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

But I think the point doesn't apply as well here. People measuring censorship thought of that already and aren't simply relying on govt to share info on the censorship it does. They also test access to sites. Obviously non-transparent regimes everywhere will often censor discretly (e.g. a story exposing their corruption).

What this means is having everything which lends itself to monopoly to democratic control, not private control, and to work together to make democratic control as efficient, localized and legitimate as possible. A well oiled, properly constrained bureaucracy is a wonderful thing, as anyone who has experienced e.g. German and post-soviet bureaucracy can attest to. And yet the Germans (rightfully) still think their bureaucracy needs improvement, because of course it does, but it's still necessary and better than privatising the essential services that are provided.

"Starve the beast" is a warcry of rich and powerful who will benefit from the vacuum after they pervert and hollow out working institutions like the US post office (if you think it's not profitable and relying on tax payers money, do your research please).

Technology and interconnection is kinda neutral here, it has helped to raise awareness of the problems but has also helped to spread misinformation and lies by the likes of Prager U And their ilk

Or is there a setting somewhere to block political-looking posts? Because this would be awesome. I heard something about 3rd party software claiming such a feature but I wouldn't trust them.

Sure but the government could do something about it, but they do not, partially because it supports their agenda. The recent congressional hearings made it quite obvious that the 3 big tech companies having the majority of internet traffic going through them are in sync when it comes to "moderation" enforcement.

Everything bad we hear about Russia & China must undoubtedly be true, because it's reported by our press, and we have freedom of press, which means that our press never lies or has an agenda. At least when it comes to foreign affairs. So your Facebook feed must've undoubtedly told the unbiased truth about your country.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Facebook uses an Atlanticist thinktank as an honest broker to censor information.

When a media use any material to promote it's propaganda ideas, doesn't bother with truth, use any dirty trick to mock opponents, it should be blocked.

But if Google blocked such dirty media, then what is to remain? Only "anti-Putin" media, which is all marked as "anti-russian".

I repeat: I do not know, why Google blocked "pro-putin" media, maybe due to reasons I described above, maybe because of order from a masonic lodge or from USA government. But the result is the same: all that is not blocked is "anti-russian".

Am I missing something or how is the one sentence a source and the next one isn't?

[1]: https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk

> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.

There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)

> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).

They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway

I'm sure you got it wrong and what they actually block is Ninja sites.

Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.

"Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"

We as a species and our societies by proxy are self actualizing kicking and screaming.

Yes, sources should be protected. But there should be mechanisms in place to protect sources who identify themselves that do not require the gullible public to just believe what they were told, because an authority said it was okay to believe something an anonymous person said about something.

Maybe this is something that the crypto/cert folks should address - a means of verifying that a source has been properly and adequately identified, without revealing the details required to target that individual for harassment/assassination/etc.

A media clearing house for sources, or a blockchain ...

This is partly because american NGOs have orchestrated a huge indoctrination effort among journalists on a global scale. I have worked for national media for a little under a decade and every place I worked, there was journalists participating in stuff from "open societies foundation".

The quality of journalism has reached such a low that when tourists are group raped for hours and then are finally decapitated by religious fanatics (Any other description would not be allowed in media anymore, but you know who) who film and put it on the internet. they use terms like "Found with injuries on their neck". And then our police and media do everything they can to stop the real horrific truth from surfacing. No wonder people stop believing a word and become overly skeptical.

Honestly I think its a sign of health that people become skeptical regarding mass media. It would be even healthier if the general populace started to dismantle the power structures that dictates our dystopian future.

Saddam Hussein did have a "weapon of mass destruction", poison gas, and used it on Kurds. You can find photos of bodies with white foam from their mouths from that time.

He did not have much, if any, nuclear technology, despite the "aluminum tubes" news clips which led to the concern over weapons of mass destruction. (There are specialized alloys used in nuclear processing, but not aluminum.)

Aside from that, the main information source was an exiled Iraqi politician that the administration said was credible to construct their narrative.

So Saddam Hussein went from a US ally, to a war criminal.

One major US newspaper tried to push back, but the rest, including the NYT, just repeated everything the White House said.

David Frum, Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, and General Michael Hayden are now MSNBC and #resist heroes. James Clapper and John Brennan are on CNN payroll as talking heads. At least the orange guy and his particular complicit press never passed a Patriot Act, didn't start any warrantless kidnapping/detainment/torture/execution programs, or mass surveillance programs against their own people, and didn't start any wars. More than I can say for NYT, CNN, et al.

The "official" outlets are populated by former CIA/NSA/FBI, and similar people with a documented history of lying (even to Congress) to protect abuses of constitutional and even human rights. In that context it's very hard to trust ANY information source, especially algorithmically. I don't know how to write a program that recognizes these people who were liars yesterday are now the good guys.

So yes, please keep remembering and remind people. Large parts of the current problem rest on a bed of forgetfulness.

With their recent breaking story of Donald Trump $750 tax, I've been reading through their published article, but have not found any solid evidence for this proposed figure, only just a bunch of links to their previous articles in past years. If anyone can find some actual evidence for the $750 tax bill from the NYT report, I would very much like to see it https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html

I can say that having been through a similar curriculum in high school (implemented on the initiative of a very thoughtful literature teacher) it has been one of my most valuable mental tools I possess throughout my adult life. Being able to understand and identify logical fallacies has helped me critically evaluate the information I consume many times over.

Of course, any program like this has the problem that it needs to be implemented by a trusted source, or it will be attacked as "indoctrination" (whether or not that is the truth). I can see that as a major challenge in the US where 50%+ of the population is convinced that the government is out to get them at any one time.

You just need to frame it correctly.

A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.

Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).

Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.

I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.

The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.

That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?

The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.

Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)

If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.

Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.

“who controls the past controls the future. who controls the present, controls the past”

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 censorship will be helpful.

I think a close reading of the OP would show they aren't portraying the state with great friendliness. Some run the show for the benefit of powerful forces and to various extents try to think about long term goals. "Bad Actors" is a decent shorthand for group trying also serving the wealthy and themselves but with a destructively short term agenda.

The key point the GP makes and I think you're missing is that stop manipulation isn't a matter of removing "tyrants" but creating an active, educated population.

consider (for example) k-12 mathematics pretty much anywhere...

We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason in a way that avoided those fallacies.

> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.

I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.

I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.

Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.

As for riots, my dad remarked to me that the TV media would represent the crowds as large or small simply by where they pointed the camera and the zoom level used. And they would, depending on their agenda.

Mass media has always been heavily agenda based.

And there you have it.

Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not. Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?

No, I wouldn't.

https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-t...

I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.

But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?

I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.

* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"

A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.

And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.

You must be joking? Twitter, Google, FB, the blatantly partisan censorship?

I disagree. Sure there will always be some amount of misinformation on the internet, but a fully state-controlled media and internet (see - China) is far, far more effective at spreading propaganda and controlling the narrative.

It is very likely that moving forward, many right wing people will shift away platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. In fact, these platforms already exist. Gab is a replacement for facebook and parler is a replacement for twitter.

There is also the immunity to bad ideas aspect; Its important that the propaganda is heard openly and argued against in public, as this makes people immune to these arguments. Censor these bad ideas and we make the next generation vulnerable to them.

I don't think we can offset this with education, as with drugs, we never give the kids the very best bad idea - argument when we try to teach the dangers of drugs, this is why so many are vulnerable to the dealers quiet persuasion. I really feel like the more we silence movements like the alt right, the more vulnerable our society becomes to their bad ideas.

Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.

Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.

No, he didn't.

USA PATRIOT Act was from Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It incorporated material from 3 earlier bills, one of which was also by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the others by Sen. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Oxley (R-OH).

https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162...

So clearly we need the gov’t to step in help the rabble who are clearly unable to figure out the “truth” on their own.

Does he realize this is the exact argument authoritarian gov’ts give for censorship? We need to censor to avoid “social disharmony” or stop those “fomenting discord”.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI

Cooperation is hard because of the prisoner's dilemma etc. You don't need "certain business people" to malevolently prevent international cooperation.

competition is at the heart of our economies at a deep level, both within and without... i suspect this wont change until internally our economies are more cooperative than competitive (im not holding my breath)

What do you mean by nationalist competition? Nations competing against each other?

>What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?

Cooperation for what? Different people value different things. Different cultures even more so. You cannot have cooperation unless everyone is on the same side of every issue in the same degree.

If we had that level of agreement, we would not survive, not for long anyway. Let me explain:

Almost all of politics (or religious sects for that matter) is about how we use the resources we have. If there are multiple ways of using the resources, there have to be people who disagree and want different ways of using the resource. That slows us down, which helps us understand the cost/benefits of different ways of doing things. That also keeps options open... so if we find problems with the prevalent way, we won't have to start over. Other groups will already have understood the alternative ways and made some progress that others can join... once they sacrifice the leader who led them the "wrong way", of course.

Nations are just another level of doing this thing on a global scale. Nations should do things differently, so that the world as a whole is more robust.

>I guess certain business people would not make as much money.

Ironically, it's certain business interests which have tried to make the world homogenous. That helps them scale their business in the most efficient way. They value efficiency more than robustness. George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, is an example of a person who religiously believes in removing all inefficiencies due to nation states... and has been using his billions of dollars for that cause. I think that is dangerous. It's not different from finding "superior people", inbreeding them and killing everyone else for being inferior. That wouldn't make them superior. That would make them fragile. It's the same for nations.

All foreign propaganda is peddled by domestic actors. Otherwise, it wouldn't be effective.

Fake News. The U.S. used to have a huge stockpile of surgical and N95 masks as part of their pandemic preparedness plans. The stockpile was gradually depleted and not replenished adequately. It was pure complacency on the part of government; please let's not blame trade openness for this.

Agree. Not as effective as today. But yes.

Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.

Agree. I think Democracy has failed because the tools of propaganda have become very effective.

Democracy died in the U.S. a long time ago... the Deep State was formed and it had a monopoly on propaganda, not only for keeping the citizens in line but also using it to control many other countries. The major competitor was Soviet Union, which wasn't very successful for long. Fast forward to today, there are many countries which are powerful enough and have competitive tools for propaganda.

While many countries are well equipped for offence, only China has very good defense against it. If other countries don't take actions to strengthen their defense, it's going to be very difficult for them.

> ["foreign interference"] fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities [...] (thanks, China).

'free trade' is definitely not a product of outside interference, it is a product of American company owners' interests - the easier it is to own manufacturing plants in other countries without giving up your IP (the key items of most 'free trade' agreements), the easier it becomes for corporations to manufacture everything where labor is cheapest.

David Atkins, Regional Director, CA Dems / Elected DNC Member:

"No seriously...how do you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?

We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/DavidOAtkins/status/1328898661569363969

Look to the requirement for phone number portability as an example. The providers weeped and gnashed their teeth, and then got together and implemented a working system.

Try the founder of Vice, let's say you want to listen to his Podcast by just searching for his name, good luck doing that on Google, on Yandex it's the 5th result down.

They accomplish this simply by attacking the organizations on another front. Never underestimate the coercive nature of politicians whose own countries forbid censorship they can get another to do for them.

The simple fact is, our western values are not the world's values.

So, we should rely on state censorship in preference to the free marketplace of ideas competing for private support to relay them?

This whole movement of people begging the government to prevent companies from curating their content, under the guise of fucking free speech of all things, is so deep into doublespeak territory that it just leaves me in awe.

We have final arbitrators of truth, they are laws, judges and juries. It isn't a perfect system, and it might not scale, but I see no need to abandon the idea some things are fundamentally incorrect, and get rid of those things.

There is political and financial incentives at play to spread misinformation. It isn't as simple as "the best ideas win" as most social media platforms make it REALLY easy to manipulate the narrative.

For example, if some politician will negatively impact my business, I can hire a BUNCH of people to go out and write nasty comments about that politician. I can create fake media pages to support whatever narrative I want against that candidate. I can do all of this for relatively little money. We see this phenomenon come up time and time again when it comes to review websites. Most people "in the know" don't trust amazon reviews because they know companies astroturf them like crazy.

Climate change is a place where this also happens a LOT. Man made climate change is a nearly undisputed fact in the scientific world, yet roughly half of Americans either don't believe in it or are unsure about it. Why? Because there's big incentives behind the fossil fuel industry to spread FUD and misinformation about climate change. On the flip side, there's just not the money or resources available to climate scientists to correct that narrative.

I can buy that "some censorship doesn't work" however, it appears that a free for all is equally broken.

Because people are not able to freely exchange ideas about politics, you end up with silos.

The main reason why the subject of politics causes flame wars is because people are thinking about it emotionally because they have very little actual information to work with.

The less sharing of information there is on the subject, the more divided people are going to be.

Are you engaging honestly? Or are you just assuming bad faith?

The dangerous territory is acting as though legitimate questions and inquiry is dangerous territory. Many of us in tech have had election security concerns for like a decade. We set up voting machines for kids to hack at defcon.

Of course, there are loud Q anon types on twitter throwing out all kinds of crap. Most of them are actually sincere as well, even though we know better and it seems silly. But those voices aren’t representative of the legitimate concerns.

I asked my wife, who hates Trump, if she was tasked with reporting a vote total in a crucial district, and she had the opportunity to plausibly fudge the numbers such that it would change the outcome, would she “do the right thing” and save us from another 4 years of Trump?

She said yes without hesitation. Somehow, I don’t think she is the only person who thinks that way. That doesn’t mean that someone cheated, but only a fool would take their word for it. With so much on the line, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get more certainty. We already know that voter fraud happens routinely, and even enough to swing elections. Especially in Philadelphia. We also know that humans make mistakes. In most elections, mistakes are a rounding error that is below the noise floor. In a tight race, a few mistakes can change the outcome.

You’re better off letting them look and find nothing than shout them down and say “nothing to see here!”. As part of this process, a lot of irregularities are going to be found that appear suspicious, and most are going to have benign explanations after they are investigated. That doesn’t make it bad faith.

They have already found several errors and thousands of ballots on memory cards that they “forgot” to upload. Ensuring that these were isolated incidents only makes sense.