Edward Snowden on the Dangers of Silicon Valley Censorship [video]
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youtube.com
I think that the reactionary take on "deplatforming" is largely right (it's not something that should happen in a free society and is a violation of the principle of open dialogue in a liberal society), but it misses the forest for the trees. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc DO have a legitimate interest in keeping disinformation, garbage, and kiddy porn off of their platform if for no other reason than pol-bots make for a terrible user experience. And notice that when so-and-so gets “deplatformeed” it’s almost always for being involved in large scale platform “reach manipulation” not for being repugnant.
I am tired to death of conversations that end with, “but ma’ speech!” but would love to hear a serious policy proposal of what the platforms or governments should do about the legitimate UX problem here. What is a scalable solution to policing reach manipulation that doesn’t look like censorship from the outside?
You can't have moderation free platforms because there are a lot of profane an wierd people. Platforms will need to pick which side they are on, and cater to those users. Just like TV channels, newspapers etc have all picked between left and right.
Besides, both Facebook and Twitter moderated beyond "illegal" basically from the day one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook's_r...
To have fruitful interactions does not require the platform to have “scale”. And over you take away scale, most of the problems afflicting these platforms also goes away; they are problems of our own making.
In light of that, this convo seems naive especially given the participants. It's surreal, like reading an in-depth report about how women in Scientology aren't given equal access to e-meters.
Meanwhile younger leftists dislike him because he correctly identifies our current leftist and youth cultures as obsessed with the mechanics of identity categories and privilege, a perfect distraction from class and from US foreign policy. I have a fairly different political worldview than Greenwald but he is totally unique in his principles and consistency in speaking truth to power. For like a decade he has refused to call himself a liberal or leftist, letting his actions (like profiling AOC before really any other outlet noticed her) speak for themselves.
Greenwald has been carefully explaining what is wrong with Silicon Valley censorship for years[1][2]. Hopefully Snowden will convince some people.
[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/918451881940344833
[2] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1077912022187163648
I'm sorry but that's simply absurd, his treatment of people like Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz shows that he himself is deeply in bed with identity politics and other SJW BS.
Please join I2P [0] to make it a new normal instead.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
I doubt we'll see anything like this though.
Liberals of several years ago were pro free speech, anti censorship, and pro privacy.
Now liberals view censorship as a good thing, because it’s used predominantly against conservatives.
They are forgetting that these censorship tools can also be leveraged against them in the wrong hands.
Censorship should not be a partisan issue, all sides should be against censorship.
This is such a misleading statement that it needs a disclaimer.
Can you give us some examples/names?
None of these can be called right-wing or conservatives. I'm not even mentioning people like Rogan. All of them are aware or actual targets of the censoring.
Can't have people thinking there's censorship out there.
This viewpoint that people need or want shit to be labelled for them is the most disgusting, paternalistic, anti-freedom bullshit to disgrace America in recent memory.
Too many of these fucking people, not just in tech, but also in politics, have this viewpoint of "nudging people into better patterns", etc. My best friend, a smart man, but by no means the smartest of my friends once said something that resonated with me so strongly I doubt I'll ever forget it:
"The problem with freedom is what other people do with it."
Turns out people don't always do what you want, and that's the "true" price of freedom. Tolerating other people's stupidity.
Neoliberals are the centrist or right leaning part of the democratic party and the moderate republicans. It is the political position of laissez-faire capitalism, reform, and reduced state influence over the economy.
Reagan and Pelosi are both neoliberal. Maybe this person meant Leftist, Socialist, Anticapitalist, or Progressive talking points?
She's against universal healthcare, she's committed to austerity, she supports the surveillance state, she fights against progressive reforms.
It's easy to see the grandstanding that people like Pelosi do as somehow leftist or progressive, but fundamentally she's playing a much more conservative game. She's a democrat who will put on Kente cloth and say black lives matter, while doing nothing to actually improve black lives.
For instance, she mandates pay-go, meaning any new programs must come with new taxes. Seems reasonable, but she's not proposing new programs. She's letting the progressive wing propose them, then letting the right wing attack the progressive wing, and then saying "there was nothing that could be done, maybe we should be taking my compromise, which is predominantly a market driven compromise."
Pelosi is not someone who is out there calling for labor strikes and strong union protections. Compare her to, say, Martin Luther King Jr and his Poor People's Campaign.
I'll leave you with a quote from her:
"I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is."
That said, my view is only one lens, and there are others. Many don't consider Clinton/Obama/Pelosi and their ilk to be neoliberal. Many do.
Edit: Also, I told someone they were wrong, which is usually a few downvotes. :D
But the sock puppet (or throwaway) accounts remain a nuisance, whether their positions are shared or not.
As I said, one can remain anonymous and comment without creating a new account.
"Bury head into sand" comes to mind.
> They are forgetting that these censorship tools can also be leveraged against them in the wrong hands.
This feels a whole lot like the paradox of tolerance. The people willing to lie without abandon using the gish gallop will ruin society.
There is so much fake stuff on the Internet and tech companies suddenly labeling tweets of the president, but not others is disgusting and goes against free speech. No labeling is needed.. speech that doesn't cause physical harm should not be labeled!
Im speaking as a proponent of free speech only as I could not vote for that person and do not believe much of any political mumbo jumbo (to me it's two billionaires using their resources to do whatever and make up whatever to win).
If X says that the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines are made using aborted fetal tissue and Y says that they are not, and I want to label X as false, what label should I put on Y to label the other viewpoint?
Just like Trump have better platform then me.
If I say something inflammatory on HN, it will get flagged, downvoted, potentially result in a temporary or permanent ban, but if the POTUS says something inflammatory on Twitter, we're all just supposed to let it go? It makes no sense, I am, in the grand scheme of things a nobody, and the POTUS, no matter who occupies that position, is one of, if not the, most powerful person(s) in the world. The current occupant is currently screaming "RIGGED ELECTION" on Twitter, and they're not supposed to put some context, note that it is false?
Almost all of his wealth came from his salary as a Senator (1973 until he became VP) and then his salary for 8 years as VP, plus Social Security starting in 2009 and also pensions. His net worth at the end of that was under half a million.
He's boosted that to somewhere in the $10-20 million range since leaving office, mostly from book deals for him and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee is $100k, but it has ranged from $8k to $190k), and a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement ($540k).
There's an article that goes into detail [1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/22/how-t...
that right there is unacceptable to me.
The man spent his entire adult life in service to this country and never profited from it while in the act of that service, which you can't say for many of his colleagues.
If you choose to believe what your side tells is truth that's fine. I just have a different view and if i have money and want power i am going to use it either solo(ly) or collectively to get what I want. Look at what Peter Thiel did with his money cause of the axe he had to grind with Gawker. He paid for Hulk Hogan's legal defense to annihilate Gawker. I'm sure other money/power bags do similarly and lots in politics. So and for me that is why I believe all politics is mumbo jumbo spun up by billionaires to win; whatever it takes!
This is in line with my general experience that those who claim 'conservstices are being censored' are the boy who cried wolf so that they themselves can censor what they don't like. Also called hypocrisy, double standards, the usual.
The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
The fact that places like youtube and Facebook even allow it to exist demonstrates how little 'conservstives' are censored. You can find plenty of conservative channels that advocate for all manner of immoral, factually incorrect and Ill intent to people.
> The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
I think it is important to note that there is nothing inherent in conservatism that leads to this. Conservatives are not dumber or more gullible than liberals.
It is just an accident of timing that has resulted in conservatives currently being more likely to fall for such stuff. With just one change 12 years ago, it would be liberals far more than conservatives embracing fact-free conspiracy theories today. In another few years, it may go the other way.
Social media got big enough that a lot of people started getting most of their news that way. More and more people stopped noticing the difference between actual news items in the feed, sponsored items in the feed, opinion pieces in their feed, comments on stories the haven't seen from friends, and satire in their feed.
Two things arose to take advantage of this.
One was governments. They started state sponsored operations that made fake accounts to post material on the social media of countries they were not friendly with.
The other was content farms that generated a bunch of low quality content cheaply, and make money from ads.
Both of these concentrated on content that would be divisive. For the state sponsored material, governments know that just posting a bunch of stuff that extols their government or directly attacks US policies against their government would not help them. That would be caught and called out.
By concentrating on things that would be divisive they hoped to at least distract the US government by making it have to devote more time to dealing with domestic issues.
For the content farms making money from ads, divisive content gets more eyeballs which means for ad revenue.
This started seriously happening during the Obama administration, and so the foreign governments and content farms pushed material aimed at encouraging conservative conspiracy theories because Obama was a liberal.
If McCain had won in 2008, it would have been liberal conspiracy theories that got pushed.
So what do you think changed between then and now to lead to such a dramatic rise in disinformation in conservative circles compared to liberal circles?
Liberals on the other hand in general, but specifically those in national political power still read the NYTimes and Washington Post and listen to NPR. And while those institutions are not perfect, they are far more reality based and balanced than FoxNews and the rest of the right wing media ecosystem. Jon Stewart basically made a career of tearing into the hypocrisy and lies of FoxNews every night for over a decade and the left turned in for that.
I used to think they we should censor bad information (E.g. 5G causes COVID), but that's just not going to work in the modern era.
Can you describe these sensors?
Now go away troll :)
What's the timeline to measure this? Decades? A lifetime?
Teach it in school along with the usual 3 R's.
From the bottom of the page: A spokesman for the Republican Party of Texas said that the "critical thinking skills" language should not have been included in the document after the words "values clarification," reports Talking Points Memo. The members of the subcommittee "regret" the mistake, he told TPM—however, since the platform was approved, "it cannot be corrected until the next state convention in 2014."
They regret the mistake, it sounds like, so I guess it's all good. Nothing to see here.
* their curriculum explicitly aims to develop "lifelong, critical thinkers"
* they feel "reading, writing, and critical thinking continue to play central roles in the development of literate individuals"
* students learn to "Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning"
I understand that you're saying beliefs such as creationism don't stand up to any real critical thought, and I agree. But I feel the same way about many beliefs that left-leaning people tend to hold.
> But I feel the same way about many beliefs that left-leaning people tend to hold.
Can you provide an example of one of those beliefs that tend to be held by left-leaning people?
One half of the country is bad. The sooner we pull our heads out of the ground (and other low regions) and face up to that truth, the better off we'll be. A key aspect of critical thought is that there is no inherent virtue in denying reality, and the reality is that BSAB is no longer a viable rationalization.
66% of Republicans in a recent poll [1] say that Trump should not concede regardless of what happens in the courts. That amounts to advocacy of a coup d'etat. There is no room for negotiation with these people, any more than there was with the Shining Path or the Red Brigades or the Khmer Rouge. They have chosen their side and committed to it.
The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
It's time we started contemplating it. Because the other side is doing just that, and then some.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/23/2020-election-results-almost...
You seemed to have had a tough time with conservatives growing up and that is unfortunate, but I think you are being incredibly extreme in your blanket assessment of the motivations of half of your countryman.
Corporate collusion with government baked in with articles of incorporation, solidified with runaway debt spending for their services against the masses is just a tip of the iceberg of societal decay ongoing here with many thinking they can always keep kicking the bill into the future for someone else to deal with… lol… I have no will to live around such a populous with such delusions of the mind.
If you do not mind me asking, where did you move to? How much better are things there? And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
> where did you move to?
I moved to Jakarta for now (and a few other places "nearby" for weeks/months here and there pre pandemic) and have been working remotely for the past 5 years for a variety of companies globally.
> How much better are things there?
For me, there is more social economic freedom, cheaper cost of living, more social cohesion (probably related to the fact that the distribution of wealth isn't as skewed towards the wealthy as it has become in the US), and relatively weak government (less downside risk with federal diktats) with nowhere near the amount of %debt to gdp in household/corp/gov sectors. But still faces similar headwinds stagnation in many places and issues unique challenges to being spread out over many islands. Though, I still remain flexible and have my eyes out for others places that could be better in the future.
> And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
Overall I think SEA is pretty good as far as near future. Not really sure about anywhere else (besides nice island enclaves few on earth can enjoy like caymens, seychelles, etc.). There's just a lot of convergence going on between areas globally in all aspects of ones life and I really think that with our current global communications infrastructure being able to enable different forms of organization, there are a lot of existential questions about what things will look like going forward: what most people will accept? what actors will exert sovereignty? how will the most indebted nation/city states (and sub jurisdictions and corporates) deal with declining tax revenues/cash flows in the face of not just mobile capital, but a mobile workforce?
Exciting times!
You cant actually distinguish fact from fiction by logic alone. You need specialized knowledge for that, the rest of us you need to decide who to trust.
People who gravitate toward conspiracy theories tend to be intelligent and tend to question things they read. They then proceed to build wild theories, beyond possibilities of dumb people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Is a lack of a label on the below an endorsement of Theranos’ technology?
Today if you post something that is pro-gun, or god-forbid, you support one of Trump's foreign policies publicly, your account on Twitter or IG will get attacked and shut down. Most informational gun accounts on youtube won't show up in searches anymore. I'm not even talking about the tacticool losers posting dangerous videos. These are the people trying to educate others on usage and safety. Because a small part of the country abhor guns, but they also happen to control Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, they shadow-ban and move along with their day.
If flagging false information was the primary usage of censorship, there wouldn't be so much uproar around it.
That being said, it's understandable why these platforms don't want to be involved with promoting 'gun-safety' information, and it's not about censorship, it's about liability. You can't talk about gun-safety without talking about proper operation. This information has implications regardless of a users intentions (good or bad). Imagine the headline: 'Mass Shooter planned attack with help from YouTube videos'... The following uproar would only lead to greater censorship and restriction. Restricting content is not about censorship, but preventing scenarios like this. It's impossible to separate 'safety' from 'tactical training', and I for one, would prefer such information was not readily available to any would-be rogue actors.
If you want to have a gun, that's fine. Take a class. Want tactical training, take a class. Better yet, join the military.
I'm not particularly convinced that owning a gun offers any net-benefit as far as safety is concerned. I'd reckon you're statistically more likely to injure yourself (or a family member) than you are to prevent an attack from an assailant. It's also a really hard argument to make that there is 0 correlation between the high level of gun-ownership in the US and the extremely high homicide rate. Especially when looking at hand-guns (Canada for example has similar levels of 'ownership' and a lower homicide rate, but less hand-gun ownership compared to US).
TLDR; restricting 'gun-safety' info is not about censorship, it's about liability and owning a gun probably doesn't make you 'safer'. (these are, of course, my opinions)
It's nicer to just "shut up and hack", but the last time we did that, we ended up with hollywood indirectly dictating what we can do with our own devices. This time the stakes are much higher, as it's not just the "hollywood-only" devices like disc players and TVs they're getting ready to totally ruin.
It's disheartening to me to see the trend of people in technology, at least in certain circles, wishing only to enjoy the benefits of giant corporation resources (eg golang, TLS1.3, HTTP2/3, v8/node, Chrome, Android, iOS) without contemplating the implications of the downsides of giant corporation resources (surveillance, censorship, AMP, javascript hard dependencies, browser monoculture, et c). A system needs to be evaluated on the whole.
I'm not a big fan of forcing people to do things they don't want to do, so I think the best way forward is 3, via education. Already it's uncool to use Facebook. The next step is Instagram and WhatsApp, and perhaps even the facebook spyware SDK.
It's been three weeks and I still can't use Instagram. They are still blocking #hashtag-recent-lists with a banner: "Recent posts from all hashtags are temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election." The hashtag I used to check is #handtoolwookworking. Very political indeed.
This is on my front page now and is almost entirely a critique against the MSM.
This isn't a critique piece against today's MSM. It's a piece that makes the point that the US is the evil force in the world today. You can feel that way and have arguments about that. That's fine and fair. But it's certainly not an example for critique against the MSM in the context of today and this discussion.
What made you use that choice of words? Where are you from?
>The Jakarta Method is a 2020 non-fiction book by American journalist and writer Vincent Bevins. It concerns American support for the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66.
That is sensible, because the MSM label is primarily a label one side uses to describe media outlets that don't lean their ideological direction, while they ignore that there is absolutely no shortage of media outlets that do. So when you see someone using the loaded term, you know you're not reading a neutral analysis.
MSM is a "loaded term."
What? MSM is anything but loaded. It's a description of the largest media platforms and that includes outlets like Fox News. And none of them provide "neutral analysis" hence the critiques.
Everything you said is wrong, imo. You're advocating censorship and labeling people you don't agree with. You might as well get a job in the MSM.
Not really. You can argue that "fake news" is not loaded, because according to you it only means "news that are 100% fabricated with no basis in reality", but that still doesn't change the fact that a significant amount of people use it to refer to any news that they don't like.
The problem is that they pretend not to be biased and they are the largest players.
"Neutral analysis" Yet Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, etc all promise they are "unbiased" while they let stories without facts run against targets on the right (IE: 'anon person says Trump said' or Covington Highschool kids)... while they sideline or suppress stories with actual backing facts that target the left (IE: "Laptop from Hell").
You call it a loaded term... we call it the largest players in the pond are "stopping election interference" by literally practicing election interference by deciding what's "true" even when it's easily proven they are wrong more often than right.
Here's Jamaal Bowman, recently elected Democrat from Brooklyn, getting his mic cut by CNN the other night for criticizing Rahm Emmanuel:
So if they are trying to secretly cover them up (as you seem to imply), they are doing a bad job.
For a less ambiguous case, look at how CNN and MSNBC treated the Bernie campaign/movement. Calling them "MSM" doesn't mean that one is a reactionary, it just means that one is outside of their set of approved viewpoints in any direction.
I can't tell which side you're claiming bias in favor of or against, but both sides get pissed off when they see something from the opposite point of view and, once they've seen two or three such things, fixate on seeing HN as biased $opposite-to-me. What's ironic is how identically the battling sides mirror each other this way.
Not every decision to remove some content is censorship.
That's fair. I'd attribute it more to some group-think phenomena.
Some users flag these things for political reasons while others flag them because they lead to crap threads, like the current thread, and because these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible.
Given your experience moderating this site, do you have any thoughts / insights on how to build a platform that brings the best out of discourse while preventing the downfalls you see here?
If you do not like the way they run their platforms Voat and 8chan are perfectly fine options. But larger audiences stay away from those platforms because they are unmoderated cesspools. Could it be that what the “anti censorship“ crowd really wants is a free audience?