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> The big problem in todays age is we can no longer assume the government is accountable to us, or even get straight answers from the right people there.

Consider the notion that government has always been this way however its easier to tell this now because we are all so interconnected and informed.

That's a cynical take, a slightly less cynical take is that the rich and (privately) powerful have always tried to cement their power in form of organising a feudal-ish state and that the rest of us had to actively support democratising forces to counteracting them.

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

Even if the post office was not profitable and paid for by the tax payer, that is absolutely fine; it's an essential service, it made America great (I feel dirty saying that), it created the need and provided the funding to set up the core infrastructure of the US - post wagons, trains, airlines.

The US mail is part of the infrastructure and should be protected, funded, and kept alive at all costs.

> That's a cynical take

I always wonder why people make this kind of comment, as if it's a valid argument and not just sentiment. The difference between your first paragraph and their comment is tonal, as both accurately describe reality.

Can I conclude from the rest of your post that you are perhaps reading into the post that their stance is dejected and disengaged, yourself preferring a more activist, "I'm part of the solution" approach?

Ya,no. Top down authoritarian systems (including democratic ones) always corrupt. Power leads to cronyism and sociopaths rising to control. Always, just give it time.

Its not "the rich" vs "the working people" narrative you subscribe to. If anything your attitude and worship of burocracy is what creates the power to be corrupted.

Less is more.

This. Power encourages corruption. Most democratic systems are designed to diffuse power as a means to prevent negative consequences to self-serving behavior.

The less power the gov't has, the better. If the gov't has a very, very limited scope in controlling speech (libel, harassment, threats, etc), then the damage done when it's used for nefarious purposes is limited.

> 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.

How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us?

How do you feel about the notion that the rich and powerful are well acquainted with the techniques used to manipulate democratic systems (such as the double bind)?

> 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

I agree that technology is value-neutral. my perspective is that just as its easier to spread misinformation, its also easier to compare different accounts of the truth and attempt to check them for consistency. If there had been social media in the 20s its likely that the Illinois Radium Girls may have heard about the legal proceedings in New Jersey, or possible that they would have heard about the dangers of radium (which were known in medical and scientific circles at the time).

> How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us?

Better than a warlord forcing their values on us, even if the majority often seems lacking and with the exception that you are the warlord.

I agree that governments could do a better job at letting people pick their values themselves, especially with the current Victorian approaches

edit: Well technically a authoritarian warlord doesn't care about your values, only a totalitarian one would require that you tell everyone how much you love him. Maybe the latter is worse, but what would it matter at this point.

> Better than a warlord forcing their values on us, even if the majority often seems lacking and with the exception that you are the warlord.

I agree that its better. Would you say its a coincidence that if that question was posed to the warlord he would give a similar answer? "better than starving to death, growing up in a chaotic anarchistic hellhole with no stable values imposed, or being murdered by a warlord because of who you are rather than what you did"

One thing can be better than another, even if that other thing is better than something else. What point are you trying to make?

> What point are you trying to make?

One can advocate for terrible things by comparing them to even worse things. That doesn't make it ok to violate people's rights, it just means we can find even worse examples in history. Here we have an example of a democracy violating people's rights. Someone said government nowadays is unaccountable. I suggested that government has always been largely unaccountable. Someone said I was cynical and that democracy was good because that allows us to wrest control back from the elites. I suggested (in the form of a question) that the people in a democracy are just as capable of violating our rights as the elites. Someone else pointed out that's better than a warlord. I observed that the warlord is also better than what he replaced. Certainly we can agree that violating people's rights is bad, and just like we came up with something better than a warlord, we ought to be able to come up with something better than a democracy.

> One thing can be better than another, even if that other thing is better than something else.

We can keep coming up with better things.

Those are good points. A political system is often more of an expression of a problem, historical or cultural, rather than the root.

Even so, the technological tools for surveillance and censorship are far more effective and widespread today than before. Surveillance might have meant tapping your phone, reading your mail or following you and all the manual labor and cost that entails a few decades ago. Today its conceivable to run a search across every email, call, message, photo, bank transaction, location signal etc a person has quickly and cheaply. The stakes are much higher when they are capable of so much more.

Although this is fair, we do actually know what a state capable of this looks like.

The East German Stasi ended up with records of about 5.6M out of a population of ~16M people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_Records_Agency

I wonder how many records Google hold. What's more is that the CIA has a stake in Google https://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/ I am pretty sure the Google/CIA operation make Stasi's capabilities look like child's play.

Yes those are good points.

In this age among democracies it also isn't just governments that are blocking content -- it's companies that play gatekeeper in communications between people. People have stopped reading traditional forms of interpersonal communication, so my only way to get messages out to friends is through platforms like Facebook.

Unfortunately, Facebook themselves like to play gatekeeper on what my friends see and don't see, which I personally think is unethical. For example, if I post something about the election, its visibility may be restricted among my friends, so I need to do all kinds of Unicode upside-down tricks to prevent Facebook from even knowing my post is about the election. If I post a Youtube link instead of a Facebook video, Facebook downranks it because Youtube is a competitor, and downranks it to the point that friends don't actually see it. Sometimes they downrank text only posts to the point that I need to include e.g. a cat picture to get Facebook to give it the proper visibility.

I once posted to my feed something about donating to a particular disaster relief NGO, only to be censored out by Facebook because they mostly censor external links (only a small fraction of friends actually see them). No friends saw it in the first hour in their feed. I asked several and they didn't see it in their feed. Fishy, eh? I delete the post and re-post the same thing saying "Google for XYZ to find the donation website" instead of an actual link and BAM 40+ likes in the first hour and several friends donated.

Personally I think this corporate censorship is unethical. It's okay for Facebook to play the ranking game with business-sponsored media but definitely NOT okay with them doing that between friends who have mutually agreed to follow each other. I'm okay with a "popular posts" section on top of everything else, but the "everything else" really must include every single post of all of the people I have chosen to be friends with unless I specifically tell them to mute a particular person's content.

Ironically, WeChat doesn't engage in this type of censorship. They obey government censorship, but besides that, I can guarantee on WeChat that a post that I make that passes the government test will be seen by every single contact if they happen to be looking at the feed. I much prefer that model, rather than Facebook's sporadic random non-transparent censoring.

Is this because you haven't confirmed your identity? I presume that is for stopping the alleged bot campaigns trying to affect elections.

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.

I don't think so. I just notice that when I post something Facebook puts a election-related warning below the post, and that seems to be correlated with visibility. So I do various things like misspelling words to stump Facebook's AI and force them to treat it like a neutral post that they don't understand. I don't want their algorithms trying to understand my content or downranking external links. I want them to play the role of blind message passing between friends.

Here's one example of what I do on Facebook. Unicode upside down, misspelling deliberately, and blocking out parts of words in the image to stump their OCR algorithms.

https://i.imgur.com/OtPxeKA.png

It's essentially the same thing one has to do to get things through the China GFW, we now have our very own version in the US courtesy of FB.

> In this age among democracies it also isn't just governments that are blocking content -- it's companies that play gatekeeper in communications between people.

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.

Before getting outraged, can we first confirm the story? It seems European countries have blocked gambling ads. There is no source for other claims e.g. human rights website.

They are litterally mentioning Norwegian ISPs blocking "Human Rights Watch" right in the next sentence after talking about blocking gambling ads.

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

If you look further down in this comment thread, that claim has been repeatedly debunked, likewise for Match.com. These sites have never been on any widely adopted DNS blacklist in Norway. It appears censoredplanet analyzed data from a corporate-only ISP.

"looking down this comment thread" is now more science than the findings of acutal scientists? Huh...

I don't know why you view scientists as automagically infallible. Mistakes are quite possible, as are misinterpretations.

For what it's worth I live in Norway. Neither of those domains are DNS blacklisted, nor have they ever been - with the possible exception of on one specific corporate ISP (CATCHCOM). If you disagree, feel free to show some evidence to the contrary.

Websites can also block address ranges on their side.

Completely agree with your sentiment. I think the only recourse is to aggressively use the legal system for any case of arbitrary censorship. If you are blocked, you must sue your ISP and/or the government. Articles like this make me happy that we at least have a few organizations to help with this (EFF). Hopefully, with a new administration net neutrality can be restored as well.

So Russia's censor meets your stated requirements, I think. There is an official publicly visible blocklist that includes a justification for each blocked site: http://blocklist.rkn.gov.ru/

There is a procedure for challenging a decision to block. All the content on that list is blocked in accordance with some law, it's just that the laws themselves are questionable...

This sounds like a problem that 'real democracy' or 'direct democracy' pretty much diesnt have.

I agree with you, but...

> but that works only in horribly egregious cases like NSA spying revealed by Snowden

Did it really work though?

If government just would have people have a crazy talk on the internet and subject them to paranoia that has been validated, it could have been a nicer situation than what we are currently dealing with.

I don't get what any government has to do with it. Almost all information now is consumed via Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. These are private companies that has their own censorship rules and push their own agenda aggressively. Government has no control over this, even USA government as was seen recently when Facebook blocked links to NYT articles and Twitter was censoring Trump twits.

All other countries (except for China that just blocks Google entirely) have to live with the fact that all information consumed by their citizens is controlled by private companies from USA.

E.g. when I just started using YouTube, most of my recommendations in Russia were "opposition" channels (mostly by notorious A. Navalny - a daft populist). When I ignored one channel from YouTube recommendations, it offered me another channel with the same content. I had to explicitly ignore these channels for months before it stopped offering them to me. It still continue to offer me channels with more subtle and clever anti-Russian propaganda. Pro-Russian channels on YouTube are blocked regularly. Pro-Russian videos are blocked even more often or they are hidden from search results (e.g. when someone does a video about rampant rusophobia in a movie or a game).

I've canceled my Facebook account because of this. My FB feed was always full of rusophobic articles and all accounts that are even mildly pro-Russian (I'm talking about accounts of Russian people living in Russia) are regularly blocked temporarily or permanently.

Don't get the downvotes either. This is a somewhat valid point. I feel like many people, even here on HN really like to paint the world black and white in this regard.

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.

Is it sarcasm? A bit hard to get for me.

There's an old and very easy way to create a distorted image by selectively publishing the news: just ignore all the positive news and publish only negative news.

Many opposition channels and blogs in Russia exploit this technique. E.g. there're some anti-Russian blogs (quite many) that publish only vivid descriptions of the most cruel crimes that happened in Russia recently. When people read mostly these blogs they get an impression that everyday life in Russia is permeated by brutal crimes and there's no escape from villains if you step outside your apartment.

They're also quite popular among Russian immigrants living in Europe and USA (my guess is that because they're promoted in Google/Facebook/YouTube search results), and they always tell me in private conversations: "How can you live in such a brutal place where people are killed for no reason every day?"

They don't get that crime happens in every country every day, what is important is statistics: how effective is effort for fighting the crime, how big is percent of victims, etc (btw, also a rich field for statistics manipulation).

But these blogs do not publish fake news - they can publish only true facts. There's enough true facts you can use to create a distorted image if you ignore all the other information.

Yes, that was sarcasm, sorry if that wasn't clear enough.

Here's what I've been saying to my partner recently, "I hardly know what's going on up North of England, or even the other side of London (we live in London), but somehow what we hear about the other side of the world must be true". I find people who hold views whatever they hear in the media to be the absolute truth and that they are well informed because they read a lot of news to be extremely naive. This Mark Twain quote completely represents how I feel:

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

They do and with the help of moderators.

I do not know why Google blocks pro-russian sources, but I know why I'd blocked them, if I could. They are not "pro-russian", they are all "pro-Putin". Any "pro-russian" source that is not "pro-Putin" will become "anti-russian" in a short time, because of activity of other "pro-russian" sources. They just forcibly stick "anti-russian" label on such a source, and here we are. Putin do all he could, to draw an equality sign between "Russia" and "Putin". And it works. Now no media needs to do nothing, "anti-russian" label sicks to any "anti-Putin" media all by itself. I know this, because I'm russian, I'm anti-Putin, and I tried to find a "pro-russian" and "anti-putin" source. I tried and failed. There is not such thing.

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".

There's one clear sign that you can find on any Russian anti-Putin and/or pro-liberal blog or channel: that Russian people are lazy, stupid, alcoholics and drug addicts, that Russians never invented anything (all the technology at all times was stolen from Europe and USA), Russia never won any war (including WWII that was "won" exclusively by USA), etc.

They go even as far as to declare Russian language "stupid and barbaric and ugly" (Gasan Gusejnov).

Not touching any other reason for now, for me it's a clear sign that all opposition is rusophobic and/or paid by the CIA/MI-6.

Why would a sane person call his nation "stupid alcoholics using barbaric language"?..

> Russia never won any war (including WWII that was "won" exclusively by USA), etc.

Russia didn't take part in WW2. USSR did.

You are making here general claims from specific cases. It's a logical fallacy. Moreover your claim about Gasan Gusejnov is taken out of context. He said: "кроме того убогого клоачного русского, на котором сейчас говорит и пишет эта страна", i.e. "apart from that sordid and cloacal Russian language in which this country speaks and writes now". It is clear that he didn't mean the Russian language as a whole but the form of Russian language used in oral and written public communication lately.

> one clear sign that you can find on any Russian anti-Putin and/or pro-liberal blog or channel: that Russian people are lazy, stupid, alcoholics and drug addicts

Wow i don’t know how it is in Russia; but that’s exactly the fake impression I’d work to cultivate if I was Putin or the state. If I had to guess, what you’re seeing is a false image designed to make you hate anything not explicitly pro Russia government. Your description follows with tactics used by clandestine groups in the US, like appearing has black activists but taken to absurd levels so as to either alienate other supporters or turn them into extremists.

It sounds like you’re being played.

> all opposition is rusophobic and/or paid by the CIA/MI-6

This is probably the most ridiculous statement I've read on HN. But unfortunately not surprising.

> There's one clear sign that you can find on any Russian anti-Putin and/or pro-liberal blog or channel[...]

> Why would a sane person call his nation "stupid alcoholics using barbaric language"?..

Oh, yeah. Lets label any anti-Putin person as insane.

What are you trying to do? Are you trying to get ban from `dang`, so you could then talk about bloody censorship on HN? "HackerNews is a branch of CIA/MI-6", isn't it?

Interesting, your post is downvoted without any comments. Maybe it wouldn't harm to say what's wrong?

Well, my comment is against the against the grain (rusophobia is trendy in the contemporary world even among Russians). Also, it's a bit muddy. I said that government has nothing to do with censorship, but I contradict myself.

Although censorship in the US is some kind of internal struggle between parties that is hard to understand for an outsider like me, but promotion of rusophobia in social networks and YouTube is probably endorsed by US government. I doubt that ordinary engineers and managers at Facebook really care so much about Russia to boost rusophobic articles in the feed.

The US wasn't in Ukraine to promote democracy. Maybe it was a reaction to Crimea, perhaps they wanted to hinder the pipeline between Germany and Russia, maybe they just wanted influence in another eastern European state, but I am certainly not surprised the conflict is escalating. We are regressing to cold war thinking and while I think Putin is a despot, I see the actions of the US very critically.

Sad really, since we had a better political situation just 15 years ago.

US/Europe staged a coup in Ukraine before Crimea. Actually, it wasn't even the first coup staged by US in Ukraine.

True, and Crimea was a reaction to that. The EU or some member sates might have been involved here too, because EU association was the goal and it is convenient to blame everything on the US.

The pipeline might have been the reason all along for energy independence from Russia. I wouldn't know on whom to be angry if I were someone from Ukraine, but I would certainly be angry.

But people blaming Russian bots on Twitter can only be called low information voters in my opinion.

It would be more interesting if in general it was impossible to downvote (any comment) without providing a reason.

The government does have control over this. They could easily introduce a law which forbids platforms from censoring any legal content. They choose not to do this.

As others have pointed out to varying degrees, everything you highlighted happens at the discretion of the government. Doing nothing does not imply a lack of engagement it simply means that the government sees no reason to act.

Perhaps this gives a clue as to why: https://about.fb.com/news/2018/05/announcing-new-election-pa...

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

Essentially the US replicated what the USSR had as state censorship but with private corporations and it is impacting international communication not only US. The best part is that some people think it is for the greater good. When you would like to talk about it you are getting downvoted.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Which NYT articles were blocked on Facebook?

At least an "questionably sourced article that made incriminating claims about Joe Biden and his son Hunter".

That was the New York Post, not the Times.

Which is quite of importance if they are true (It looks like that to be honest, but the involvement of family matters should not have happened). It is highly relevant to developments in Europe and the relationship to Russia.

It is silly that Trump was accused of what Biden is probably guilty of. That is a point where you loose me even if there are understandable objections to Trump. He didn't start shit like that at least.

It's not a 'failure of democracy' - that's just how democracy works. You're just not in the majority....of people behind the scenes using voters to scam each other by pretending there's actual change. The only thing worse than a politician is someone who votes for them, and believes that's all there is to it. The real power is at the water kooler.

Snowden had nothing to do with censorship. I haven't seen a credible accusation of internet censorship against the government in recent memory. Private companies can refuse to serve certain customers. And obviously there's copyright law and government secrecy laws. But no personal expression is banned.

I think Snowden was just a general reference to needing whistle-blowers to bring accountability because the rest of us are in the dark.

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).

Mass surveillance induces censorship and has a chilling effect on speech, so it is arguably true that security agencies violated the constitution they are sworn to protect.

Strong disagree. The potential damage done by mass surveillance would be against private communication, not public. Intelligence agencies can and do gather a lot of intelligence by just observing publicly-shared information. And considering the surveillance excesses observed since the war on terror has unfolded, there has been no discernible decrease in speech freedom nor has anyone ever been provably prosecuted or persecuted due to data wrongly collected in one of these programs.

I do think the chilling effect from big brother remains and we don't know if intelligence agencies collect about people, building profiles for example.

What I know is that agencies couldn't produce evidence of data collection helping with their mission. And it becomes a problem if the work too closely with political parties in my opinion.

What I do have seen is panicking about certain people that could gather some crowds and we do know that intelligence agencies like to disturb a civil right movement or two. I demand performance from people payed by taxes and they cannot deliver.

US ”censorship” happens through AI flagging and demoting content, screaming louder than the next guy, distorting the narrative, DMCA takedowns. And it's quite effective. A high percent if people won't ever see the content. One can probably still see it if they take extra steps.

But none of that is government.