientist talking with their credentials.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#44

Post by whatshisface » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #43

plerpin wrote: post #14

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and y…

The thing is, you've had Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling promote vitamin C as a panacea. Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something about philosophy/religion. Scientists using their credentials to give credence to whatever their particular argument in whatever domain is nothing new. In fact, it is part of what the Weinstein's general critique of the scientific realm is. Perhaps they lack the self-…

>Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something about philosophy/religion.

It may be hard to imagine now, but at the time several major religious institutions had hard positions on subjects his biological knowledge was relevant to. His writings were instrumental in bringing about the retreat of those institutions from certain corporeal claims.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#45

Post by fighterpilot » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #41

enraged_camel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.

If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add something like this to the My filters ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c5a:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c88:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c9c:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycom…

It'd be cool to have an option in the user's HN profile/account that they can toggle if they want to hide the greying out

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#46

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #40

plerpin wrote: post #14

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and y…

I believe the Latin name for your post is ad hominem i.e. "Weinstein is a bad person." Maybe you could address what he actually said, instead of attacking him & Heather? I watched the video [1] I assume you're talking about. The word "reactive" is never spoken (I searched). While I do buy iodized salt and I'm not worried about it, their concerns about getting too MUCH iodine are measured and well-spoken. The concerns…

[deleted]

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#47

Post by maverick-iceman » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously.

Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore.

People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community.

Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview.

Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#48

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

ndndksksl wrote: post #27

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell. Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did. As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation. So far, attempts to regula…

Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook.

But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#49

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:33 PM UTC

ndndksksl wrote: post #27

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell. Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did. As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation. So far, attempts to regula…

One of the problem of such networks is permanency of something that we still treat as spoken word. If posts were ephemeral, they would present much less of an attack surface for various digital mobs.

Maybe there should be an option for users to limit their comment lifetime to N minutes. With N starting somewhere around 5. Of course, you can do this manually, but a semiautomatic mechanism would work better.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#50

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

kingsuper20 wrote: post #32

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell. Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.

The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.