I built ByteDance's censorship machine

Correct, its not binary.

Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets.

We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup.

Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.

My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc.

Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships.

But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.

That’s discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment, and extermination of the target du jour,

> One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps.

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian...

> they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party

Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing.

When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too?

These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too.

Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins.

To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters,

Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them.

They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden

Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could.

Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters.

They were the in-group until they weren't.

Moving between democracy and dictatorship several times in my life I can say this: it mainly boils down to how well your interests align with the interests of the one(s) in power. The main difference is that if your interests don't align you'll have a much harder life in a dictatorship than in a democracy, special cases (like Singapore) notwithstanding. For every Singapore there's more than one Myanmar.

" dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules."

Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example.

Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?

Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.

The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same arena with traditional news and reporters: their news aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you.

The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.

"Internet sleuthing" can mean "reporting the glitch" without meaning "giving a causal account of the glitch".

The "official narrative" on major political events has definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are pretending not to see the glitches.

But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of society hasn't been paying mind to it.

Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?

> but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems

Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.

The question is how do we fix this?

It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being critical of news establishments, due to things such as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal distrust of news establishments have become conservative political dogwhistles, and imply that the speaker has a tenuous grasp on the concept of "reality."

Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support actual news of events that really happened...or delusional fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"

Honestly, it's disturbing.

I have yet to witness MSNBC pour their efforts into deliberate misinformation. They clearly have a bias, but they are at least peddling correct information.

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.

If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

What? It’s all about the money.

Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.

In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed.

Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before.

I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.

I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.

Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?

You are right, but I was legitimately curious. At the very least, they have the choice of not working in that particular role/company. Further down the article they mention their colleagues had studied journalism and raised some eyebrows, and that he/she wanted to change things from the inside, if only by a little, then realized they were just a powerless cog. I'm going to guess they must be in their late 20s / early 30s now.

What do you do afterwards ? All good jobs eventually end up in a handful of mega corporations. The startups will either be acquired by one or become one.

Because that is how capitalism works in practice, and that’s where the true wealth comes from on the internet: sociopathic detachment.

A television which spies on you and can be with you 24/7/365? Every parent I know gives up by age 10 and YouTube becomes their childrens’ babysitters. No more childhood, just consumption until the day we die.

Isn't Chinese surveillance and censorship completely out in the open? Why would there need to be an Edward Snowden? There is already gobs of evidence of total surveillance, so why would someone risk their skin to expose what is already known and established fact?

I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-wing media.

He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals."

But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams.

Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.

> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies.

There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks).

Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting.

Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.

> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies

No, it's not.

It's mostly targeting the Democratic Party establishment and centrist media. He’s still playing the role of a leftist critic of the elite centrist establishment.

Of course, it's hard not to notice that though he will still ritually make perfunctory negative comments about the Right in the course of doing so, the content of his criticism is carefully calibrated to match current right-wing narratives about the same outlets as he is criticizing.