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One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

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Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#211

Post by KarlKemp »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #154
jl6 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web ser…

Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc. With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barr…

Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions.

Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#212

Post by yywwbbn »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #191
pjc50 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't see 80km from the ground, and it's on the other side of a closed international border and the war itself . Residents of Belgorod can have little to no idea what's happening in Kharkiv other than the news. Well, that and the gigantic explosion of the local oil depot. Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.

Seriously? Imagine an alternate universe where Canada and USA went to war. Do you really think that people in Seattle would have to depend on German social media apps to figure out what goes on in Vancouver while it's being bombed? Seriously?

What would the alternative be if US banned all independent media sources (like Russia did)?

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#213

Post by KarlKemp »

dotancohen wrote: post #38
toxik wrote: post #24

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…

The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the internet. The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise. The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent…

> It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal.

The internet original was little else than implicit promises of such things, if not explicit. “It routes around censorship” and all that…

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#214

Post by KarlKemp »

qiskit wrote: post #174
vages wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outside of serving autoplaying ads NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. I’m not sure about the BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they have a number of great in-house developers that churn out quality content and a great video streaming service (tv.nrk.no).

> NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. Which is britain's equivalent to RT?

That’s the sort of cynicism RT want you to adopt, yes.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#215

Post by nirui »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #182
nirui wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression. The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook d…

> The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies. With all due respect the problem with the internet is that you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is. You and many others believe the Internet is what the internet is capable of. It's not. The…

If I understood it correctly, here is the key point of your comment:

> The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.

To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.

While I do agree a technology should be designed with good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too idealistic.

Most technology that we utilize today were invented not actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge. Further more, technology itself is not static, instead, it iterates too, sometimes by different people in different organization at different place across different time.

Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.

Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.

Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the Internet don't exist.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#216

Post by lambdasquirrel »

hermannj314 wrote: post #193

Aggressor nations have the privilege of lying to themselves on the consequences and reality of their wars. The defenders do not get the privilege to ignore that. Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever wor…

Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did, and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.)

From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn.

The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations.

Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#217

Post by verisimi »

ajross wrote: post #157
verisimi wrote: post #59

This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine. But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not. We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what w…

An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a downvote. The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.

Content moderation is de facto censorship. If someone is sharing a honestly held opinion, not threatening anyone - that should be allowed.

You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc.

Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice?

All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#218

Post by KSPAtlas »

Eduard wrote: post #190
SecondChildSev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC isn't allowed to run ads either. They are also generally can't recommend products without talking about alternatives. Always amusing on kids arts/crafts shows when they name a brand and then have to state other products that are available. They can display adverts under certain circumstances though. Public billboards aren't censored in news reports, and adverts on the sidelines/stands of sporting events (like…

Browsing bbc.co.uk, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60947877 , from outside of UK, half the page estate is dedicated advertisement.

Not here

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#220

Post by FabHK »

Joeri wrote: post #73
dotancohen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the internet. The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise. The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent…

Like the zen koan, does a piece of information exist of no one is around to read it? Self-hosting is mostly pointless because the problem is the walled gardens trapping global attention. Many people barely see a browser window, and consume all online information inside the walled gardens. Whether you publish outside that garden or not it is effectively the same, because they will never see what you write.

> Many people barely see a browser window, and consume all online information inside the walled gardens.

I seem to recall a survey in South East Asia asking people about their internet use, and there were more Facebook users than internet users...

Ah, here: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

"11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet."

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