It's important to have content-neutral browsers. Several days ago Mozilla indicated their support of the Internet censorship regime: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
> 1. Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> 2. Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> 3. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> 4. Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
> These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that.
I read the blog post as claiming that deplatforming / silencing isn't the answer. A lot more (outlined above) is required.
> 4. Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
I'll help you. These two are the overt censorship.
When (often hyper-partisan like Snopes) fact checkers are the ones determining what you can see based on THEIR OWN interpretation of "hate speech" or "inciting violence" then that's censorship.
Alternatively, if you don't want to see something on Twitter / Parler / Gab / etc, just don't follow that person instead of calling for them to be censored.
This viewpoint is the culmination of years of hacking the Overton window. In any two-party environment where only _one_ party regularly _does_ proliferate bigotry and violent attitudes, any reasonable/neutral observer will appear to be a partisan for the opposition by default.
To assume this wouldn't be the case wrongly assumes that ideas should naturally fall along a Normal distribution, with the most morally-correct views centered precisely at x=0 (bipartisan) along the left/right axis.
Anyone who believes this is a true depiction of politics in the USA is willfully blind.
I'm not making the claim that the balance is immutable (it's always changing), but at this moment (and for the past decade, at least) there is one side where those ideas are _far_ more widely seen as acceptable or encouraged.
"more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms"
And of course, they want to be part of determining who, exactly, is a bad actor.
I'm looking for alternatives after 24 years with Mozilla.
I used to worry about their sinking market share. Now I celebrate it (2.66% if mobile browsers are included).
Unfortunately most alternatives are based on Chromium, and Google is of course also not a neutral player.
Still, there are some interesting browsers to be discovered. Opera has some really nice features now (like workspaces and a free VPN), but it's closed source and partially owned by a Chinese company. But it shows that innovation is still possible in the browser space.
The only issue I see with Brave is Qwant is the default search engine. Qwant is heavily backed up from the French government and answer to censor request very easily, I have more trust in DDG for privacy & censorship.
I've used that trick to add custom search keywords for multiple websites that didn't have an "official" Firefox search engine.
None of the search engines that I want to use seem to support open-search, however.
In Firefox this is not an issue and adding a custom search engine there is trivial.
Part of me thinks I should make the switch, and then part of me think that I'd just be indirectly backing Google by switching to Brave.
Anyone have thoughts on that?
You mean backing Google because of Chromium? It's not my favorite link, but I also don't see how Google benefits? Except perhaps by open source contributions to Chromium that can be reintegrated into Chrome?
When you are in a politically charged moment like we were when that post went live, a headline of "We need more than Deplatforming" is implicitly stating that the actions taken were correct and justified. That is obviously something a large portion of the country is going to disagree with.
Ever since the ousting of Brendan Eich over his Prop 8 donations, right-leaning people have been a bit wary of Mozilla. Many of us still backed them because the ideas they claim to stand for seem noble.
Blog posts like the one in question make it very hard not to feel like Mozilla's position is "we disagree with you and we don't want you around." If they don't want us as users, then maybe it's better we go elsewhere. Brave is a logical place for such people to look since it is run by Eich, which was where everything started.
Those other things are also called for in the post, but the actual post title was "We need more than deplatforming" (emphasis added). In other words, mere deplatforming / silencing isn't enough, according to the post.
ProtonMail indicated potentially entering the browser space: https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1347930110553419777
I've tried Brave and it looks and feels good. And the ability to donate to random Twitter users directly from the browser interface is a brilliant and innovative feature that I intend to start using.