Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bless your heart. It was actually a trick question: you cannot tell me what “violent extremism” means in this context, because you don’t know. You don’t know because you’re not the one who gets to decide. The only definition that matters is the one held by whoever will be deciding what gets censored and what doesn’t. How might your political adversaries choose to apply a filter on “violent extremism”? I could easily…
>It was actually a trick question: you cannot tell me what “violent extremism” means in this context, because you don’t know. You don’t know because you’re not the one who gets to decide. Oh, ok. The powers that be. The shadowy cabal. The unseen hand which controls all aspects of society with absolute and arbitrary power. I thought I was going to be able to have a rational, intellectually satisfying discussion but on…
Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
211–220 of 337 posts
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
4Chan and LiveLeak have both been blocked (via DNS) in Australia and New Zealand. So, the scrutiny albeit region specific has occurred.
I don't think you understood my point. Blocking websites is not scrutiny of the intelligence services. I'm saying an individual with weapons doxed himself and telegraphed his intentions on a public forum and the security services completely missed it. That could all have been be picked up without any new laws or intervention from Facebook. We need to analyse how it was missed and learn from it.
I agree with your comments entirely.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#213This 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. The interesting thing is that this really doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. Consider weapons treaties, like the UN ones banning the use of land mines and cluster munitions. The only countries that have signed them either don't have any reason to use them, or are allied with a nation that hasn't signed that treaty. This is much the same…
Hell 4chan trolls moderation with really bad content for sport from time to time. I hate to go there but I think its sometimes necessary to see it happen to prove that laws dont stop people already violating laws from gasp violating laws. You cant moderate them IRL what makes you think you can stop them online?
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#214This 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.
If extremism couldn't be effectively spread, extremists wouldn't bother trying. But they put quite a lot of effort into recruiting and propaganda.
For those interested, I strongly recommend Neiwart's "Alt-America": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MT2KCB2/
He's a journalist who in the 80s and 90s was covering extremists (e.g. violent white supremacists, "patriot" militias). He makes a very good case that the Internet has been an enormous boon, enabling significant growth and normalization.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#215Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I didn't see any people protecting ISIS's free speech. Now that this censorship is targeting other hate speech, suddenly everyone is shouting "free speech". The fact is, most people calling for free speech don't truly believe in it, they just want to be able to spout their own version of hate.
FWIW, there were a small group of people raising concerns about how the government went about shutting down "terrorist" websites after 9/11 but it largely fell on deaf ears. These people have been ideologically consistent, but they're outside of the political mainstream.
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Huh? The US has been very aggressive about shutting down websites that spread Al-Qaeda and ISIS propaganda on most websites" You mean like archive.org? That's the website I've seen hosting all the ISIS shit.
True, there's a few other "ISIS archives" that are used largely by intelligence analysts, journalists, historians, and academics for study. But I don't think NZ is saying "Hey journalists and academics, don't study a dump of 8chan!"
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#218It'd be great if people who want to explore this as a free speech issue would engage with the question of what happens to the free speech (and other) rights of people who are killed by extremists, and whether they are more or less important than the rights of people who advocate such killings.
The comparison isn't between 40 people's right to live vs every terrorist's right to free speech. It's between some probabalistic chance that 40 people's right to live isn't violated in the future due to these actions, versus some probabalistic chance of millions of innocent people being silenced and having their privacy violated in various ways due to the collateral damage from this kind of policy making for the for…
Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#219Re: Tech companies and governments sign up to Christchurch Call agreement
#220Everyone decried censorship, but always fails to provide an alternative to try and stop extremism online.
So now, what is extremism?