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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

I re-read it twice, but I don't see anything in the blog post advocating censorship:

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> In any two-party environment where only _one_ party regularly _does_ proliferate bigotry and violent attitudes

Anyone who believes this is a true depiction of politics in the USA is willfully blind.

The probability of both factions promoting bigoted/violent attitudes at precisely the same rate is, well, impossible. Inevitably there will be a higher penetration of these ideas in one side or the other.

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.

Starting with the title "We need more than deplatforming". First claim is that deplatforming / silencing is great, but we need even more of the same.

"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.

Their market share dwindling to zilch can't come quick enough.

They also claim that The New York Times and news outlets the NYT recommends represent "factual voices" that need to be amplified.

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.

I just ended 17 years of FF fidelity. I was already using Brave on mobile and sometimes on desktop. With the bookmark import tool and my password stored on Bitwarden, it takes a couple of minutes to have a comfy browsing environment.

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 just installed Brave for Android, and for me Google was the default. It's very straightforward to change to Startpage or DDG, but much more worrying than the default engine is that it does not seem to be possible to add a custom search engine such as one using Searx! That's an absolute necessity in my opinion.

I don't know if Brave supports it, but I learned a while back that in Firefox you can add "smart bookmarks" (I think that's what they're called) where you put a "%s" in the url and then when you hotlink the bookmark it will substitute any words after the bookmark keyword into the url.

I've used that trick to add custom search keywords for multiple websites that didn't have an "official" Firefox search engine.

You can set DDG in the settings, I'm using DDG on the Android version. It's also easy to choose it on the desktop version.

I know, as I said in my comment. DDG is okay I guess, but why is it not possible to use a truly custom engine? I personally want to use an instance of Searx.

Surely it is possible to configure a custom search engine in Brave. I would be amazed if the list was hard coded.

Apparently it's only possible if the search engine supports "open-search": https://community.brave.com/t/is-it-possible-to-add-a-new-se...

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.

I went to the Brave website and had a look around Friday evening. I have also been using Firefox since back before it was even called that.

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?

I will now try Vivaldi, which is also based off Chromium.

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?

I'm with you- I read Mozilla's statement in a well-intentioned light, and believe that they are still as much of a leader of internet freedoms as they've ever been. It's true that there's a complicated situation around censorship and moderation, and the national conversation turning to this area doesn't make the lines any clearer, but Mozilla certainly doesn't deserve the level of criticism I've observed in some forums for this statement. If you feel as sure as I do, and would like to support their cause, it's more effective to donate what you can to the Mozilla Foundation than to further engage with the narratives these threads imply.

I could agree with this view if the article was titled something like "Deplatforming is not the answer"

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.

> I read the blog post as claiming that deplatforming / silencing isn't the answer. A lot more (outlined above) is required.

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.

Their only job is to display HTML as fast and optimized as possible, not to guide people how to browse the Internet and what to read.

That ship sailed about 15 years ago when browsers started blocking popup ads by default.

They chose differently.

Imagine Mozilla were actually producing TV sets. Then reread and reevaluate.

The post reads (to me) like calls for web sites and advertisers to implement these practices (like transparency in advertisers), not like features/changes that will ship in Firefox. I'll gladly change my tune, of course, when I see a patch land that blocks users from viewing certain content.

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