Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and what they don't.
It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then.
Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents.
That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today.
My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom.
Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow.
I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?
I was talking with my mother last week and she had never heard of bitcoin.
She is on facebook literally all day but had not even heard the word bitcoin before.
She is just clueless. She wouldn't even begin to be able to understand this debate.
Even so, that's a totally LMGTFY thing, no?
But it's really not a difficult concept. Just ask someone their position on some contentious issue. And then ask them how they'd react to being blocked from posting about that on Facebook or whatever.
But yes, cutting greenhouse gas emissions would also be prudent.
I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.
That's the thing: there have been systems like that in place for decades (Freenet, I2P, Tor). Nobody uses them. Why? Because most people are actually depressingly pro-censorship. Even YouTube's censorship could be trivially broken if a plurality of people opposed it: if everybody just flagged every video on YouTube, they'd have to give up on policing them. You can't oppress people without overwhelming consent, and it's clear that the majority of us do consent.
My dad has fallen into the sway of fox news and the people who peddle conspiracies via forwarded email chains (obama did this or that terrible thing, chloroquine will save me from covid-19). He used be a leader of 1000 people in a company, he was an electrical engineer. He's old but its terribly sad to see him there. He'd be better off if he didn't get exposed to all these things. In his case he has heart problems and when I forwarded him an article from a doctor about the interaction of chloroquine with people with issues like this he said it was a lie from a democrat who wanted covid-19 to destroy the president.
He stopped trusting the newspaper in his town because it doesn't talk about these conspiracies he hears about. It does matter that real journalists have the ability to talk about things that are uncomfortable to powerful people, have the freedom and capability to do things. And there have always been people pushing the conspiracy stories to explain things away. The new thing is how much damage the big lie can get today.
But the point is that some may be true. It's not all or nothing.
However, it's important to keep in mind that stupidity and recklessness are generally more likely than malice and conspiracy.
But at least you can have media that don't enforce filter bubbles.
Not saying it isn't possible to do something like this right but I think it would need to be done very carefully, because IMO it could also make things worse than just having an aggregator that is up front biased in a particular way.
I remember voting for John Kerry, then Obama, and thinking how the liberals were the party that valued individual liberties over maintaining order via social control.
I never thought in my wildest dreams that Trump winning in 2016 would trigger a movement of mass censorship from the party who I thought was on the side of the people.
It's soul crushing. All over a theory that people actually changed their votes over troll posted news articles, with no evidence that voters actually did this after seeing said articles.
Sure, but that's only possible with systems where censorship is possible. Consider Freenet. It's ancient code, but it's arguably impossible to censor. Even to censor what's being stored on your local machine. But unfortunately, there's no anonymity, and users are readily discovered and arrested.
The source of this worry is that we could lose our democracy to what Neil Stephenson calls the Miasma.
I really think Neil Stephenson captured this brilliantly year ahead of time in his idea of the Miasma.