Politics aside this isn't going to be technically possible apart from plain SMS. iMessage and WhatsApp are encrypted so it won't be possible to intercept and fact check them.
Wait until end-to-end encryption is illegal.
Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
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Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#12The original Politico article says the DNC plans to "work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation" and has no further information about what that entails.
The Politico White House Correspondent has clarified in a tweet[1] that "Outside groups are attempting to flag to SMS carriers false information campaigns that are driving misinformation on vaccines."
So it appears the goal is to specifically identify the misinformation campaigns. Since it's non-governmental, "outside groups", doing the identification I think that'd mean the information they're using to do this is, if not outright publicly available, at least acquirable/purchasable by arbitrary companies already.
So at this point my conclusion is that no text messages sent by private individuals will be read as part of this that weren't already available to the highest bidder (e.g. for advertising/tracking purposes). Further, there's no indication that any private text messages at all will be modified, corrected, or made to include fact-check warnings or anything like that based on their content.
And as described it could be even be as benign as asking people if they've gotten text message spam with that misinformation and trying to look for a pattern.
[1] https://twitter.com/natashakorecki/status/141471637838542438...
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#13What can regular people even do about this? It's a disgusting overreach if it ends up happening. And if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.
Regulation, unfortunately, probably can’t solve this.
Imagine that we had the most thoroughly crafted law imaginable to prevent private messages from being blocked or modified.
You still have to take those companies to court, which cost a ton of money, fight them over years, and even if you win, then what?
The only workable strategies I see at this point are to fight to preserve individual choice, and the ability to connect point-to-point.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#14Politics aside this isn't going to be technically possible apart from plain SMS. iMessage and WhatsApp are encrypted so it won't be possible to intercept and fact check them.
Both Apple and Facebook support this type of censorship.
As do many of their employees.
You don’t even need to make encryption illegal. You just need to backdoor it. Trivial for one or two well-placed developers.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#15What can regular people even do about this? It's a disgusting overreach if it ends up happening. And if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.
The same thing people are doing under other repressive regimes like the ones in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others (China comes to mind but the CCP has been quite successful in suppressing dissent): stop using open channels, start using encrypted [1] communications for things which go outside of the currently mandated narrative, assume your communications are being monitored by "the Party" so make sure to appear to be a good citizen when using open communication channels unless you're willing to suffer the consequences. Also, make sure to vote wisely the next time and hold whatever candidate you vote for to his promises. Don't just follow whatever stupid narrative you're being fed, think for yourself.
> ...if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.
If those private companies serve as the regime's lackeys doing their bidding to monitor citizens communications they should not be treated like private companies but as state actors.
[1] where encrypted should be read as "encrypted without _NSAKEY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)" et al.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#16The more reputable source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/biden-covid-vaccina... > Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination beca…
'More reputable' is subjective based on your own bubble and frame of reference. The OP's link is 'right biased' your link is 'left biased'. I generally try to read a little bit of everything, with a huge grain of salt, and there is no way to read this action as anything other than 'oppressive' imo. Just look at the whole lab leak fiasco for a very recent example of why this type of censorship is awful for both truth…
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Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#17What can regular people even do about this? It's a disgusting overreach if it ends up happening. And if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.
Stop voting the blatantly conglomerated collusion that is Big Tech + MSM + DNC.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#18Based on current behavior of cancel culture, I don’t think generation Z truly appreciates the nightmare they are headed for. 20 years from now someone is going to come out of the woodwork with a tweet, text message, social media post, or heaven for bid only fans, and completely destroy someone’s life. The Internet is forever, and private companies are making that so.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#19In short:
DNC seeks to implement global surveillance of any SMS or chat medium to do pattern recognition and "fact check" insertion, which won't in any way lead to any type of bad or otherwise unintended side-effects or potential abuses at all, ever.
There are few things I justify as worthy of the implementation of such a measure (I mean, I'm sure it's possible I'll think or hear of one some day) but I still find any mention of contemporary issues as a justification for doing so unconvincing against the potential for abuse.
If true, would be political suicide to hopefully any reasonable individual. Also, saw a ZeroHedge article before it was flagged on HN. Feel like I just pulled off an achievement.
Re: Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages
#20"Zero Hedge (or ZeroHedge)[b] is a far-right[12] libertarian[17] financial blog,[13][14] presenting staff-written articles and aggregating news and opinions from external sources."