any and all of these become instantly captured by people with a political agenda and used as a propaganda source. which is exactly what they want.
The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
271–280 of 303 posts
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples of Misinformation: scientifically debunked ideas like the idea vaccines cause autism Ideas with zero basis in reality like the idea that most or all mass shootings are actually faked using "crisis actors" Political conspiracy theories like the idea that Bernie Sanders would have been the democratic candidate for president, but was cheated by Hillary Clinton. Misrepresented ideas, like how certain people on t…
> Misrepresented ideas The notion that "misrepresenting ideas" is a form of "misinformation" is chilling. It suggests that there is some privileged point of view regarding any given idea and that anything that contradicts that point of view is "misinformation". Exactly how do you propose to determine what the correct representation is for any particular idea? Isn't it possible that some ideas are not credible and tha…
It’s not about criticism and competing ideas, it’s about trying to force a definition of idea different from what it actually is.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> without the corruption of a profit motive That's a fantasy. The people who provide the money always call the tune, even if it's the government, even if it's donations. A more effective system is one that does not attempt to deny human nature, but takes advantage of it.
If the money comes from listeners (and most of it does) then they are beholden to listeners. It's quite different than being beholden to companies.
I'm pretty sure most of the money does not come from listeners, that's a myth they promulgate. The local stations are mostly rinkydink organizations that raise money from listeners (and say "listener support") and funnel it to the national organization to purchase the programming, but the national organization thrives on govt subsidies and keeps the budgets pretty much secret.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, it is odd. There's also an entire piece of R&D that the BBC are doing that I know people on called "Public Service Internet" https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/public-service-internet
Interesting to read this - has anything come out of that project yet? The BBC generally has quite good online services (e.g. news, iPlayer) but would be interesting to see what this project is thinking about.
> iPlayer
I remember when iPlayer came out: it was _worse_ than what we were already using (Windows Media Center DVR, BitTorrent from UK TV tracker forums) simply due to the content expiration policy… which is downright Orwellian.
I know it’s the fault of overbearing rightsholders, but it was a dark-day overall because a lot of the UK TV tracker sites became a lot less useful because fewer people were seeding and many sites had a strict “No torrents for iPlayer content” rule to avoid being shut-down.
I wish the iPlayer launched with transparent DRM policies that named-and-shamed whichever rightsholder demanded content-expiration - instead of the blanket policy, even when the restrictions are against the wishes of the rightsholder, ugh.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the bigger fish? Could you elaborate?
There are articles on the Internet that say that the US is withdrawing to focus on the great powers competition (basically China). It doesn’t have the extra resources to burn on Afghanistan and Iraq anymore. The US has also drawn down troops from Iraq.
The drawdown from Afghanistan started 10 years ago. The last remnants leaving are largely symbolic from a cost and manpower standpoint.
US soldiers killed in Afghanistan is a reasonable proxy for number of soldiers actively engaged, 2009: 310, 2010: 496, 2011: 412, 2012: 301, 2013: 120, 2014: 2014, 2015: 22, 2016: 14, 2017: 17, 2018: 15, 2019: 22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
Looking at just combat fatalities and the difference is even more obvious. 440 KIA in 2010 down to 11 in 2015.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large content platforms don't curate content, and so incentives are misaligned. I believe "curated content without click-baity incentives" is the kind of thing a "PBS" tries to solve. E.g.: an educational video will be followed by flat-earth conspiracy video if the YouTube algorithm choses so. This sabotages content producers with – in this case – educational intentions, as the platform will make producers compete fo…
The corollary to not empowering anyone to push content is disempowering some from pushing content. That is incredibly bad because gives some the power to limit the voices of others. History shows that this power is abused and that the abuse of this power is worse than disinformation. If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on…
Well said.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take YouTube. There is one of it. PeerTube, however, could potentially encompass all video-hosting sites.
The global http network already encompasses all video-hosting sites. If YouTube were a cluster of PeerTube nodes nothing really changes, all the stated problems associated with YouTube's popularity remain. e.g. if YouTube nodes ban your videos and you have to move to a less popular node, you're facing the exact same problem as you would getting banned from YouTube today.
> The global http network already encompasses all video-hosting sites.
So does the universe. I don't really think this is a relevant observation, given we're talking about user behaviour.
> if YouTube nodes ban your videos and you have to move to a less popular node, you're facing the exact same problem as you would getting banned from YouTube today.
Except users can move to KnockoffTube and still see YouTube videos. A school could use EduTube or ScholasticTube (hypothetical curated educational-resource sites) and not get recommended “video game unboxing” videos in the sidebar – and they wouldn't have to search on EduTube and ScholasticTube separately, because if something's on one it's on the other (modulo some minor curation decisions).
You could also solve this issue by curating search engines, but there are barriers to that; the idea of a search engine has been around for ages, and yet very few curated search engines exist. (Plus, you still have the “autoplay Flat Earth videos” issue, unless you proxy the video in your search engine, in which case congratulations! you've made a video platform.)
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#278PBS should be privately funded.
Then it would respond to and have the same structure as everything else. It's not diversity, it's making everything the same A rich media landscape is about diversity of structure, not about having a bunch of news brands by the same powerful groups in society that are simply demographically targeted to different consumers. Diverse structures producing well funded content. That's how you get a rich media
Diversity of thought is a problem. Diversity as commonly defined only by race is being promoted everywhere.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large content platforms don't curate content, and so incentives are misaligned. I believe "curated content without click-baity incentives" is the kind of thing a "PBS" tries to solve. E.g.: an educational video will be followed by flat-earth conspiracy video if the YouTube algorithm choses so. This sabotages content producers with – in this case – educational intentions, as the platform will make producers compete fo…
The corollary to not empowering anyone to push content is disempowering some from pushing content. That is incredibly bad because gives some the power to limit the voices of others. History shows that this power is abused and that the abuse of this power is worse than disinformation. If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on…
Centralized censorship is dangerous and should be avoided. However, a distributed system of gatekeepers (e.g. newspaper editors prior to the creation of the internet) has its benefits. Competition limits the power of censorship, but the censors still have enough power to keep certain ideas out of the mainstream. This has its downsides too, no doubt. Some of the ideas being suppressed were good ones, but there were benefits as well. As with all things, there are trade offs.
Re: The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Censorship is a tool. The goal was to prevent Daesh / ISIS from recruiting Americans into dying for their cause in Syria / Iraq. The number of US citizens flying out to die in a forsaken war on ISIS's side are miniscule to none. Believe it or not, American citizens were doing this back when the surge was happening. We successfully disrupted their information campaign and their recruitment. And ISIS / ISIL / Daesh is…
They never needed American recruits. This is a sideshow. There are many millions of non-Americans in the world to recruit from, and many non-internet ways to do it.
ISIL didn't exist a few years ago. They only came into existence thanks to foreign recruits.
Americans included of course. But there are recruits from all around the world. Disrupting that recruitment process is one of the shining examples of effective cyber warfare vs ISIL / daesh.
Non-Americans use Facebook, YouTube, and other websites in large numbers.
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ISIL is still trying to recruit from the US websites. We just censor the crap out of them so they make no progress. It's in fact, proof that censorship works in practice.