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Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

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Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#181

Post by darcys22 »

azth wrote: post #164
yesenadam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So uh, why do you put Australia in your two-especially-scary-governments-in-the-world list? That seems extremely odd to me. Sydney here. I've seen oblique mentions like this a couple of times on here recently and asked about it, as I've no idea what would inspire such a comment, but no-one answered until now. Well, for one thing, we don't have nuclear weapons pointed at anyone...

The narrative is that the Australian government is enforcing authoritarian lockdowns and mandates on its population.

Melbourne here, its not that bad.

The narrative is mostly being spun but the anti-lockdown parties in the USA trying to push their own agenda.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#182

Post by dragonwriter »

toss1 wrote: post #94
dragonwriter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology As a share of current events information , it was greater, often virtually monopolistic, for not just “yellow journalism” generally but often a fairly unified single viewpoint of yellow journalism. (In terms of divisiveness, the actual problem today isn't greater proportional influence of yellow j…

I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now. Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'. Both are unacceptable in sustainable society. Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly…

> I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now.

That it is not new in either existing or the extent of it's influence of public perceptions of events outside immediate perception is a very good reason to not view the current situation as an unprecedented crisis posing an imminent existential threat to ordered society that requires slashing political freedom of expression in the hopes that it might curtail yellow journalism without creating something far worse.

> Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'.

No, it's more like saying the current manner of discrimination is manifestly less bad than when we had overt chattel slavery, so countermeasures that would not have been justified to deal with chattel slavery would, a fortiori, not be justified to deal with present discrimination.

Except that, of course, the kind of extreme measures that would even arguably not have been justified to address chattel slavery aren't actually on the menu for dealing with modern day discrimination, but tossing aside freedom of speech and the press to empower state censorship as a tool to combat yellow journalism is, for some reason, something people are actively campaigning for.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#183

Post by dragonwriter »

anjbe wrote: post #111
toss1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now. Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'. Both are unacceptable in sustainable society. Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly…

The point of bringing up Schenck is that reasonable ideas can be and have been used to justify great wrongs, and thus that we shouldn’t rush into action whenever we see a problem, even if there’s a principle that rings true. “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” What killed the yellow journalism of the past? Was it added restrictions on speech? Or was it something else that we could c…

> What killed the yellow journalism of the past?

Nothing; the golden age of neutral journalism people describe a decline from to today is just when the institutions of yellow journalism all got on the same page and sang in harmony from the same propaganda hymnbook.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#184

Post by jlawson »

mdanger007 wrote: post #83
roenxi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people calling for that have really not thought their positions through. The SV companies have a lot of flaws, but they do appear to be genuine in their belief that their censorship is helping. That is arrogant and not good enough ... but there isn't going to be a better option. The alternatives to them having control enable people who are more arrogant, less able and do more damage when mistakes inevitably get m…

I can't take "censorship" arguments seriously on 2 accounts. Firstly, information is not egalitarian: Information is better supported and more relevant than others. No one saying a baby screaming in a movie theater is being censored. Secondly, social media has its own rules for speech almost diametrically opposed to government and academic. I regularly come across crazy claims from anti-vaxers like "the virus 2 micro…

>"the virus 2 microns. too small for masks to capture."

This is literally true; it's just incomplete given the relationship with saliva as you noted.

The solution here is to reply and spread more true knowledge.

You can cite super-narrow cases constructed to make censorship seem like a great idea. Within the limited bounds of those examples, the argument may seem to hold water. But in reality, there is no way to limit the power of censorship to the places where it's right to use. It will always be abused, and today it is being abused massively to suppress reasonable ideas from millions of people because they don't flatter the values of the people who happen to hold power.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#185

Post by emerged »

systemvoltage wrote: post #117
christophilus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang. I wish every platform had a dang. The world would be a much better place.

I love dang and this also sounds very authoritarian.

Authoritarianism is fine so long as it’s dang.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#186

Post by seneca »

throwoutway wrote: post #170
seneca wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I think the actual entity to be scorned here is NPR, not the laureates. They seem to be twisting the meaning of the speech to promote some other agenda, and in one case outright fabricating the connection.

Is there a way to report this to NPR? Perhaps someone in charge of of journalism integrity

I believe this would typically be the ombudsman.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#187

Post by emerged »

tomnipotent wrote: post #89
ForHackernews wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least governments (in a democracy) are subject to public scrutiny and accountable to the electorate. As far as I can tell, the big tech firms aren't answerable to anyone.

You can stop using Google, Facebook, or Apple and not be a customer. You do not get this choice with your government, regardless of the electoral process.

People are also free to stop taking opiates, alcohol, crack, or to stop gambling. Yet these things wreck unbelievable havoc on our society because a vast swath of the human population is not psychologically, even biochemically, capable of stopping themselves from doing these things.

Human agency has its limits because humans don’t have precise rational control over their own behavior. Otherwise we’d all eat sleep and exercise flawlessly for our entire lives… and we wouldn’t keep refreshing the front page of HN every 30 minutes.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#188

Post by emerged »

Jefenry wrote: post #45
cletus wrote: post #28

> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts? This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth. You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just s…

> There is no universal objective truth. So you're saying it's true that there's no objective truth?

I believe they are saying that, for example, whether or not there is universal objective truth doesn’t have a universally objectively true answer.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#189

Post by perl4ever »

8note wrote: post #142
perl4ever wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen it claimed that in the US, elections are significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, in the sense that, while prisoners may not vote, they are counted as inhabitants of the county they are imprisoned in, so they increase representation of those who can vote nearby. Locations of prisons tend to be rural and have very different demographics from the places where prisoners would otherwise be living. Decid…

I think it's obviously where the prison is. Their vote should be able to impact the conditions of the prison

The prisoners don't necessarily outnumber the locals outside, so I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that they will be able to.

But another way to look at it, is that by being counted as part of the population in the vicinity of the prison, it provides an incentive to have prisons and to incarcerate people, and it also reduces the representation of the places prisoners come from.

Re: Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

#190

Post by clairity »

christophilus wrote: post #134
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're "beholden to the voters" only in an aggregated sense. Most democracies are representative, so if there's an elite consensus around an issue, it's easy to end up in a situation where a few unpopular policies get enacted or a few popular policies don't. This is ultimately too niche of a topic for many people to be single-issue voters about.

This, and at least in the US, your choice is really between two candidates who are— in practice— virtually identical on most issues. Want to vote for a pro-privacy, anti-war, anti-monopoly, fiscally responsible, forward-thinking candidate? Great. Your candidate will get 0.0001% of the votes. The Republican and Democrat machines don’t give anyone else a chance.

> "Want to vote for a pro-privacy, anti-war, anti-monopoly, fiscally responsible, forward-thinking candidate?"

yes! that's totally me in a nutshell. i'm hoping more and more people realize the hegemony that the two-party system represents and votes against it en masse. we need more people standing up against the consolidation of power and wealth in all its forms. that's the only way we return to a healthy and dynamic society.

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