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‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

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Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#121

Post by CJefferson »

DrJones1098 wrote: post #82
cogman10 wrote: post #61

I have to wondered how we "fix" our current internet situation. On the one hand, censorship appears to be appealing to stop the tide of misinformation. Anti-vaxx garbage is a prime example of something that should be censored into oblivion. It is actively harmful to the public. But, on the other hand, who pulls the levers of censorship is equally terrifying. I don't want a world where a dissenting opinion is censored…

You can't have both censorship of things you don't like (anti-vaxx things) and no censorship of things you do like. Religion could be classified as mis-information but that helps a lot of people. Who is the final arbitrator of what is determined as misinformation? If one religion took control that one religion could classify another religion as mis-information and censor them. If one political actor took control they…

That sounds like saying we cant have laws which forbid things I don't like, and no laws against things I do like.

We have final arbitrators of truth, they are laws, judges and juries. It isn't a perfect system, and it might not scale, but I see no need to abandon the idea some things are fundamentally incorrect, and get rid of those things.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#122

Post by Symbiote »

neximo64 wrote: post #26

Emmanuel Macron has been getting newspapers to pull down their articles in the past few weeks (the FT usually never removes articles but they did too). I bet barely anyone notices. Interesting that politico sent one straight to print today without an online article first.

I'd prefer the newspaper to highlight the "factual errors" rather than withdraw the article, but they do need to do one of those things to maintain their editorial integrity.

> I bet barely anyone notices.

It took a single search to find plenty of articles covering this.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20201105/france-is-not-fighting-isla...

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#123

Post by eloff »

tptacek wrote: post #76
busterarm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism. And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".

It has never in the history of western civilization been easier for people to inject random claims into the public discourse. Neither Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes nor Otis Chandler at the LA Times would have given an inch of space for QAnon or antivax, but the "giant corporations" you allude to today do so happily, and at a scale no newspaper publisher would have imagined 50 years ago.

It's worse than that, the algorithms these companies use sometimes purposefully promote these random claims because they lead to more user engagement.

For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.

As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#124

Post by free_rms »

artursapek wrote: post #59
war1025 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about this is that nationalism is in general associated with right-leaning politics, and the censorship is far and away being applied more aggressively to those very same right-leaning nationalist groups. You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.

Exactly. There's nothing "nationalist" about the type of censorship we're seeing on Twitter. If anything it's the opposite.

There's a strong undercurrent of Scary Foreign Election Interference to a lot of the pro-censorship arguments, FWIW.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#125

Post by VBprogrammer »

busterarm wrote: post #47
varispeed wrote: post #40

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information…

It's worse than that. We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism. And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".

The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies.

The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#126

Post by AussieWog93 »

varispeed wrote: post #40

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information…

>The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques

I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students. And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#128

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

Cerealkiller050 wrote: post #25
bendbro wrote: post #7

It is extremely dangerous to our democracy to have unlimited free speech. 1. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. 2. Corporations aren't the government, so the first amendment doesn't apply. 3. Haven't your heard of "fire in a movie theater"? 4. Hate speech IS violence. 5. Reading disinformation from un-check-marked, non-fact-checked sources is anti scientific. Since all scientists have check marks, we…

This post is gonna be a good litmus test to see how many people read this comment to the end before they start attacking their keyboards

This is probably the first based HN post, ever? And of course it is flagged to death.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#129

Post by throwaway2245 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #46
varispeed wrote: post #40

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information…

I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education. But I hope I am wrong. Is there any evidence it is possible?

> I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education.

A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.

Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).

Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.

I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.

Re: ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

#130

Post by ketzo »

nprz wrote: post #54

Remember how the usefulness of the internet and social media was championed by media during the Arab Spring movement? Now it's suddenly a threat to our democracy. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/obama-interne...

I mean, in that article, he makes a pretty coherent point:

> Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.

I don't think that's out of place in a conversation about today's internet/media landscape. He's not saying "the internet is bad," or even "social media is bad"; he's saying that the internet clearly has the potential to amplify disinformation to a point that becomes harmful, something I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with.

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