They're planting the seed and seeing how the public reacts. This is ridiculous! Mark something "controversial", "possibly fake", but don't memory-hole us. An archive only archiving history they agree with is not worth the funding.
For example, this is why the archive obeys robots.txt policies retrospectively. I can't access my personal web pages from 20+ years because at some point the university changed it's robots.txt policy. (The domain no longer exists, freezing that policy quasi-permanently.) But at least they're archived. Maybe at some point before I die I'll get to see them again, but at least it's a possibility. More importantly, my "sacrifice" (such as it is) is a small price to pay to help ensure that archive.org preserved access to material that would have been cut off if websites felt that they didn't have control of availability once archived.
We can't expect archive.org to fight our battles for us, whether regarding censorship, copyright overreach, or other issues. It's great that they do to the extent that they do, but their success is partly a consequence of them picking their fights and emphasizing their character of being a quiet, harmless archiver. It would be counter-productive to ask them to risk that credibility and power. And it's entirely unnecessary.
What surprised me was that you say they respect the robots.txt, but the data is archived anyway, so they are crawling anyway, but only publish according the rules defined in the robots.txt?
If so that is news to me.
100%. It reduces the entire point to just voluntarily donating to your favourite think tank or political party, not an "archive".
I hate language like this. I mean, propaganda is not a new thing. And opinions about "misinformation" are extremely subjective. It's not at all uncommon for mainstream media to reflect mainstream biases. Or even biases of governments in power, media owners, etc.
For example, when I first heard of the NSA's Enigma program, mainstream media (if it even mentioned it) discounted it as "conspiracy theory". Or the CIA's Mk Ultra project.
> At a time when false and ultra-partisan content is rapidly created and spread, and social media pages are constantly updated, the importance of having an unalterable record of who said what, when has been magnified.
This I agree with. But access should not be restricted.
No one is suggesting that misinformation and bias didn't exist previously, the suggestion is that it is spreading at a greater rate.
To conflate bias with misinformation to the extent of exclusion as you are suggesting seems unnecessarily harsh to me. MSM had it's problems always, but it is incomparable to the basic factual inaccuracy prevalent in social media and the internet pundits that exist today. That can be argued, but it is a separate point.
I think the problem is bigger than just media though, it's a downstream problem from the war on the attention of average person. When people suggest trying to solve for Cambodian clickbait mills, it seems to me that they are just treating the small symptoms of a worse problem.
They don’t say criticism of the govt is prohibited, they say that it’s necessary for the security of state. Doesn’t everyone want a secure state?
There was a lot of controversy around the copyright expiration of Mein Kampf in Germany a few years ago. The Bavarian government owned the copyright and refused to allow it to be printed. When the copyright expired, annotated versions were released, putting the book in context. There are certain disadvantages that not printing had: making the book more mysterious and taboo, and leaving the text to stand on its own when it was acquired (thus having no space for rebuttals, historical comments, etc.).
Personally I lean toward keeping these kinds of things but annotating them and providing ample context - the equivalent of a study on history or a museum exhibit. Maybe we as a species can learn from our mistakes. It's not like forgetting these texts will prevent the same conditions that created the rise of fascism and genocide.
That is one factor why I believe Germany to be more likely to succumb to fascism again compared to the US for example. Luckily, the 21st century doesn't allow for much content control anymore.
Mein Kampf can reasonably fail on itself. There is need for context, of course, that education can and has to provide.
If you allow people to use their own judgement, perhaps that would have served as an incentive to use it in times of dire need.
The current idea that fascism rose because of too few content control is a grave mistake.
Citation needed? From the view of my filter bubble it looks like white supremacy and it's racist ideologies seem to be on an alarming rise in both countries regardless of their approach on free speech.
Unfortunately freedom of information has come under attack in the US as well lately, so yes, the rise of some circles is no surprise or contradiction. Unfortunately that aligns fascist groups with people that see value in these freedoms. Although to those it is mostly no secret that fascists are just temporary passengers with other ambitions.
Fascism needs the antagonist, it is an essential piece of the puzzle. Only through that people are able to strip their conscience, elevate themselves above others and commit atrocities against people they see as threats. It is their personal victim role.
"White supremacy" was a laughing stock 10 years ago. And I mean really a laughing stock. Their last hope was to sweep up some anime weaboos that didn't really buy into it in any significant number, but it was their goto strategy to groom these groups in hope someone a litte too full of himself would randomly condemn them as the root of evil or just plainly associate them with facsism.
You can fight fascism with giving people more freedoms and more access to information. That collapses their victim narrative and has the positive side effect from the measures itself. Censoring a book, banning people perceived to align with fascism, or pointing out moral imperatives doesn't achieve anything. On the contrary and I believe this behavior to be a main factor to current developments.
But since the US has basic and fundamental protections to freedom of speech and against overreaching government, it is in a far better state compared to Germany, which is partly on the road to make the same mistakes again.
Fortunately, we can do both. Despite being nearly white, you can read the comment by highlighting it and it is still high the page, so it can be discussed. Seems like a model of how strongly oppositions should be treated.
0) https://archive.org/details/TriumphOfTheWillgermanTriumphDes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w
The propaganda was incredibly successful. To this day "Triumph of the Will" continues to be used as a reference point for the mental construct of the Nazi regime. The modern understanding of the Nazis is deeply informed by a propaganda film produced by the Nazis for the explicit purpose of creating that mental construct. "Triumph of the Will"'s endless lines of soldiers marching in formation is exactly the image they wanted you to think of when you thought of them.
And the light show! Camp fires and torchlight! Huge insignia, and huge billowing banners. Very moving.
There are certainly plenty of things in there that implies too much concentration in the power of the state (e.g. monopoly on communication and banking) for someone of more liberal or libertarian (whether left or right) bent if one considers a modern interpretation of the state. Which is why even many Marxists, especially libertarians, look to works like Marx writings on the Paris Commune for more specific details.
This response suggests to me it is quite likely you haven't read it.
Perhaps someone is not so adept at reading between the lines. Just a guess.
I've heard Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker called neo-nazis.
Maybe you're a neo-nazi. Since neo-nazis always deny being neo-nazis, then your denials are further proof that you are a neo-nazi. B&
> I’ve heard jordan peterson and steven pinker called neo-nazis.
It still isn’t clear to me what this brings to a discussion. It seems like such a strange question.
Are any of us under the impression that label misapplication somehow means a label is no longer used? Of course not. After 30 years in the same house, my partners mother still calls the tree in her front yard an oak tree despite the fact it has always been and will remain a maple. Her misapplication of the label doesn’t mean oak trees no longer exist. Tree experts, dendrologists and arborists aren’t throwing their arms up and declaring their entire fields deprecated because a random person, in a casual setting, uses the wrong term.
My father still calls disk storage, RAM.
My partner still calls the serrano peppers she grows, jalapeños.
I regularly see politicians who lean to the right call obvious capitalist liberals, commies.
I still sometimes call giant ships, boats.
None of these misapplications matter, there are still an awful lot of people who rely on what words actually describe, despite a random old lady calling a maple tree an oak.
As always, casual conversations with casual people will at some point lead to casual use of words. It will continue to happen, for as long as we’re a species.
What if your partners mothers mom was put in charge of a maple tree conservation arboretum, and decided to cull all the oak trees, but she kept confusing maples for oak trees?
I'm not arguing that neo-nazis don't exist. I'm arguing that we shouldn't arbitrarily censor stuff just because some people call it nazi propaganda.
> I'm not arguing that neo-nazis don't exist. I'm arguing that we shouldn't arbitrarily censor stuff just because some people call it nazi propaganda.
She’s not in charge of any arboretum, that’s the point I’m attempting to get across.
We have reached a point where the collective We are treating random people having random casual conversations as if these random casuals have the same weight as experts in their fields. We have collectively started to treat what used to be completely understood as casual forum discussions and casual opinion pieces as if these hold the same weight as an authority in their field publishing a well documented, far more rigorous, and well cited paper. We’ve allowed a fogging in the ability to distinguish between casual people and rigorous experts and this is the outcome. An intelligent collective should never hold these two opinions at the same weight.
My idiot cousin by marriage, who has a very real lack of critical thinking, who has a degree in “google research” from “the school of hard knocks” however, she does have a knack for writing in such a way which absolutely resonates with uneducated mothers. She writes as if she’s an authority in child vaccinations, she regularly goes into her closed facebook group and convinces other mothers why they should ignore their doctors and not vaccinate their children. Her words have more weight than medical research and medical professionals.
She seems to pull the card which almost always seems to work on a certain segment of the population – the “narrative” card. The target of this “narrative” charge is for some reason automatically assumed to be nefarious and the person who spotted this so-called “narrative”, their words now hold more weight than the actual expert in their field who had a “narrative.
We need to get back to a point where my words regarding the best methods to pick coffee beans mean little when compared to an actual coffee bean farmer, because my field of expertise lies elsewhere. I can read an article or three on coffee beans, but there is no rational universe where my words should hold the same weight as actual experts in coffee bean farming.
Until the collective We are able to say, “I don’t know.” or “I can give you my opinion, but you’d be far better off listening to Jill, she has far more knowledge on the subject.” until we get back to a rational discourse, we’re going to continue to find someone who is outraged because some idiot on a forum or some idiot made a video, used the wrong term and falsely labeled someone.
We need to get back to a point where the smartest people in the room are the people who say “I’m not sure. I’m not an expert. I don’t know. I don’t know the nuances of that vast field. I don’t know.”
When the meaning of a word isn't likely to have a big impact on people's lives we can be a bit more forgiving (though personally I still want to move towards a clearer thinking population).
Yes, the term "neo-nazi" is sometimes misapplied. That misapplication doesn't mean that neo-nazis don't exist, or that the term has no meaning. If the term didn't have an established, commonly agreed upon meaning that referred to a specific ideology and movement in the real world, then there would be no reason to quibble about its misuse, because calling someone a neo-nazi would be as meaningless as calling them a flarndingle.
If someone was being harassed and censored because they were accused of being a flarndingle, I would have a problem with that. If corporate America were calling for mass censorship of "flarndingle" literature, I would be opposed to that.
I would not like being called a flarndingle if I knew it would mean that I would be censored. It does not matter that flarndingle is a meaningless word.
The term neo-nazi is actually quite abstract. For many younger people and activists, it has just become a synonym for "person I do not agree with".
It has become a catch-all insult that can be applied to anyone. There is nobody who that insult won't stick to. You can be a Jewish academic with controversial opinions about society and have "anti-fascist" activists target you for being a neo-nazi.
So, obviously we can't ban anyone that is called a neo-nazi.
The same way that the right call liberal capitalist "commies" as an insult.
I've often wanted to know what viewpoints enemies of state have so I can get another opinion on things. Particularly a world-view as different to mine as ISIS would have been interesting. :(
That's why I never use Tor, except through nested VPN chains. And I use the same VPN setup for torrenting, rate limited, in the background. So to the ISP, I just look like someone who torrents. It's not until you'd trace out the chain that you'd see connections to Tor entry guards.
There are justifiable cases where you might want to remove something from the public internet. Some problems of p2p distributed proposals is that the only way to take down a single bit is to dismantle the entire network.
In this sense a federated system is objectively better.
of course download and upload are 2 different things...
which is why Torrent users often get emails about their download activities...
(For torrents I believe that there is (in many jurisdictions) a presumption that if you are downloading torrents then you are automatically guilty of distributions; similarly how in many places being drunk in a turned off car can be sufficient for a DUI)
Or think of it this way: the lifetime output of George R.R. Martin is <10MB. The output of 100000 writers like him could fit in a 1TB drive ($50). If everyone in the US was as prolific as GRRM, you could archive their lifetime output for $150000. Everyone in the world, $5 million. That's 1/20th of the investment that Juicero got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... Hence the "In the Soviet Union, the future is known with certainty. It's the past that keeps changing." joke.
Archiving everything published by any institution as immediately-and-systematically as possible, in a cryptographically sealed and timestamped (blockchain!) publicly accessible form, may prove precious when it comes to fight such behavior. However, as usual, somebody has to fund this effort, and most institutions may not be willing to do so.
If it was possible to create a "time-locked" blockchain vault would be interesting.
I can't see any way of doing that which wouldn't boil down to taking bets on the speed of advances in computing, though. But that might be good enough if the goal is just to ensure it takes "long enough" rather than guarantee a specific amount of time has passed.
To archive something I keep a copy (file) of it (it may be an archive storing many files), calculate some digest (let's say SHA512) of the file, then immediately publish the file on my archive-webserver, and its size (amount of octets) and digest an the existing and active blockchain (in this case: Bitcoin).
As a courtesy I can let the source know that I archived.
At publishing time everyone can check that I (and no one else) archived the exact material published by the source. If I distorted the published material I cannot deny it, thanks to the timestamped digest stored in the blockchain.
Later everyone can be quite sure of the publication date and integrity of the archive, once again thanks to the timestamped digest.
Doesn't this method cover all needs? Is releasing another key necessary, which one and why?
1. Your suggested approach handles provenance for data you yourself arranges to "open up" in the future.
2. Additionally people may want to ensure the longevity of the data - this is "easily" done by simply archiving all referenced archives multiple places.
3. Some people wants to ensure important data eventually will get released, but don't dare / can release it now and/or worry that they will be prevented from releasing it in the future (be that for a nefarious reason, or simply because you might die of natural causes before you get a chance).
The last case is what I meant by a "time locked" system. Being able to archive something now even though you're not prepared to publish it now in a way that doesn't require you to take complicated steps to guarantee that "someone" is trusted to release the right keys would be powerful.
What you suggest also have value, it just covers a different set of use cases.
1/ put all those important to-be-published-later data in an archive
2/ obtain the archive SHA512 hash
3/ cypher the archive, using a symmetric-key algorithm and a a random key
4/ use secret sharing, with the key being the secret, with the adequate amount of redundancy (this is the most tricky part). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
5/ give each part of the secret to some notary, and pay him to have it delivered to each member of a group of tech-savvy friends of yours. Chose unrelated notaries installed in different countries
6/ give the cyphered archive along with detailed instructions to each member of the group, in order for him to be able to rebuild the secret and then decrypt the archive. If they will have to act this way more than 10 years after receiving the instructions give them full "image systems" (a real machine!) storing all required software, ready to run
7/ publish the SHA512 hash (on archive.org?), sealed-signed by you, along with some explanation "At date X I, John Smith, created the archive whose digest is...". You may also publish the cyphered archive (this is not very useful and raises the risk)
8/ pray. The symmetrical cypher has to resist attacks during the timelapse, enough groupmembers have to survive long enough, image systems must be usable when time comes...
Take a look at the MP4/4 F1 race car shown on McLaren's website for an example: https://www.mclaren.com/racing/heritage/cars/1988-formula-1-...
Compared to an unedited version of the car: https://www.motorsport.com/f1/photos/ayrton-senna-mclaren-mp...
They even do this to videos of old races.
Some geographic and viewpoint diversity would help IA not fall into the trap of thinking radical views like the one you quoted are actually ideas most people support.
Or do you have a different OPINION on what's hateful?
The fundamental flaw is that you're always trying to put everyone on different levels of intellectual responsibility and whenever you do that you fall into an elitist model of governance, which is what the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent.
Sure there is.
If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.
Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education.
For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
Edit: Also this thread is full of people (including me to be fair) not providing any sources to whatever they feel is true.
(Unfortunately it also lead to me investigating other ideas which are far less popular than atheism in the modern day, so I guess you might have a point)
OTOH, one might need to read original pro-slavery propaganda to know that the myth, long adopted in many US states’ education systems as its own revisionist propaganda, that the Confederacy was not centrally about slavery and racism, was a lie.
We have schools in America, and while reading Mein Kampf added negligibly to my education, no one being able to do so would have subtracted significantly from it.
More to the point, reading Kapital and the Communist Manifesto added significantly to my education, though many people on the US would see them as at least as worthy of suppression as Mein Kampf (which I wouldn't even be able to know was a bad idea if they—or Mein Kampf—were suppressed.)
> For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.
First, a cure-all doesn't stop you from getting sick, it just makes it so you can get better. So, there's not even an inconsistency there.
Second, no one here (and virtually no one anywhere) describes it as a cure-all. A necessary element of a healthy society, perhaps, but not by itself sufficient even as a cure, much less a prevention, of bad government.
But that doesn't really change anything other than some centrist nonsense arguments. I was aware of his actions, philosophy, propaganda, and approach without reading it. I was also aware of the consequences, be it through visits to one of the old Konzentrationslager sites, museums, and other cultural and educational experiences. Or simply through the aftermath and it's presence of foreign military bases that are still here to this day. I'd expect most children even today having similar experiences around here and I'm honestly baffled how those kids grow up to be in their 20s and vote for far right parties regardless of the consequences. The book would have been nothing more than yet another propaganda tool of the, already pretty strongly organized, far right.
This whole thread is a weird hill to die on, the US has entire districts of schools that are forced to teach creation as fact, banning books containing scientific facts from their libraries, and people complain that we banned a book that was actively used for recruitment to the neo-nazi scene and authored by a genocidal madman?
How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do things? Nazism, for instance, came about because the people were being oppressed as a result of losing WWI and it was a rebellion against that oppression. It wouldn't work without the oppression. The idea itself is not the problem.
Catholics used to attack Evangelicals. You see the Evangelicals had dangerous ideas that had to be eliminate lest the common folk would be lead astray.
People have always been afraid of ideas. This nonreligious religiosity is novel but we've seen this play before.
Just as one man's Freedom Fighter is another's Terrorist, this really depends on perspective.
Das Kapital is kinda negative about capital holders, after all.
> You know what's evil - it's the stuff full of race hate and misogyny. There is no moral equivalence.
Is it all the stuff full of racial hatred and mistreatment of women? Because you're going to have a hell of a time banning the Torah, Bible and Koran - to say nothing of other religious texts.
Would a pamphlet against abortion be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against [Islam|Christianity| Judaism|Hinduism] be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against Israel be allowed?
Would a pamphlet against affirmative action be allowed?
No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people. Things are a lot more nuanced than "banning bad, because kids dumb".
I never said kids were dumb, but they absolutely are curious, and forbidden knowledge is an incredible lure. The absolute majority will realise it's messed up, but there will always be that few who become radicalised from what they see.
Rather than burying our past we should and need to teach them why it's wrong. This trend of rewriting history is extremely worrisome.
>No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people.
It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent.
Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal?
This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image.
Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.
When Society sees Nazi things as forbidden fruit and makes them widely available, then you get the bully types dabbling in it, and it's more widespread.
And when society permits it to be mainstream politics, you're one solid resistance movement away from genocide.
There's a lot of certainty in the way you are saying it.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have any references? Truly curious, I always see these things as hard to measure/understand, so super interested to know info that would help remove that for me.
I don't know if censorship is the answer. But because our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice.
*By true honest dialog I mean actual dialogs between people that try to convince each other with the goal of understanding where there is agreememt. And where there isn't one, where it stems from, and how it can be mitigated by some synthesis of opinions. This, as opposed to one sided commentary that it's goal is only to discredit the other side by focusing on disagreements and inducing fear and radicalization in your intended audience.
I'm just asking anything to provide evidence. Well rounded arguments with lots of accurate and well thought out examples (i.e. statistics, objective trends, etc) maybe books or theories supported by certain segments of the social sciences, etc.
Same goes for your statement: > our current climate of discourse doesn't enable a true honest dialog* we are edging close to no other choice. (censorhip)
Can you please tell me why this time it is so different than say the election between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine? I'm truly interested in hearing the concrete reasons for censorship being the 'no other choice' option.
Again, not saying anyone is wrong, just interested to hear how much of what is stated is based on subjective truth vs objective truths.
You're missing my point.
Those most likely to be radicalised are already isolated.
If we scrub content about Nazi ideology from Internet Archive (and everywhere else), these people will find it elsewhere and likely be even more radicalised than they otherwise would be.
Nobody is arguing it should be mainstream politics, only that it should be archived and preserved as lessons to the future generations.