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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

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 in hope that bad actors will not influence the public. It seems like governments still want to manipulate people, so censorship in their mind is the only way out of this. Unfortunately it is like having an aching tooth and taking pain killers hoping it will pass instead of going to dentist. My only hope that in the end this will make politics more honest and people will learn how they are being exploited. I don't accept that someone should have a power over what I can or cannot read and preventing me from forming my own opinions.

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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 widespread censorship.

And you say:

> 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 in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.

The first major heading in the article is this:

> Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites

Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?

Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.

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.

Then I'll just click the link, read some memes on reddit, then come back once the timer runs out.

Of course you will, but the point is that many people like you will find such a process more of a hassle than it's worth. My solution would reduce the amount of this happening significantly, even if it won't stop every do-badder...

Why are you so opposed to reading something before commenting on it?

A lot of people aren't interested in discussing linked material and therefore reading it, they just want to have a discussion on the topic of the title.

And in the process turning this site in to a predictable talking-point forum that just gets triggered by random title keywords.

A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.

But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.

Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.

So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.

We tried that on reddit a long time ago. It didn't work. We realized that a lot of people just want to see the discussion.

I always click on the comments first myself to see if the article is even worth reading.

I thought that was the WHOLE point of Reddit when I joined years ago. It was like Digg but ONLY for people that had "Read-It".

I think that was the idea and it quickly devolved into horse shit.

I would love a site that was like Read-It but forced people to "read-it" first.

My take on “read it” - is that I read the title, look at the score and then the qty of comments

If it’s an interesting title and the score and qty of comments is high, i go to the comments.

I’m pretty much in /all and I hide tons of subs using RES...

So my feed on /all is pretty clean and tailored to things I’m open to.

The OP is talking about posting comments, not viewing them.

So was I.

First and foremost thanks for reddit, Ive had an account for 14years, and pretty much hit the site every single day for 14 years

With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.

I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.

Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.

I just was talking to someone about this.

I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.

But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.

I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.

Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.

If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.

Honestly clicking on the article just leads to paywalls or ad laden disasters that just consume my CPU (or complain if I have an ad blocker).

HN just works, so it's a lot less work just to read the discussion here.

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.

Yet it also goes on to say this:

> “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.

Why would you let the actual content of what you are supposedly responding to get in the way of whatever you are soapboxing about?

>This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation.

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.

The source article is about countries forcing ISP-level bans on accessing certain sites, while the parent comment is about misinformation. Nobody's blocking gambling content, pornography, or Match.com because they're worried about misinformation.

varispeed talks about control and manipulation. That's far broader than misinformation.

Yet also not "gambling content, pornography, or Match.com."

Sorry for being curt in the last reply. To expand on this, I think a key line might be

>bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage.

which I interpret broadly as enticing people to do things not sanctioned by the status quo morality. Some governments aren't happy about sexual liberty, others about certain religious or political belief. The internet with the liberation of information also liberated a certain relativism that is corrosive to the epistemic fundament of established power.

The behavior of tech companies in the US was certainly a template for governments around the world to block their own content as corporate censorship wasn't criticized and instead hailed because it censored the right people. Heck, they have validated Chinas censoring attempts or that of any dictatorship really.

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

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".

That's not the literal definition of fascism but it's also Not Good(tm).

If you think that's the case, you don't know your history. It's exactly the tactic of Mussolini.

Edit: And when he did it, most of the western world/press fawned on him and praised him as a genius until he went and allied himself with Hitler.

I mean, since this is an argument about semantics

> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader

is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.

And saying that something is "the (very) definition of" something is a colloquialism drawing comparison that dates back at least to James Madison and the Federalist Papers.

No. 47, if you'd like to read it.

That's still not how you use the word "literally".

It is a technique used by fascist regimes, communist regimes, dictatorships (basically totalitarian regimes of all stripes.)

It is a separate concept from fascism.

EDIT downvoters seem to have weak English skills...

Regardless of whether or not that was a tactic of Mussolini, that is most definitely not the definition of fascism.

You can wait to wake up to a totalitarian government biting you on the nose, but some of us remember that Mussolini was a journalist and rose to power in the media and don't want to let it get that far.

Fascism has a specific definition that is not just "whatever Mussolini did".

Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.

Newton can be credited as being substantially the inventor of Newtonian Physics. That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics, despite the fact that Newton wrote numerous treatises on alchemy.

Or possibly that alchemy has nothing to do with motion and gravitation.

Chemistry isn't a sub-field of Physics either.

Exactly.

No, we don't agree.

He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.

But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.

>Chemistry isn't a sub-field of Physics either.

Chemistry is just applied Physics.

And yes, for all you mathematicians out there, Physics is just applied math. :)

Except neither is true.

> has nothing to do with motion and gravitation.

Oh but it does. (The force of gravity is essential for some (al)chemical techniques.)

> That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics

No, but it does make it part of "Newtonism."

> Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.

Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)

So then why not take Mussolini's own words on what fascism is and isn't? His definition required it to be totalitarian: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

To be fair, Hitler himself was not universally recognized as a "bad guy" until, well, later.

To be depressingly fair, Hitler was never (and is still not) universally recognized as a "bad guy".

Yes, it's feudalism

How?

Well the OP said:

> 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.

And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:

> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]

I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

> Yes, it's feudalism

Its really, really not feudalism, which is highly de-centralized.

I'm not so sure, I think if GP had expanded on it a little it's an interesting take.

Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).

You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.

First of all this, but even in the very definition of feudalism it's feudalism:

Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

> but even in the very definition of feudalism it's feudalism:

Except there is no “holding of land in exchange for labor”, the only concrete element of the description you quote.

Not in the literal sense of land, but in the economical/capitalistic sense. In capitalism theory, the basic idea behind the growth of capitalism is defined as "land grab", i.e. the system ingests what is foreign and makes it its own. So land in that sense can mean anything that binds people to you. Nowadays this means money in order to pay rent, food, bills etc.

> 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.

Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.

So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.

Walled gardens (read fiefdoms) run by megacorporations is decentralised, I don't have to accept Alphabet's TOS if I don't want to. They just have so many people who do want to that they can dictate pretty crazy terms.

Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.

> 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.

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?

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.

No, before you had to be rich enough to buy the newspaper to print crazy bullshit, but that certainly happened (and still happens) too.

That's still a filter effect. Now, crazy bullshit is being peddled at 100x the rates from before. It's not sustainable.

Yes, we should have never given those poors access to say whatever is on their minds, right? At least not in front of other people...

It'll be the end of civilization.

Everyone should agree with the rich and powerful.

Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?

If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.

Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.

If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered

I don't know how you follow this to any conclusion that doesn't advocate for locking down the entire internet.

That genie is out of the bottle.

> Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?

My interpretation of the allegory is that it suggests that everyone "should" employ epistemic humility.

I think it would be more sensible to fix the education system than to appoint uneducated people to government positions just to increase the representation of poorer people.

It's more about education and a skeptical but not paranoid and nihilistic mind, than about "rich and powerful". You should be "this tall to ride". In this case, "this tall to broadcast your thoughts to millions of people".

> rich enough to buy the newspaper

That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.

It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.

A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense

newspapers have reach, which is in the context we're talking about when making comparisons to twitter.

sure, you could cheaply print stuff, but you had to (pay people to) stand on a lot of street corners to get your message out there.

Thomas Paine made money off of Common Sense.

Really this is central to how the USA started, as there were several among the founding fathers who printed newsletters.

It's worse than that, the algorithms these companies use sometimes purposefully promote these random claims because they lead to more user engagement.

For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.

As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.

Conversely, it has never been easier to inject true claims that are inconvenient for gatekeepers. What tilts the balance of equities in favor of censorship for you?

It's coming from people that don't share his politics.

You won't find anyone on this board more quick to defend censorship along political lines.

Because it takes far longer to confirm if a claim is true or not than it does to make a claim.

The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.

"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Seems like it should be TRIVIAL; (if backed up by legal authority of governments - and that's the REAL trick) - to cause all claims to be properly categorized.

Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?

Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.

I don't even have to reach this question to support my argument. You're effectively comparing 2020 to 2015. I'm comparing 2020 to 1980.

You can't just toss out core enlightenment principles because a handful of loud simpletons latch on to bad ideas. Not without explaining why.

I object to the claim that I've tossed out any "core enlightenment principles" by observing that we have drastically fewer gatekeepers now than we did in 1980.

It is my understanding that toleration, free association, and free expression are core enlightenment principles that enable a civilization to be governed by reason. These are threatened by the censorious attitude of boomers and aging gen-xers with home equity to protect.

It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/democratic-enlightenment-philosophy-r...

Do you implicate that we need gatekeepers? If so, then yes, if not, then it was falsely concluded.

You know that Mike Wallace interviewed an Imperial Wizard of the KKK on his show in 1957, right?

And Ayatollah Khomeini.

I am well aware; read my comment in light of that.

In 1957 there was a television for just about every 5 Americans, an average family size of 3.6 and not that much programming to watch.

Mike Wallace effectively gave the KKK a forum reaching everybody in the United States... That's much more effective than Twitter.

Your comment doesn't read any better.

You can watch the Eldon Edwards video right now, with a single Google search, to see how untrue it is that the KKK had in 1957 anything resembling the access to the discourse they have today.

If you think the KKK is stronger today than in the 1950s, then you are so ludicrously out of touch that I can't continue this conversation.

They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.

As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.

Yeah, you missed my point. In fairness, I didn't make it super clear for you.

Very few people like the KKK. Arguably fewer than in the past.

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.

I remember free mp3s.

Plus a ton of guys arguing about free beer or speech, and me having zero understanding of why any of it was a big deal.

QAnon is irrelevant aside from the attention they are getting from their supposed political enemies. You seem to need an image of an enemy. Same with flat earthers. They existed 20 years ago and they were completely irrelevant. Antivax had a lot of people joining because they had partly reasonable objections or trust issues towards official sources and some hobby Don Quijotes with a slight inferiority complex needed to prove themselves by demonizing these groups as if they were the devil. As expected, these groups didn't shrink.

The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies.

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.

You are talking about Bush the 2nd right?

I don't know if you've been under a rock for more than a decade, but, no, Bush the Younger is not President of the United States. (Sure, some of the bad acts under his administration prefigured bad acts under this one.)

Attic. It is a past tense sentence, just sayin'.

> It is a past tense sentence, just sayin'.

"The president of the United States has been using [...]" is present perfect continuous tense (expressing an action continuing in the present that began in the past), not past tense.

So it could be referring to the office of the president, not a specific president. Politicians lie, it's a commodity across the parties.

i think it was sarcasm.... maybe /s would help?

Alas, Facebook was founded 4 years too late for even the younger Bush.

He is, perhaps, talking about what should have happened during Bush 2.

>> 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.

I think there may be some legitimate truth to this statement that you are not seeing.

Donald Trump is far from the only bad actor we've had in our history, and things weren't running smooth as silk before he arrived on the scene, but you sure wouldn't know it from the way people talk.

I do agree with that to some degree. In fact I do find some of the pan rattling about how social networks "must combat disinformation" about the potential Covid vaccines troubling.

However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.

> However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.

So censor what they see to ensure they only receive the information you approve of correct?

I don't think platforms (or governments) should ban content they disagree with, but I think platforms should be structured to emphasize compact social groups over viral content. It's irresponsible to have a UI like Twitter, with a "What’s happening" tab deliberately looking for the most controversial topics it thinks you'll like.

No, but the 30 thousandth time a meme resurfaces proporting to show guns being delivered to terrorist refugees it would be nice if Facebook automatically tagged it with the information that actually it's a scene from some movie or where ever it really came from.

Oh that’s interesting, I’m not on facebook much (ever) so I missed this.

> The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources

I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?

I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?

I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.

Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.

F this.

Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the other nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not. Meanwhile, one-to-many communications services, like broadcast TV, by their nature require editorial decisions. If you're only broadcasting one stream someone has to decide what the content is, and thereby becomes responsible for that content.

Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.

Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.

> Are companies that provide one-to-one communications services, like cell phone companies, complicit in drug dealing, insider trading, and all the others nefarious acts that are no doubt organized using their networks? I think most people would say they're not.

Unfortunately this same logic isn’t used when discussing the PLCAA or gun manufacturers in general.

Cells phones are not comparable to an online service.

Property rights are a thing and those who own the servers can determine what they will store and present to other users.

Conservative groups that don't spread misinformation and hatred are thriving on FB and Twitter. Change the law to make them store and publish anything not already illegal will turn them into cesspools like the various *chan sites inside of a month and advertisers will leave as will people with a conscience.

> 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.

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.)

“Literally fascism” is a little overused. I’m not saying governments and corporations teaming up is a good thing, but let’s not use fascism here, that will only make it harder to recognise actual fascism.

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.

Good point about the Volk. To be noted, contemporary Anglo culture has constructed the photo negative of Volk. Everybody of the Volk is intrinsically broken, worthy of contempt and deameaning. Everybody not of the Volk is intrinsically virtuous, worthy of praise and elevation.

History will tell what the consequences of corporatism + negative Volk will be.

That is not Fascism. That is Nazism.

Words have meanings beyond "things I don't like".

If thats your litteral definition of fascism I suggest you get yourself a dictionary. Please dont make blanket statements to describe complex phenomenons.

You can see elements of the slippery slope happening with the rewriting of American history in public government-funded schooling.

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

I can't imagine what I would do if I had children. Homeschooling for sure.

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.

Not disagreeing with most of what you're saying here, just wondering if you mean manufactured consent, like the Herman and Chomsky book, not consensus.

Yes, I was referring to Chomsky's "manufactured consent", but I suppose consensus works as well here.

> 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 censorship will be helpful.

It takes time, but it does cure it. The biggest problem with censorship is it locks a state into conservatism. What is conservative now was liberal 20-50 years ago. When you censor new ideas, you're stuck 20-50 years ago.

. . . 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.

You're not really for free speech if you're arguing that any topic is off limits. Sometimes even playing the devil's advocate for a "bad" topic can be illuminating and can help strengthen and deepen your own understanding of why racism or genocide are immoral.

What benefit do you think the government gets out of lockdowns? (other than the obvious one of stopping the spread of the pandemic).

Some people debate the ROI of pandemic controls. Also, not all lockdowns are pandemic lockdowns. There have also been curfews unrelated to the pandemic and in some cases predating it.

Mandatory real time tracking of every citizen.

Sounds insane?

So did the patriot act in the 90s.

Not every lockdown entails tracking of individuals.

And 9/11 would have not been stopped by forcing everyone to take their shoes off before getting on the plane.

Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.

That was technically done by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. That incident started the shoe thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid

One guy later was the underwear bomber. Thank God that didn't take.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab

Yeah, another 9/11 was basically stopped by adding locked compartments and training the pilots in self-defense techniques, some of which are even armed.

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 behaviors.

(3) Destruction of in-person social channels outside the sphere of state electronic surveillance.

(4) Normalizing fear of non-conformists ("you're killing grandpa").

(5) Destruction of non-sanctioned economies. Global companies have effectively been part of the state for decades, and can easily weather the storm. Smaller businesses can not, which dries up cashflow outside of state-approved channels.

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.

So a cultural revolution?

I don't think that really holds up. I'm in a part of Australia that had a lockdown and we've rolled back most of the restrictions because we're successfully basically eliminated the virus in our state (in the community that is - we have a few cases in quarantine of people arriving internationally every couple of days).

The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic. I feel absolutely no sense that people are more willing to submit to Government control now or anything like that, and it's the same even talking to people down in Victoria that had a big second wave and way longer lockdown than we did. Their willingness to comply was to stop the spread of the virus so they could get out of lockdown, and it worked, and now the restrictions are being rolled back.

It's frustrating to hear people in the media here crowing on about 'authoritarianism' and 'government control' over this, especially because the State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus. But at the same time, these conservative commentators who are aligned with our right-wing Federal Government happily ignore actual authoritarian, draconian laws that the Feds are passing to give police and intelligence services unprecedented powers for warrantless mass surveillance etc. over the last decade...

I'd even go as far as saying that the pandemic would actually be a really bad time for a Government to try and 'normalise' increased government control, because there's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over (if we get a vaccine for instance). The desire to throw off all the restrictions once the virus is gone is just too strong.

First: thank you for replying, and not just downvoting.

> The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic.

It is highly debatable that lockdowns ever were, or currently are, either necessary or effective.

> State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus.

The US is in the thirty-second week of "two weeks to stop the spread".

Credibility went right out the window when the powers-that-be decreed weddings and funerals as too risky, but protests and riots as totally fine.

Not to mention the long list of politicians whose personal lives seem to be an exception from the rules they have imposed on others.

> There's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over.

I remember airports before 9/11. Hell, I remember the US before 9/11.

The ironically-named Patriot Act represented a massive seizure of power and a wholesale trampling of American civil rights. None of the airport security measures introduced were necessary or effective, and yet they continue to this day.

Since 9/11, the United States has been at war in the Middle East for twenty years, squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to achieve... nothing.

This was neither legitimate nor logical. But it did make a bunch of politicians and their friends very powerful and very wealthy.

I also remember, at the time, the moral frenzy that enveloped the nation after the fall of the twin towers.

Things now feel the same from where I sit.

The government isn’t a magic entity or intelligent AI that wants or doesn’t want things. The government is people. And a certain breed of people are magnetically attracted to power, which is part of human nature that goes back to the beginning of humanity. The benefit leaders get out of lockdowns is power, which regardless of its legitimacy or necessity is one of the most intoxicating and addictive things on Earth.

I'll go with the normalisation of curtailing freedoms on a whim.

Sweden managed to just ask their citizens to behave properly and it worked.

I don't think they were trying to make the case that the government wasn't a bad actor. I read it more to mean that they liked it better when they were the only bad actor.

You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor".

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.

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 entertainment. When I read the news articles written the following day, I was completely shocked at how much bias was present in the mainstream news media.

During these protests it essentially went like this: during the day, the protest was 100% peaceful, hardly any police. Literally a perfect 100% peaceful protest. As night came, the crowd would shift. The peaceful people would leave and then a new group would start showing up, dressed in all black and start doing full blown violence against police. Starting fires, destroying private property and many similar illegal and dangerous stuff.

The following day I read articles on CNN that said there was very little violence and it was almost entirely peaceful. This was false because there was tons of violence at the night. When you read articles in fox news they say the protest was mostly violent. This was also false because the day time protest was 100% peaceful.

This type of news reporting is pushing division politics and social media further fans the flames because people can confirm their narrative and also get false reporting from idiots on twitter/facebook which spreads misinformation.

I could also tell this is heavily influencing people's view on the world because I would debate people on reddit. For liberal people, they would link me CNN and washington post articles to support their arguments. If I argued with conservatives, they would link me fox news and breitbart articles. This is what they're linking to me as their "proof" to support their argument. If I responded by saying that fox news/cnn is biased reporting, they would jump to personal attacks at me, almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.

This is hardly new. "60 Minutes" was infamous in the 1960s for the egregious slanting of their segments. It was so bad that the smarter people being interviewed by them would demand that the interview be simultaneously filmed by their own people.

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.

Yeah very true I guess. I guess the big eye opener now is that cell phones are cheap and high speed mobile data is cheap so that allows anyone to become a "citizen reporter" so to speak. If something serious is happening, it is very likely someone will be live streaming it to facebook, youtube or similar platform so that is a complete game changer at breaking away from main stream media.

I think an even bigger eye opener for me is that we seem to have agreement on both sides that there is bias and it’s creating division, but we don’t see any catalyst for change it. If a true ly neutral news org came out (or exists already) would people give up their biased soap operas for the good of the country?

There is way too much money to be made in biased "news" sources. And they're all biased. I think the only one we MIGHT be able to rely on is AP since it's a non-profit. But I don't know if that is any guarantee.

Governments are non-profit, but history shows us that government news sources are heavily biased.

Trump boat parades are an example. Some were epic in scope, thousands of boats. Multiples more people on beaches. Nicest bunch of people.

News almost completely ignored it.

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

And there you have it.

>The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques

I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students. And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.

just because it's in the curriculum doesn't mean it will be taught well.

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

Ah, but that was intentional! We didn't want people to really understand statistics, because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. ;-)

You hit the nail on the head there. And it's not just K-12 math, either. I don't know about Australia, but I can see what it's like here in the US.

I moved here 7 years ago, and my son has gone through a public elementary school and is currently in the last year of a public middle school. If it was just one year or just one teacher or even just one school (or one district), I could write it off to bad luck. Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the whole system is abysmal.

Agreed on k-12 maths, but the analysis of persuasive techniques was actually taught quite well and comprehensively, at least when I went through school (finished in 2011).

As someone currently tutoring an 8th grader in math: The curriculum is not really much different than what I went through in the 80's and 90's. They're still learning Algebra going into High School, and lots of work with fractions, percentages, interest rates, area, volume and so forth leading up to it. The kids still loathe word problems.

The basics are just being taught differently.

Maybe it is part of the curriculum because you ended up with Murdoch. That guy has been running the show since the 60s.

The Murdoch's have been influencing Australia Earlier then the 60's. It goes back to WWI, Keith Murdoch - Rupert's father made his name reporting on World War I, especially The Gallipolli campaign. He was hugely influential in shaping how the campaign was viewed and received in Australia.

It would later come out that there was exaggerations and embellishments in his reporting (https://insidestory.org.au/the-myth-of-keith-murdochs-gallip...)

In Australia, Gallipolli and the ANZAC mythos became part of our national identity. It is hard to explain to non-Australians the impact of the "Anzac legacy" on our culture it was like Australia's Gettysburg or Waterloo etc. Anzac Day is still celebrated and observed more than 100 years later it is a major patriotic celebration.

Murdoch also tried to use his influence to block the advancement of Sir John Monash (arguably the greatest allied general of WWI and the last person to ever be knighted on the battlefield).

And Daniel Andrews. My condolences.

Hahaha, touche.

I think we need to add "nobody ever talks about.." to the list of trope fallacies.

I experienced similar topics in curriculum here in the US in English and history classes in middle/high school as well as the English class I took in college (part of the liberal arts requirement for basically every degree at my school).

I remember those classes in VCE. Unfortunately a lot of people interpreted it as a class on "how to be persuasive" (as a writer) rather than "how to avoid being persuaded by propagandists" (as a reader).

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.

Its impossible to not be fallacious in any meaningful discourse that goes on long enough, and that's okay.

Every single invocation of an expert is an argument from authority.

Every single invocation of logic like "it is more like nature therefor it is more good" is a naturalistic fallacy.

Do we even need to get to other ones like "appeal to emotion"?

Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality (given that there are an infinite number of possible logics based on which axioms you start with), and that being worried about and trying to avoid "logical fallacies" in our reasoning does not help us see reality more closely to how it is.

There's obviously levels to it, its not "This is a fallacy/incorrect argument" and "This is a good argument". Invocation of expert is not the end of all discussion, as there are non-truthful experts and authorities (such as Government) which are more obviously less trustworthy. That doesn't mean that you should ignore all authority (I've never seen that argued).

Naturalistic fallacy really depends on how much you value the natural state of things, but it is usually used to point out that just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it is good or sensible to do/continue.

Appeal to emotion. Appeals to emotion are often used to incite people without them thinking through. "They killed our people!" sounds a lot more convincing/inciting than, "They had an altercation which unfortunately escalated, leading to the deaths of several people that we knew". Using emotion to obscure or not properly think about how it came to be to that point and what should be done from then on.

I think you're conflating logic (ex: mathematical logic, or far less rigorous careful reasoning) with an overly strict definition of a logical fallacy.

All I'm trying to say is that high school students should be taught "how to reach a logical conclusion" rather than "how to be persuasive in an amoral way".

> Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but it sounds a dangerous path to go down. People have already discarded facts - I think discarding logic as well would make things even worse.

I liked the stance in Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach by Douglas Walton, wherein "logical fallacies" are thought of as more the consequence of an argument which inappropriately shifts from one argumentative context to another.

For example, if during a formal debate you were to threaten to harm your opponent if they didn't agree with you (an "Appeal to Force" fallacy), this wouldn't be an appropriate argument for this context. But in, say, a contract negotiation between a union and a business, the union could threaten to strike if the business doesn't agree to terms, and it can be part of a valid argument. Thus appeals to force (and, as Walton argued, all "informal fallacies") aren't inherently fallacious in all contexts. Rather, the threat of harm was an inappropriate change in context from a formal debate to a negotiation, and it's the change in context which creates these fallacies.

I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education. But I hope I am wrong. Is there any evidence it is possible?

I don't think you can educate an above average person either. Unless you've done in depth study of the techniques, and most educated people haven't either. In addition, some of the techniques work even if you know them.

Finland has specific curriculum in schools teaching kids how to critically evaluate information they find online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fict... They study historical propaganda campaigns, how to lie with statistics, and critical thinking.

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.

It’s like a more complicated version of teaching people to recognize phishing attacks, I think a belief that the median human isn’t capable of learning about their weaknesses seriously underestimates humans.

You just need to frame it correctly.

> I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education.

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.

It has been done studies of education and gullibility. Sadly enough people who has some education, like a masters degree, was more gullible then people who lacked education. It was first at PhD-level that education seemed to help.

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.

> 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 in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.

That is by FAR the best summary of the issue I have read.

Analogy:

It's as if we've been living behind castle walls and now those walls are gone. We can now be directly attacked by enemy armies, whereas before we could only be practically reached by our own government's police and military. Having been sheltered for so long, we don't know how to hold our own without those walls.

Can I ask for some kind of documentation or reference for the causal relationship you are asserting here? Specifically a documented example of a democratic government that has deliberately restricted education on manipulation techniques because it might make their own use of it less effective.

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

It's a real shit situation. The fact that we cannot agree on facts in politics is truly frightening and I cannot see an easy way out of it.

Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.

Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.

The reasoning course should start at first grade

I'm curious—who prevented you from reading the article, which has nothing to do with your comment?

ⓘ Claims about censorship in the United States are disputed. Click here for more info: https://xkcd.com/1357/

I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue. I've seen this argument come up all the time as justfication for the destruction of ideas in good faith and rarely ever for actual harassment or intimidation. It's ironcially almost always linked in bad faith, to misrepresent the weight of whatever being replied to.

> I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue.

Because we've learned in the past decade or so that the "marketplace of ideas" fallacy is false. Ideas aren't traded like market goods; rather, they spread like disease. And the way to prevent dangerous ideas like Nazism from threatening society is the same as the way we prevent diseases like COVID from threatening society: containment. Isolate the afflicted, and implement measures to limit the exposure of everyone else.

Crude ideas are like snakes and the more you struggle against them, the more allure they have for others. Or just use some Nietzsche quote, I don't care.

People disputing the marketplace of ideas want to be authoritative voices in my experience. If we had been a little more relaxed in the face of objection, we might have fared better.

Anyway, if you are correct, we would need an authority on truth and I see a lot of problems already. Frankly, literature is full of examples why this is a bad idea, but don't let me stop you.

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