Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages | Hacker News Reader

Democrat Groups Plan to “Fact Check” Private Text Messages

zerohedge.com

34 pointsgaryclarke2733 comments

Based on current behavior of cancel culture, I don’t think generation Z truly appreciates the nightmare they are headed for. 20 years from now someone is going to come out of the woodwork with a tweet, text message, social media post, or heaven for bid only fans, and completely destroy someone’s life. The Internet is forever, and private companies are making that so.

I feel very, hopeless for lack of a better word, about this kind of thing lately. I feel strongly that we're sliding by popular demand into this kind of thing, that I'm well in the minority (not on this site but in the population at large) for thinking that it will end terribly, and that instead of putting up my own meager resistence to it, I'd rather egg it on because I believe everyone who genuinely believes it to be a good thing deserves every single repurcussion of it that will inevitably come to them.

I realize this headspace is neither productive nor healthy, but honestly other than burying my head in the sand about the world today, I don't have any bright ideas for how to not be perpetually, distressed?

If you egg it on, what makes you better than the "others" you distinguish yourself from?

I think it's pretty clear that doing things that I truly believe lead to society at large becoming worse would make me a bad person, that's at least partially why I don't actually do them.

Simultaneously, when looking at other people who take actions that I believe will make society worse, I don't wish them eternal peace and happiness as much as I wish they'd stub their toe, spill their coffee, and have a seagull poop on their back. That might make me a bad person, honestly I think it just makes me an average, if not slightly below average, person.

The thing that scares me the most about it is that twenty years is a long time. I'm not at all confident that I can predict the direction society will take over the next two decades. By extensions, I'm also not at all confident that I can judge, today, what will be considered abhorrent in the future.

That’s a good point. I was listening to a podcast of a comedy historian explain how comedy is very generational. If you go back and listen to the comedians of our parents generation, it’s very different than what we hear today, it’s very rare to see comedians cross generations. Twenty years ago what did we have? No Twitter, Facebook, nascent digital photos, mostly VHS and DVD. Today a digital image, video, or screenshot could be saved by someone who genuinely wants to cause someone harm in the future. It’s already been done and when it happens to some random kid applying for college it’s truly terrifying.

I’ve got 15 years to retirement and I’m very fortunate to have not done anything to get myself canceled. I really hope I can make it to retirement without a an overblown dongle-gate situation crushing my career. I still think about those guys…

Edit: Grammar, as always.

The men involved in the PyCon dongle incident found other jobs quickly. The woman did not.

She lied and made false accusations that got two people fired. When the facts came out it became clear that she was the bully.

What can regular people even do about this? It's a disgusting overreach if it ends up happening. And if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.

The same thing people are doing under other repressive regimes like the ones in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others (China comes to mind but the CCP has been quite successful in suppressing dissent): stop using open channels, start using encrypted [1] communications for things which go outside of the currently mandated narrative, assume your communications are being monitored by "the Party" so make sure to appear to be a good citizen when using open communication channels unless you're willing to suffer the consequences. Also, make sure to vote wisely the next time and hold whatever candidate you vote for to his promises. Don't just follow whatever stupid narrative you're being fed, think for yourself.

> ...if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.

If those private companies serve as the regime's lackeys doing their bidding to monitor citizens communications they should not be treated like private companies but as state actors.

[1] where encrypted should be read as "encrypted without _NSAKEY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)" et al.

Regulation, unfortunately, probably can’t solve this.

Imagine that we had the most thoroughly crafted law imaginable to prevent private messages from being blocked or modified.

You still have to take those companies to court, which cost a ton of money, fight them over years, and even if you win, then what?

The only workable strategies I see at this point are to fight to preserve individual choice, and the ability to connect point-to-point.

Politics aside this isn't going to be technically possible apart from plain SMS. iMessage and WhatsApp are encrypted so it won't be possible to intercept and fact check them.

Wait until end-to-end encryption is illegal.

But they don't need to break the encryption because iMessage and WhatsApp are closed platforms without support for third party clients, so Apple and Facebook can just create a list of "undesirable" keywords and push it to the client (automatically, without any way for the user to opt-out) that would mark such messages or completely delete them.

FB has always censored many of its media. I have no doubt WhatsApp will be the next.

Both Apple and Facebook support this type of censorship.

As do many of their employees.

You don’t even need to make encryption illegal. You just need to backdoor it. Trivial for one or two well-placed developers.

You don't even need to back door it. WhatsApp already implemented restrictions on forwarding of messages, which shouldn't be possible if the encryption worked. Of course they didn't need to: you can just include a "forwarded counter" in the message and enforce it on the client. That trick can be done for any rule they wish to enforce.

The original Politico article says the DNC plans to "work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation" and has no further information about what that entails.

The Politico White House Correspondent has clarified in a tweet[1] that "Outside groups are attempting to flag to SMS carriers false information campaigns that are driving misinformation on vaccines."

So it appears the goal is to specifically identify the misinformation campaigns. Since it's non-governmental, "outside groups", doing the identification I think that'd mean the information they're using to do this is, if not outright publicly available, at least acquirable/purchasable by arbitrary companies already.

So at this point my conclusion is that no text messages sent by private individuals will be read as part of this that weren't already available to the highest bidder (e.g. for advertising/tracking purposes). Further, there's no indication that any private text messages at all will be modified, corrected, or made to include fact-check warnings or anything like that based on their content.

And as described it could be even be as benign as asking people if they've gotten text message spam with that misinformation and trying to look for a pattern.

[1] https://twitter.com/natashakorecki/status/141471637838542438...

In short: DNC seeks to implement global surveillance of any SMS or chat medium to do pattern recognition and "fact check" insertion, which won't in any way lead to any type of bad or otherwise unintended side-effects or potential abuses at all, ever.

There are few things I justify as worthy of the implementation of such a measure (I mean, I'm sure it's possible I'll think or hear of one some day) but I still find any mention of contemporary issues as a justification for doing so unconvincing against the potential for abuse.

If true, would be political suicide to hopefully any reasonable individual. Also, saw a ZeroHedge article before it was flagged on HN. Feel like I just pulled off an achievement.

"Zero Hedge (or ZeroHedge)[b] is a far-right[12] libertarian[17] financial blog,[13][14] presenting staff-written articles and aggregating news and opinions from external sources."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

"Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue. The most common form of this fallacy is 'A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

And yet it's just repeating something that appeared in Politico, so if you wish to ad hominem this page you need to also do it to them.

The more reputable source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/biden-covid-vaccina...

> Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

> “We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”

'More reputable' is subjective based on your own bubble and frame of reference. The OP's link is 'right biased' your link is 'left biased'. I generally try to read a little bit of everything, with a huge grain of salt, and there is no way to read this action as anything other than 'oppressive' imo. Just look at the whole lab leak fiasco for a very recent example of why this type of censorship is awful for both truth and science.

Sadly I've not found a news source that simply reports known facts.

>> The OP's link is 'right biased' your link is 'left biased'.

The politico link referenced was linked as the source of information in the zerohedge article OP submitted.

You will never find this, because it can not exist.

There are so many variables. Not just word choice, but which facts do you report? If something is highly important, but you only have about 60% certainty, how do you share that?

Your only option is to triangulate.

First, my political views are right-wing.

Second, while Zero Hedge does report on interesting/lesser known stories, they take very strong opinions on the story.

For example, "Trying to 'fact check' people’s personal conversations is utterly demented." While I wholeheartedly agree with that sentence, it is nonetheless an opinion, not a fact.

Where possible, I prefer articles that state facts and leave the opinion-making to the reader.

How do they say plan managing disinformation sent over SMS? This seems… alarming? Do people get disinformation text messages about vaccines? I can’t say I have.

Probably the same way Facebook and Twitter censor private messages.

It’s just unencrypted data.

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