Hidden for some reason deapite 10 submissions/upvotes in 51 minutes.
I've sent a mail and asked mods nicely if they can override the flags on this one.
I've sent a mail and asked mods nicely if they can override the flags on this one.
For me who doesn't follow it to closely the fact that significant more proofs - including from officials in Sweden - have been coming out since the case was dismissed as cased closed by fact checkers was the big one.
For someone who follows it closely this is yesteryears news.
For me this was the first time I read that. (edit: it -> that)
Edit: as for the title if we don't have to honor the original in this case, could something like "Summary of developments in the Hunter Biden case previously dismissed as false news" work?
What they intend to get people to think, the means they employ, and the extent to which they do it are fundamental to understanding tech in society. How ironic is it then that every time a report of details and extent of their censorship and hiding is submitted to HN, the same people doing the censoring are allowed to flag the article out of existence on HN, censoring and hiding information about their censoring and hiding of information?
And if the argument is that reports of what Big Tech is doing to bias discussion will "ignite flamewars", well they know that means they can further bias discussion by threatening to rage until potential critics submit and self-censor. Certainly trillion-dollar tech corporations working to control society don't impose upon themselves any need to provide "new information". On the contrary, they repeat claims over and over that would not stand up to evidence, confident that any reports of the evidence can be severely limited and quickly swept from view.
Big Tech has vast power to limit what people find out about in almost every venue. I would love for HN to be an exception where the details that they try to hide are always in full view.
> every time a report of details and extent of their censorship and hiding is submitted to HN, the same people doing the censoring are allowed to flag the article out of existence
You're pushing the door in the wrong direction! We're open to these topics being discussed on HN. They've been discussed a lot and they can, should, and will be discussed more, as significant new information arises. But the underlying submission needs to be substantive enough to support a substantive HN discussion. The initial conditions of a thread are the article and the title. If those are flamebait, we're guaranteed to get a flamewar, and that's not what this site is for.
In this case I tried several times and didn't see a way to salvage either the title or the article in a way that would clear that bar. That's a quite different problem than the one you describe. If you want to see this topic discussed on HN, you should understand and work with the goals of the site, not assume that the people running it (or the community at large) are somehow against you.
> You're pushing the door in the wrong direction! We're open to these topics being discussed on HN. They've been discussed a lot and they can, should, and will be discussed more, as significant new information arises.
I'm not a native speaker but I wonder if you are talking past each other:
SiVal - as far as I can read - describes ordinary users flagging stories before the rest of us can see them.
You describe that HN mods doesn't do that and quite the opposite: you reopen discussions like this one.
Both of you are correct in my opinion and I think the point that I and possibly also SiVal feel is that moderation is good but some users are abusing the flag feature and it is too easy to do that.
Many of them and people like them are using the powers of trillion-dollar corporations, Hollywood, mainstream media, agencies like the CIA, universities that are gatekeepers of employment, etc. to aggressively employ the unprecedented powers at their disposal to suppress information that they want to keep hidden. Every time they justify why they do so, "Surely you can't expect us to allow opinions that people like us label as 'misinformation'", they admit that they do so.
And the ultimate irony is that they insist that this biasing of information is necessary because they speak for the voiceless who don't have power. If they are correct, it is the critics of the most powerful organizations in history whose voices actually need to be amplified. If they are incorrect, all voices should be allowed with none allowed to be silenced.
They, not you, will flag any attempt to report on the things they want to hide until your algorithm silences it for them. And they will flame as much as necessary until you learn to treat anything they want to silence as "flamebait". They have endless techniques for limiting the distribution of information that doesn't support them.
I'm just hoping that your policies will not be such that they can silence criticism here, as everywhere else, by flagging and flaming as necessary until your reasonable-sounding "substantive" and "new information" and "no flamebait" and so on are properly trained to self-censor what they don't want people to hear.
You seem to be making up a story, though, about who's flagging those articles. How do you know that it's Big Tech employees? I haven't seen such a pattern. No doubt some are, but whether they're anything close to the majority is a different question.
In my experience, it's important not to jump to the mind's preferred narrative about what/who are producing the phenomena you don't like on HN (and maybe elsewhere too). It's a huge Rohrschach diagram—people see what they read into it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Of course we all do this kind of thing, these biases are built into how the mind operates, but it's important to get more conscious about it, because it's not harmless - it fuels polarization, for one thing, and even paranoia. For example when you write this:
> And they will flame as much as necessary until you learn to treat anything they want to silence as "flamebait". They have endless techniques for limiting the distribution of information that doesn't support them.
... I think you've entered the wilderness of mirrors, at least in an HN context. I haven't seen evidence of this.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"...who's flagging those articles. How do you know that it's Big Tech employees?"
It doesn't matter whether they are employees or not. I'm talking about the subculture of people who dominate the Big Tech companies. When seen from China or India or Middle America, the subculture dominating Big Tech is just as culturally distinct from the rest of humanity as the equally self-reinforcing, compliance-demanding subcultures that dominate Japanese Big Auto makers or the Southern Megachurch industry.
The difference is that Japanese auto makers can only enforce their cultural preferences on their own employees, not on all car drivers. Imagine if Megachurches made so much money that they ended up owning almost all TV & radio, which they then extended to all entertainment: streaming, Hollywood, the news, and used their cultural agenda for "codes of conduct" and "terms of service". Fundamentalist Christians wouldn't have to actually be employees of a Megachurch to participate in the anti-"hate speech" enforcement.
If there were reports of what the Megachurches did in secret, it wouldn't matter whether the Christians who flagged such reports to get them hidden were church employees or not. They would simply be members of the same subculture using the unprecedented powers uniquely available to their group to silence their critics.
If this were a Japanese-language forum for discussion of the auto industry, I would expect it to include an atypically high percentage of people who were members of the salariman subculture. Likewise, if it were God Talk, we would expect an unusually high percentage of people who would flag and treat as flamebait all criticism of megachurches. But it's Hacker News, so it is heavily weighted with people who are fully on board with the Big Tech companies' enforcement and information hiding policies. They are of the same subculture and will cooperate in whatever ways they can.
HN being a worldwide forum thankfully means it is less dominated by that subculture than Big Tech itself, but there is still so much overlap that Big Tech will have as many allies flagging and flaming here (whether employees or not doesn't matter at all) as Big Church would have on a God Talk forum. But unlike other world subcultures, the one that dominates Big Tech has enormous power to promote their social agenda and silence opponents.
So, I think that here on HN, reports that Big Tech would want to hide ought to be regularly in full view and difficult for their allies to constrain.
Now you have censorship by tech instead of just by government, propaganda by tech in addition to media, mandates by corporations and by government.
Before, tech just told government to compel them via law. Now, government works with tech and corporations to achieve governmental aims without writing laws. It is extrajudicial.
I don't think the USA is a democracy or it is less and less of a democracy.
For those orgs above (or those who work apart of them) who will actively fight those from pursing decentralized/federated and open alternatives for all aspects of ones life: there is subversion, exfiltration, exploitation and demolition. The best of those orgs will help people bridge the gap to future where power isn't nearly as centralized to the degree it is now.
If this is news to everyone like me that CIA and Facebook and the fact checkers got caught lying then it is a big story and it probably should affect how fact checkers work and how much we trust them.
Every act of opinion writing is political, what you write about and what you don't write about. Do you criticize Biden or do you criticize Putin? Either way you (try to) move the public needle to one direction or other.
OK, so I read an interview of Greenwald at https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/now-we-re-talking/en/gle... and, now I think I know where he goes wrong, at least in my view. He seems to blame "USA" a lot for its past misbehaviors. What's wrong with this view, in my view, is that there is no single "USA". There is the US government. But the current government is totally different from the government of last 4 years. There are two political parties one of which doesn't seem to like democracy much at all. Doesn't seem to care about people dying of Covid because of vaccine misinformation. Whereas in the case of Russia there really is singular entity "Russia" meaning its current government because that government seems to be in power permanently. That is not the case with USA. US government this year is totally different from last year. Why? Because there are two political parties. Greenwald doesn't seem to see this difference, he thinks (or wants us to think) that Russia and USA are a pair of evil twins.