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

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401–410 of 645 posts

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

#401
This is the tip of the iceberg.

We already knew that governments censor Human rights and leaks proving war-crimes and false flags. Even the UK puts journalists in prison.

But today it has grown to the censorship of Doctors and Scientists, because they have better insight in what is really happening than the governments. That is because the governments are guided by lobbyists.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor". They've used all sorts of manufactured consensus techniques to get us into unjust wars or to give up our liberties (i.e. mass surveillance, lockdowns, etc) for over-blown threats. We aren't going to get education from the government. Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.

> Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda. I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censo…

. . . for example: "open debate" will accomplish nothing, if we are continually spending time debating whether or not racism and genocide are immoral. We fought wars over this.

I am very much for "free speech" - but at some point, you have to shut certain topics out of reasonable debate, because at the end of the day, if we have to keep debating things like this, we've learned nothing.

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

#403
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you or the responders read the article? This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation. It's not. The part about the United States says this: > While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widesp…

HN really needs a way to force people to have at least clicked on the article before posting. Maybe something where the article has to be clicked on, and then a X minute timer is started so that people will be strongly incentivized to read the article before commenting.

HN self-policed fine back when caustic takedowns of incorrect comments were normal/expected/rewarded. But in the dang era of "comments must be nice" you get more upvotes by regurgitating HN-friendly views quickly based on the headline than by reading the article, so of course people respond to that incentive.

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be a mistake, not an intentional lie.

It’s such an egregious mistake that you’d have to assume the rest of their data is similarly worthless.

I agree. I mean, were I not a skeptic I'd be walking around dropping the interesting tidbit that "Norway blocks match.com" - it's as bad as the info-memes with nonsense on them people quote from facebook.

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

#405

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…

Agree. Another big problem I've noticed is that there are so many partisan news sources. If you are liberal, you go to CNN which has a liberal spin to it. If you are conservative, fox news. The problem is each one is adding their own biases to it. I saw this clear as day when I was watching live streams during the Portland federal courthouse protest. I would watch these for several hours per day as a form of entertai…

> almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.

And there you have it.

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

#406

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 made a small article about how to investigate the truth about something.

https://saidit.net/s/Solutions/comments/50i5/how_to_investig...

The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.

Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.

And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution

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

#408
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten minutes of thinking gave me: (1) Identification of potential dissidents. Those who violate lockdowns or mask orders are most likely to resist state control. (2) Normalizing control over common activities. It takes four weeks to normalize a new habit. "Two weeks to stop the spread" has been going on since March (that's thirty-two weeks and counting). Americans are now habituated to state-controlled social behavior…

I keep asking people to explain why they downvote posts like yours and nobody wants to. I guess they know the reasons aren't good, they just can't help giving in to the desire for control. Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.

Thank you -- that's very kind.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which government agency is censoring Twitter? Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.

Private censorship is still censorship, and when large monopolies or cartels dominate the market, it can be just as damaging.

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

#410
post #76

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.

I had my first Internet Account in the 1980's via PLATO.

When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.

I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.

Holy shit was I wrong.

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