Everyone decried censorship, but always fails to provide an alternative to try and stop extremism online.
What constitutes ‘extremism’? It’s a term so vague as to be practically meaninglessness.
Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
201–210 of 337 posts
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#202This just sounds like a giant can of worms that is going to blow up in people's faces. Remove for a moment any potential future government alignments, just so we aren't talking about hypothetical fictitious governments. Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it. Indonesia has harsh religious laws, crack downs on illegal reporting, and literally raids on LGBTQ gatherings. The Senegal government arbitra…
That's a strawman, plus nazis/white nationalists are groups that actually spread anti-LGBTQ propaganda
Sorry, that’s not what a straw man fallacy is. You may not agree that the danger of censorship misuse is high but it’s not fallacious.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#203This just sounds like a giant can of worms that is going to blow up in people's faces. Remove for a moment any potential future government alignments, just so we aren't talking about hypothetical fictitious governments. Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it. Indonesia has harsh religious laws, crack downs on illegal reporting, and literally raids on LGBTQ gatherings. The Senegal government arbitra…
That being said, India blocked reddit a few days after the Pakistan attack earlier this year.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#204This just sounds like a giant can of worms that is going to blow up in people's faces. Remove for a moment any potential future government alignments, just so we aren't talking about hypothetical fictitious governments. Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it. Indonesia has harsh religious laws, crack downs on illegal reporting, and literally raids on LGBTQ gatherings. The Senegal government arbitra…
"Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it." You picked three. How about Australia, Canada, European Commission, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. Are you going to examine those? Most of those are the most free, most protective countries. "The hate isn't "spreading through social media" the hate and the fear were alread…
> It absolutely has made the problem worse in otherwise reasonable societies.
I'm genuinely curious, has it really? I wonder if it's just more widely reported?
I tried looking up terrorism statistics and found this: https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism
For most countries, it doesn't look like much has changed from 1970-2017.
I glanced at hate crime stats on the FBI website (just looking at 2008 and 2017), with 7,783 and 7,175 crimes reported for each year). So not much change there either.
Obviously this is a half-assed attempt, but I just wanted to counter the idea that the world is falling apart. Hopefully someone who has more interest in these things can provide some studies with more comprehensive statistics.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube permits a lot of demonetized videos they don't dare to sell advertising on, or (previously) that YouTubers wouldn't give permission to sell advertising on, because the alternative of erasing the videos would send the YouTubers and their viewers to DailyMotion or Vimeo. As long as the demonetized viewers occasionally watch a non-demonetized video, or the sometimes-demonetized YouTubers occasionally make non-de…
That's a weaker incentive, though. And it comes with a risk of occasional scandals that scare away advertisers, at least temporarily. I don't think incentives are enough to predict what YouTube will do. The future is uncertain, there are a lot of policies that could plausibly make money, and the decision-makers are people who read the news and have opinions about what's right, not paperclip maximizers. Politics matte…
True!
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#206This just sounds like a giant can of worms that is going to blow up in people's faces. Remove for a moment any potential future government alignments, just so we aren't talking about hypothetical fictitious governments. Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it. Indonesia has harsh religious laws, crack downs on illegal reporting, and literally raids on LGBTQ gatherings. The Senegal government arbitra…
> The hate isn't "spreading through social media" the hate and the fear were already there.
This is an idea worth examining more closely. In one view, social media acts as simply a passive reflection of an existing culture; in another, social media reproduces that culture which later becomes (in part) a reflection of social media etc. The causality goes both ways.
Organised white supremacists have decided that social media can also be used to help steer society, and it can be -and is- used as a recruitment vector, two things that wouldn't be possible if the 'passive reflection' model was accurate.
For what it's worth, I'm undecided as to whether this particular proposed response is workable or harmful or effective or whether it risks liberties collaterally. But I view that as a separate question from whether social media plays a significant role in white nationalist recruitment.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#207The Christchurch shooter amassed a cache of weapons, and also posted a copy of his manifesto and a link to his real Facebook account to 4chan. The censorship/Facebook algorithms amplifying abhorrent content debate is one thing but I'm surprised by the lack of scrutiny of the security services over this. Especially for a member of the 5 Eyes. I can't help but feel this could have been prevented without any of the chan…
The Royal Commission of Inquiry is just beginning and will specifically focus on what the relevant agencies did, or failed to do.
One of the questions the public is asking them is why White Supremacy is not mentioned in 10 years of NZ SIS and GCSB reports. For readers unfamiliar with the agencies involved, the NZ SIS is NZ's domestic intelligence agency, whereas the GCSB is ostensibly focused on foreign intelligence.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#208> Tech companies and governments sign up
Two wolves and a sheep vote on what's for dinner. What's for dinner being our most fundamental rights as citizens.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent didn't imply it was. Freedom is often lost incrementally. Framing that basic fact of history as a logically fallacy is unwise.
>Parent didn't imply it was. Yes, they did. The purpose of suggesting that "extremism" as a term is "so vague as to be meaningless" is to imply precisely that. It's a common enough rhetorical tactic that it can be taken for granted in any thread where speech or censorship (particularly of what is considered right or far-right politics) is the subject. Extremism in context has a commonly understood definition, and cla…
My point was not that ‘extremism’ does not have a definition; my point was that what content falls under that definition is very much subjective. I could have phrased my original comment better.
Obviously, the drafters of this agreement had certain types of content in mind. But those people are not the ones who will be implementing the policy.
The types of content targeted by this kind of policy depend very much on who is making the decisions.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Let's just examine the governments currently signed to it." You picked three. How about Australia, Canada, European Commission, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. Are you going to examine those? Most of those are the most free, most protective countries. "The hate isn't "spreading through social media" the hate and the fear were alread…
> It absolutely has made the problem worse in otherwise reasonable societies. I'm genuinely curious, has it really? I wonder if it's just more widely reported? I tried looking up terrorism statistics and found this: https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism For most countries, it doesn't look like much has changed from 1970-2017. I glanced at hate crime stats on the FBI website (just looking at 2008 and 2017), with 7,783…
Many people seem unaware of how bad the 70s were, and that definitely predates Facebook.
https://www.npr.org/2015/04/05/396359930/explosive-protests-...
I suspect people just like to have a boogeyman to blame so that they feel they have more understanding or control of the situation than they actually do. "It's a bad situation and we don't know what the cause is or how to fix things" isn't something you'll hear very often, particularly from politicians.