Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#141

Post by random314 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #70

potamic wrote: post #37

I don't know if many people realize, but this is a pivotal moment for freedom of speech in India. The archaic IT act and National Security Act are already being severely abused to arrest journalists and activists, and the new 2021 rules take this to a completely new level. What they are essentially going for is unrestricted authority on content takedown and traceability of originator of content which will force compa…

>Today, saying that cow dung does not cure covid, can land you in jail because it goes against the government's narrative. I overall agree with the point that many indian authorities have been using laws to punish dissent, but that is a little disingenuous. The specific context in that case was that those comments were made about the death of a BJP leader. So, those people were jailed for mocking the death of a polit…

Nobody was mocked. The BJP leader claimed that cow dung cures covid19. He subsequently died of covid19.

The one sentence post was a PSA that cow dung cures covid19. Nobody was mocked. If you want to see mocking in a free country go here https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/ . India is not a free country.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#142

Post by random314 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #127

kevinwang wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of it before, but just googled it and it looks like it introduced a new exemption for children to work for their families: https://thediplomat.com/2016/08/indias-new-child-labor-law-b...

Yes, I just told you that everybody was lying about the bill.

No. The article goes against what you have been claiming. How did your programmer brain not see the flaws satyarthi is pointing out? Why such shoddy/research or comments on your part?

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#143

Post by random314 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

msravi wrote: post #30

Naushad wrote: post #17

The article misses some more context. 1. The escalation intensified after tweets by prominent ministers and fucntionaries of the ruling government were marked as "manipulated media" 2. The IT Ministers and opposition partys accounts were locked for copyright infringement. 3. The govt wants twitter to comply on removing content and users critical of govt policies. [1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/manipulate…

There is also the context that Twitter refused to remove blatantly false and deliberately incendiary tweets during the farmers' protests in which the Red Fort was breached similar to the Capitol Hill riots. Also, more recently, Twitter has refused to remove clearly manipulated media intended to inflame Hindu-Muslim communal riots.

Placement of a flag on an empty red fort is simply not comparable to a sustained attack and attempt to kill legislators on Capitol hill.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#144

Post by Majromax » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #119

Majromax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance. An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of ke…

This is a conflation between the meanings of the word bias as “a weight” and “an ideological stance”. The thing that people take issue with is generally the latter, rather than the former.

It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better.

Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results.

You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings.

Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#145

Post by swiley » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

potamic wrote: post #37

I don't know if many people realize, but this is a pivotal moment for freedom of speech in India. The archaic IT act and National Security Act are already being severely abused to arrest journalists and activists, and the new 2021 rules take this to a completely new level. What they are essentially going for is unrestricted authority on content takedown and traceability of originator of content which will force compa…

Twitter has not had free speech in a very long time. I would be more concerned about India blocking TOR and self hosted forums.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#146

Post by Majromax » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

mlnj wrote: post #97

Majromax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance. An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of ke…

You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years. Please attempt a simple implementation with the methods you describe and see how it performs over even a non trivial amount of data and you will see the difference in results. And I'm not even considering malicious results gaming the whole system.

> You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years.

I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good."

This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#147

Post by mardifoufs » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

potamic wrote: post #37

I don't know if many people realize, but this is a pivotal moment for freedom of speech in India. The archaic IT act and National Security Act are already being severely abused to arrest journalists and activists, and the new 2021 rules take this to a completely new level. What they are essentially going for is unrestricted authority on content takedown and traceability of originator of content which will force compa…

That sounds a lot like the C-10 bill here in Canada.

And yeah the world is steering towards china like totalitarian censorship, but canadians think that since we are a western liberal democracy (tm) it's all fine because we just couldn't be the baddies. Like when we do it it's fine and justified, because why should we even care about muh rights and muh freedumbz in a free country?? The cognitive dissonance is just maddening at this point.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#148

Post by alex_smart » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

random314 wrote: post #142

alex_smart wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I just told you that everybody was lying about the bill.

No. The article goes against what you have been claiming. How did your programmer brain not see the flaws satyarthi is pointing out? Why such shoddy/research or comments on your part?

>The article goes against what you have been claiming.

Not really, that article is an example of people spreading the lies.

Perhaps it was not clear to you, but my claim in the previous comment was that a, pretty much all liberal voices were saying that bill would weaken the existing child labour laws and b, that all of them were lying. So the fact that you can find many such articles saying those things is not really inconsistent with my claim.

>How did your programmer brain not see the flaws satyarthi is pointing out?

Because they did not exist. Like I said, I read the bill and the law that the bill seeked to amend and found that there was not a single instance or way in which the bill would weaken the child labour law. In fact, in was very significantly strengthening the child labour law.

Look, I know for you it is just one random person speaking on the internet vs hundreds of sources and people that you inherently trust. So, I can understand if your instinct is to not believe what I say and in that case you are welcome to just ignore me and move on.

But if you actually want to get to the bottom of this, then please do read the bill (now act) and the original law, and you will find that I am right. All you would need to prove me wrong will be a single example, however hypothetical or far-fetched, of a situation in which it was earlier forbidden for a child to work that would have been allowed under the new bill.

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#149

Post by alex_smart » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

random314 wrote: post #141

alex_smart wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Today, saying that cow dung does not cure covid, can land you in jail because it goes against the government's narrative. I overall agree with the point that many indian authorities have been using laws to punish dissent, but that is a little disingenuous. The specific context in that case was that those comments were made about the death of a BJP leader. So, those people were jailed for mocking the death of a polit…

Nobody was mocked. The BJP leader claimed that cow dung cures covid19. He subsequently died of covid19. The one sentence post was a PSA that cow dung cures covid19. Nobody was mocked. If you want to see mocking in a free country go here https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/ . India is not a free country.

>The BJP leader claimed that cow dung does not cure covid19.

Source?

>The one sentence post was a PSA that cow dung cures covid19. Nobody was mocked

Now that is just dishonest. Both the posts are available on this link https://theprint.in/india/journalist-activist-jailed-under-n...

How is saying "Cow dung, cow urine didn’t work, oh!!! RIP" after someone's death not mocking them?

Re: Twitter has lost liability protection in India, government says

#150

Post by kevinwang » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #127

kevinwang wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of it before, but just googled it and it looks like it introduced a new exemption for children to work for their families: https://thediplomat.com/2016/08/indias-new-child-labor-law-b...

Yes, I just told you that everybody was lying about the bill.

I see. I did some additional googling and I think you're basically right: the family exemption was already in the original bill, and it was merely kept, not introduced, in the amendment. Row 5 in this quite thorough article [0] shows the similarity/difference.

So I'd wager the reason there was backlash against the bill was that it did not close the exemption, not (as mentioned in the article I posted originally) that it introduced the exemption.

[0]: https://www.right-to-education.org/es/node/850