On Being Disappeared
chrishedges.substack.com
chrishedges.substack.com
Solzhenitsyn. Checkmate.
People knew (in the general sense) where Solzhenitsyn was and why.
And you're right in many ways. So in fact the way Chilean human rights lawyers nailed some, but not all, of the military (but not civilian) torturers of the coup despite their amnesty when the military lost power, was by saying, well you have amnesty, but you don't have the body, so you can't prove you murdered him some time ago, for all we know he's still alive and you're kidnapping him to this day, so it's an ongoing crime, so you're still on the hook. Maybe his family is right in hoping he comes back any day now. And you deliberately wanted the family to hope that, you had decades to tell them you really were terrorising them. Or maybe you weren't, maybe he's in some attic in a jail somewhere, caught in a secret passage in a dungeon (real life dungeon adventure! real secret passages, traps, monsters, minibosses and final bosses!) but you lost track. Oh you looked twice? Look again! Looked again? Look again!
And the subtext is "fuck you, obviously you're an asshole. You put remains into the subduction zone, you must accept the consequences of your actions, if you want to see the light of day again you'll have to take a submarine and then dig, dig with your hands and nails you piece of shit, until you find the body and bring it back. And don't resurface until you find it. If you don't like that, maybe you should have given him a funeral and informed the family of his death."
Of course, as they exist now, they are technically and legally nothing of the sort, which is a big reason why this specific complaint is tedious, absurd, and self refuting. Obviously he wasn't "disappeared", obviously there's no right beyond the terms of whatever contracts you have signed for arbitrary corporations to host video files for you, obviously all those videos he claims are "gone" still exist on the internet (hosted by a different corporation, at least for now...), obviously almost all of his claims are factually wrong.
Still...
...it feels like it'd be nice if we did have something a bit like the YouTube (and Twitter, and Apple App Store, and Spotify, etc.) that he seems to vaguely imagine exists? If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! And yet almost every other area I look, I see walled gardens and closed platforms that can (and do) censor their users at a drop of the hat.
I don't know if the Fediverse, as it exists today, is a step towards a solution for this, but man, I think we need one.
Like, Elon's idea of making a more free Twitter, or someone else who launches a no-holds-barred Youtube, just won't gain traction right now. That's not because they're going to be suppressed by a hidden cabal bent on silencing unpopular speech. It's because the majority of people who currently delegate the task of weeding out bad things to Youtube are more or less okay with people like this guy being removed. If or when that changes, something else will rise up in its place, but it's doubtful that such a platform won't run into the exact same problems a few years later.
Sure, but good luck getting anyone to see it without promoting it on established platforms (either by paying and/or getting "influencers" to push you)
And then, if you do get an audience but cross an invisible trip wire, expect your ISP/host provider to drop you.
And if you really manage to persist, the DNS police can finally de-platform you for reals (See for ex. sci-hub).
I'm no fan of Russia Today as a source of information, but I do believe people should have the right to speak and be heard. The problem today is there is so much utter shit on the webs that we each have a moral obligation to try to think objectively about our media consumption and stop lazily and addictively searching for data that confirms our biases and gives us a shot of outrage (like coffee) to start the day.
The Russian government already has the ultimate way of promoting their channel: Banning all other channels and imprisoning anyone who shares something not approved by RT/Sputnik.
Again, RT.com is still fully available in America and anyone can go there to hear the Russian government's side of this war. Anyone who wants to think objectively can and should go watch it and make their own decisions.
However, there is nothing whatsoever that obligates an American company to host their propaganda. And no, you don't have a right to be heard. At least here you have a right to speak, which you don't have in Russia.
But can you really? Didn’t websites catering to ultra right wing content get removed from the internet, because no web host would host then? I specifically remember AWS and others refused to continue hosting a fairly major right wing forum a year or two ago, although I don’t remember the details. Payment processors pressure platforms (see OnlyFans), and the government pressures platforms (look at the Facebook hearings). Even if you host your own website on your own physical machine, your IP might get blocked in Chrome and various other website blocklists (1). The internet involves so many commercial parties, at what point do you draw the line and say that actually, everything is a platform, so maybe we need to figure out a way to enshrine free speech on platforms rather than the easy argument of “it’s not censorship if it’s a third-party company”? How do you protect free speech online when there is literally no way to speak on the internet without involving some sort of 3rd party that might decide to block you?
(1. Just like email spam block lists, hosting your own website on a IP block that doesn’t normally host websites means you deal with all sorts of safety warning issues. I used to host the website for a community theater but I would get customer support issues where people couldn’t buy tickets because somehow we wound up on a block list as a suspicious website. I coded the website myself in basic static HTML, there was no newfangled React server or JavaScript or anything that could have been infected. No matter how many support tickets I lodged with the company that maintained the blocklist, I couldn’t get removed from the blocklist or get any explanation. Now it’s hosted on Digital Ocean. But if it had been something controversial that I couldn’t just throw up on a third-party hosting platform, I would’ve been out of luck.)
No, you haven't been "disappeared". Your content still exists. YouTube just doesn't owe you anything. Go find somewhere else to distribute it.
In fact try being a free thinker in your beloved Russia and see how far that gets you.
Just to clarify.
This is absurd. His RT content was in the same vein as his books, and his work published while at The New York Times. His work is consistent with his principles, regardless of the medium, or the source of funding.
When all of the major distribution systems exclude anyone that is not aligned toward accepted narratives, this becomes less and less feasible. And so the question remains "Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship?"
Even more so from someone who has associated themself with a media outlet created by a despotic nation who is busy violating human rights.
The big "censored" banner across made me instantly regret clicking it.
If people, and (I need to use it here) so called "journalists" don't know the difference between a private corporation and a nation state I just can't tske anything they produce seriously.
You can't be censored by YouTube. You can be deplatformed if you would like to call it that way. But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored.
The outcome might be the same, but there is still a structural difference between me showing someone the door as I don't like what they say on my platform and the government coming and gagging them.
Maybe I am just to sensitive to the usage of the term, but imho it denigrates the victims of actual censorship.
I'll allow that the situation in Australia is a lot cozier when it comes to certain things like mining, but the Australian government has literally zero control over Youtube, so the argument falls flat.
Comparing my experience and hers (or her family's) gave me an interesting view of freedom. Namely that I think there isn't one freedom. Not in the universal sense.
For example. In the GDR it was a bad idea to critique the state/government/socialism. But I know quite a few cases of people telling their boss he was an asshole. Without any consequences.
Compared to Western Germany. We could call our politicians names, critique our government, call democracy an idiotic for of representation but tell g our corporate bosses they were idiots could destroy your life.
Just an extreme example of what I mean with different forms of freedom.
In the end I think it always comes down to a society needing to decide where to limit the freedoms of their people to ensure as much freedom as possible for all members of society. And future generations.
Our constitutional court for example declared the climate change efforts of our former government not sufficient to ensure freedom of future generations as doing nothing (or too little too late) now would burden future generations to an extent that is not in line with our constitution. Limiting our freedom right now (taxes, limits to how fast to drive, and so on) to ensure freedom for yet unborn.
You're just plain wrong on that specificity and you threw in a pathetic ad hominem to boot.
Wikipedia:
"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies. "
Merriam-Webster:
"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"
Oxford:
"to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons"
To be clear, you can be censored by government, or by a corporation, perhaps your own editor, or even yourself.
There's no sign at all that Google has the slightest interest in its many years of abusing its customers and users.
When true competitive choices arise to Google products, people will jump at them.
The real outcome here is that Google must offer creators the ability to backup/download their videos. Does that exist already?
There might be an opportunity for a startup to create a service that downloads YouTube videos as backups for the owners of the channels.
Seriously though - Russia banned Youtube throughout the country. Youtube banned a channel. America banned nothing. How is removing a channel from your own website even remotely similar to blackholing packets on a national network?
Youtube is censoring videos and channels that run counter to the Western narrative, for the purposes of this conflict Youtube is a Western mouthpiece, Roskomnadzor bans all of Youtube.
The Russian government shapes the content that RT publishes especially as it pertains to Russia, for anything that pertains to Russia, RT is a mouthpiece, Youtube bans all of RT.
The difference in the above is that one actor is a private entity and the other a government agency.
Almost all web traffic follows the pattern you laid out, and almost none of it in the US is broken in that pattern. Having your content hosted on the end service is entirely up to who runs the end service, and entirely outside the control of democratic government. And it's a privilege, not a right.
Would you have our government force Youtube to host content it's decided it doesn't want to host?! I suppose if your understanding of the world were as simplistic as that of someone who believed RT, you would just assume government makes everything up and creates corporations as shells to put out their message. That's not how it works in the free world.
Youtube is just one site in Russia. RT is one site in America. RT is not banned in America.
Does RT let me post anything I want about Ukraine on their website? When they do, let us know.
Freedom of speech is not protected within the context of corporate employment. Say or do something that crosses advertisers, people in power or generally the wrong persons and you’ll be fired. Same applies to creators who effectively work for youtube.
If they care so much about making this info available then time to re-upload to a new distributor.
It was the (probably algorithmic) decision of a private entity not to provide free hosting and traffic for something they didn't like.
Can we please not denigrate real censorship victims because someone felt entitled to YouTube hosting and spreading their stuff?
Maybe banned, deplatformed or something like this. But technically (and legally) only government can censor you. At least in my jurisdiction free sprach protection does protect you "only" against the government. They are not allowed to use censorship. A private entity doesn't need to accept you on its platform. To me at least that is quite a difference.
But me showing someone the door because they state that vaccination causes autism is not censorship.
Just as an example. There is a clear distinction between the two.
1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever.
2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that.
People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on.
I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.
I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation.
I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics.
On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics.
All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are.
Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users.
Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context.
The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation.
POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.
Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme.
We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.
Posting content online & expecting it to stick around, and perhaps getting banned years down the road & losing it
To:
Whether or not we should have an expectation of our activity in stores/malls/parks accessible publicly & to us in pereptuity.
Can you spot the difference? Is it clear to others that these cases aren't the same? This is a question of expectation & intent. No one has a reasonable expectation that what we do in a store/mall/park endure & be remembered. When we post into comments & threads in public spaces, and it lasts for years, & gets removed for some fault or issue, obliterated forever, that's a surprising change. What we did in parks has never been part of the public discourse. What we do online always has been. The differences are obvious. What we do online, for many of us, speaks much more closely to who we really are, because we are entailed into the bigger conversations happening, operating in a global sphere. Your local sphere probably isn't that relevant, and it was never going to be preserved anyways.
Generally I just think it's bad form to assert your own priorities & value-systems over everyone elses. I don't think you've allowed room for other ways of seeing things. I think there's a lot of relative merits to both. Our online identities contain a lot of carefully-constructed thought that we would clearly want to be able to access, that most people will be free to access: the denial of that, in a shocking surprising manner, is obviously harmful & traumatic. Trying to steamroll that basic fact with some kind of Real World Real Talk comes off way bad to me.
Saying "the web never forgets" is very, very wrong if people interpret it to mean that you can count on anything that happened being preserved.
There's two aspects to that, things that disappear in the sense they aren't easily searchable (or at all), and things that get revised, such that you think they are available, but history has effectively been changed.
A virtue of physical books is that they can't easily be changed without a trace.
Archive.org is something, but very far from comprehensive.
HN, for instance, might be a casualty - how much more investment would it be worth to YC to comply with a bunch of data archive and export regulations? Especially if different countries make different rules?
As for as decentralized syndication and self hosting and all... I'll stay skeptical until someone has a compelling set of products to actually make it easy, since it's been a few decades of mostly unrealized hype at this point.
World's smallest violin for anyone griping that offering a 2 week download window, maybe with a maximum download cap, is going to be cumbersome.
Trying to hype this up as a hard problem is simply not representative. This ask is meager.
But it's real cute that you mock people who don't want to deal with government regulations proposed to REQUIRE making it a burden of a third party to help people do obsessive self-archiving, but you take offense at having this desire questioned.
(Does HN even have a GDPR export? I can't find it on their legal or FAQ page. For your proposed "my own content export": would it just be comments w/o any context? What's the point, if so? The comments and replies of others too? What if one of those users had issued a CCPA privacy removal request, say?)
Letting things go is a good thing!
Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR. For one it only covers personal data you provided. Not all content you ever created on a platform. This part of GDPR does not make platforms your free backup.
So if HN fell under this provision (and I am not SURE as IANAL) they would not necessarily be forced to provide all comments you ever made.
> Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR.
I'm AOK with restricting user-rights to save-the-things-that-are-about-to-be-deleted to sites that meet a GDPR style minimum bar for engagement. Minor minor minor sidebar, I think sites should have to have advertised machine-to-machine accessible metadata on what their site's terms of service are.
It's dead now, not a good implementation, & probably not a good fit in the particulars, but the vague wide-scale idea of P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences, a terrible name for a spec exposing what was more usually data-rights to the content than privacy concerns) kind of has some illumination for what a future path here might look like. It should be known. We should entail ourselves knowingly. This is one place GDPR doesn't really seem to address, that it misses the mark: I believe fully in small scale operators, in letting them do their thing, but as a user we should know what compacts we're entering into. Without having to read elaborate/complex human-authored terms: the machines should be able to tell us what minimum bars are met.
If anything, the strange thing is that life online is unusually durable compared to normal experience. Most of the meat-space equivalences to the ephemeralities you mention-- a discussion here, a note left there, etc, evaporate in days. Online life is weird in that this stuff sticks around for a few years often and occasionally decades.
I too miss previous communities, cultures, and participations. I enjoy the snippets I can find from 2-3 decades ago, and I wish more was still around. But if anything, I think the fact that it could still exist makes me grasp for nostalgia with energy that could instead be spent living for today.
I also deleted a lot of letters and journals by throwing them away.
I was bitten by a platform that stopped existing and took content with it. I had not backed up my texts.
I think what I am trying to say is that it depends. If it is important one secures it. If it isn't one carries the risk of loosing it.
It doesn't necessarily depend on the medium. But I agree. Except from entries in one's journal 1on1s are really ephemeral in the real world.
2. Hedges is well aware of history. And of changing times. And of the present heavy hand of SV censors. Go read some of his books before you play him off like a simpleton.
First our prisons, then our military, and now silencing dissidents - the US likes to privatize its dirty work. Those private actors aren't held to the strict legal constraints created for government actors. This is what Americans call "efficiency."
2. I'm sure he is - this article comes off to me as a highly intelligent person ranting. I'm calling out that his appeal to precedent is, at best, weakly laid out in this article (and at worst it's dishonest). As I said, I agree with elements of the argument that he's making, but he's made the arguments poorly here.
Just like there was no historic precedent of states limiting the size and tactics of corporations until the rise of 19th century monopolies.
And no historic precedent of meddling in what wages could be paid until we decided there should be a minimum wage.
And no historic precedent of forcing businesses to serve all races and ethnicities until we decided that redlining and segregation were wrong.
I think everything you wrote is correct. But I am increasing concerned about the power of a few individuals to control what can be published.
I think it's time to discuss what we should do rather than what the law mandates. It's a difficult question, and I don't have a good answer.
Remember that actors, writers, scientists, and other professionals were blacklisted by McCarthyism--and technically no one did anything illegal, but it's not well regarded now.
I am just saying that sometimes free speech is more of an appeal to a principle than a law.
This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.
Can you explain this? Wouldn't something being enforced by society be an example of it being a principle rather than a law?
I guess I just find this discussion so tiring. Even if I accepted your definition, that still does not answer the difficult question that I am proposing: what do you want society to be like?
> to be harassed
What is the definition of harassment being used? Because I experience more and more people who feel harassed when having their opinion critiqued in a discussion and claiming freedom of speach. While they are actually claiming that they want the right to say anything they like without consequences and don't want others to be allowed to argue against their voiced views (and in that denying the same level of freedom of speech to others).
The above goes against the desires of both the illiberal progressive left and the conservatives in their desire to deplatform those who express beliefs they don't like.
Aren't to hold views and to express views two significantly different things?
> seek, receive and impart information
Does information include proven falsehoods like vaccination causes autism?
In general I agree, but people weaponizing this to inoculate against critique is probably not in the ideas of those who wrote this.
Call me illiberal or conservative. I don't care for these weaponized labels.
To me, having grown up in Germany, there are very clear borders to "free speech". Denying the holocaust. Insulting/denigrating/dehumanizing other people. Stating falsehoods as facts.
Exactly as our law sees this. Time and time this imho very sensible approach has proven to be healthy for society.
Brainwashing, for better or worse, has already been weakened. So someone using that term today is using it in a very different context. Time and context matters.
Now, you add in things like torture and detainment. I mean, whatever. Feel free to die on this hill. My post's point is that the vast majority of society does not think of the Dirty War, or any sort of violence, when they hear the phrase "I was disappeared".
Hedges hasn't been literally "disappeared", made invisible, any more than he's been a victim of what "to be disappeared" has come to mean.
> Now, you add in things like torture and detainment
I'm sorry, where do you think the unmarked van is going? "Now you add in detainment" — detainment at least. If somebody disappears, it's either because they're being kept somewhere secretly or because they've been killed.
The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s. I stand by my statement that the Dirty War in Argentina is not something that comes to mind for most Westerners when someone uses the phrasing of being "disappeared"
Both of those predate the invention of the particular use of “disappear”, a passive voice construction implying an active voice transitive use with an animate direct object (the active voice form of which was not actually in use yet, but is sometimes seen since), which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina. It has been used since somewhat more broadly, but only because it invokes the intense coverage (including in the American media) of the Dirty War.
While certainly for a large number of young and/or particularly historically ignorant Westerners the specific referent may not be immediately recognized, the upthread comment that “ To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina” is absolutely correct.
It was not invented, that was the first time the euphemism was correlated. Having knowledge of the history of "to be disappeared" and having knowledge of what "being disappeared" brings to mind, are two very different things.
Well maybe something else would hit closer to home, like ferrying off supposed terrorists to Gitmo without due process or other secret prisons in quite a few countries should come to mind.
I believe that to be intentioned by the author.
The term "disappearing people" was used for describing the US practices outside the US to describe these practices. And the author for sure knew this.
Still doesn't make the use of the term by the author any better in my book.
But given his agenda I would actually think he intended to associate himself with these cases as much as with the victims of other governments to show once more how bad the US is from his view and to his intended audience/bubble.
I don't want to discuss the actual practices of the US and other governments. Nor compare them. This thread isn't the place for that. Just that the author intentionally conjured these images.
The protagonist here chose to be a useful idiot to help the Russian state attract self-described dissident voices to a Russian propaganda outlet. If you chose to make your living that way and care about your work, embracing backups is a good idea.
Unlike his kremlin patrons, western society doesn’t generally “disappear” people like him, we just ignore.
He deliberately compared the deletion of his stuff by YouTube to people being captured, detained, more often than not tortured and too often killed. He wanted to invoke this image to paint YouTube in as bad a light as possible.
In doing so he not only compared apples to oranges but also showed quite strongly that he is missing empathy and a sense of proportion.
I strongly suggest that he slept in a real bed last night. Ate a good meal. Did not get hurt by prison guards. Wasn't punched in the gut, starved, electro-tortured, got his fingernails ripped out, had to stand on a box with his underpants over his face while wires hung from his hands fearing electrocution. And so on.
I doubt that the victims of being disappeared (nor their families) would see what happened to him and his spinning of the story and say: 'Oh yeah. There is someone who had the same fate as we.'
It actually doesn't matter that you or others did not get the reference. Making this reference is the problem, even if not a single one of his audience would miss it. He intended it and devalued the horrible experiences of real victims to blow his felt victimhood out of proportion and generate more enragement.
I feel like we might have read different articles.
1. Whining and moaning,
2. Other political areas,
3. Intellectually dishonest arguments
to stand as a valuable contribution to the discourse on this topic. In particular the 'The most vocal cheerleaders' paragraph is just an emotional dump on the author's personal political bogeymen.
There wasn't? I remember going through the catalogs in the public library as a kid, looking at the microfilm, even listening to some audio recordings. Even a public library had loads of information, and the thought of it being made inaccessible on an arbitrary whim was unthinkable. Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.
Maybe in the time of Jim Crow or something certain public libraries would censor this stuff. I honestly don't know. It just seems to not jibe with my experience as a kid getting information at the library.
Also, libraries are very constrained in what they will and won’t archive and bring in to the collection. Budget, politics, space, taste all figure in. Hustler Magazine is a famous anti censorship platform thanks to Larry Flint. You won’t find it at your local library.
> Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.
But I guess that's partially my point, right? The instant broadcast/archive-by-default nature of YouTube is new and unique to our time; trying to refer back to historic figures as your precedent for having access to it seems a little hollow to me.
[1] I grew up in more sparsely populated areas (and, also, in Australia), and perhaps that changes my perspective on what is reasonable to expect for access to libraries pre-internet.
We have a choice as societies to fund public archives that are free from (direct) corporate interference.
Corporations and governments aren't clearly distinct entities, as corporate execs work as politicians and politicians often retire from office only to get hired by the corporations they regulated or gave business to while in office, but there's still a big difference between a corporation made to profit its owners/investors and a non-profit government entity supposed to benefit the public good.
We now have so much of the world's cultural artifacts in the hands of these few incredibly powerful corporations at whose whim any/all of them could be lost.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In fact I wonder why YouTube didn’t just remove ads from that content.
Sorry working for foreign governments cost you your free hosting. Upload it somewhere else.
We spend way too much time pretending that people have some kind of right to be on a private platform.
Julian Assange has yet to be 'dissappeared'.
You sir,
are talking to us from your SubStack.
Which still pays you money.
YouTube kicked you off?
Line up behind all the devs who've lost their livelihoods because a bot hicupped.
Yes, this has become the norm, and pretty quickly.
Question still stands.
It's amazing the lack of diversity in thought, and the amount/rate of simple, unforced(?) cognitive errors, on a site with such relatively high intellect. I think something important and unseen is going on here.
Looks like he ended up throwing in with en even more imperialistic, militaristic one party crowd.
Saying that though, it’s not a necessity and it’s his show to to cover the topics he wants.
Other people in this thread telling him what he should’ve covered to make himself less of a target for censorship… smh.
"Being a useful idiot" or a "contrarian" is subjective. And don't Western democracies, the US foremost, congratulate themselves on always allowing contrarian points of view? It's in their DNA... allegedly.
It can be thought of as the Russian attempt to create an equivalent to Al-Jazeera and the BBC.
"Not being impartial about Russia" isn't a crime. Even not being truthful about Russia isn't a crime. If it were, a lot of mainstream Western media conglomerates should be banned.
I really don't get the need to block access to any news channel or conglomerate, no matter who funds them or what's their agenda. I don't want Fox News to be banned, either.
People said similar things about Al Jazeera, but how many people actually were aware that they were state media? I wasn't for a long time, and I still can't remember the country offhand without looking it up.
I'm not saying that they made it a big secret, and I'm not saying that it is shocking that "Russia Today" is what it is, but I dunno, why did KFC start using its initials or Dunkin change its name?
Marketers know there is a benefit to not saying words like "Russia", "Fried", or "Donuts" because a significant number of people will not think of them.
And it doesn't make sense to assume that bias towards something can't affect reporting on anything else, because everything is interrelated.
That RT is "state sponsored" or "funded partly by the Russian state" was plastered all over YouTube, Twitter, etc. Why was that not enough?
I know for a fact RT's coverage of current affairs in Latin America was pretty good. The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways -- Western news media wouldn't escape unscathed, for example.
I'm not criticizing their reporting (because I haven't read much of it) or saying that knowing who finances them necessarily results in a more objective reaction. That is, certainly there is prejudice that comes into play.
I'm saying that it is demonstrably possible to have gone for years generally aware they exist without being aware they are state sponsored, and not encountering any mention of it.
I would expect more people to know about RT, but my point is, regardless of how you view people who are ignorant, the proportion of people who are ignorant matters. It has some influence on how they affect society.
There's a genre of articles that link the CIA to things and makes a big deal about it, like the most sinister imperialist forces in the US government are necessarily controlling it. So it seems to me that the idea of the source of something tainting it is universal.
Saying people should be aware of what RT stands for cannot be taken as an argument that they are.
>The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways
So? Rejecting it doesn't produce a license for inconsistency.
If we agree that Fox News is unreliable when reporting on Republicans, does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Democrats? Does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Ukraine and Russia?
Is this about RT, Al Jazeera, or other media? So far I have read such things about CIA in all kinds of media, including the so-called trustworthy ones, so I would say that a lot of these claims are probably credible.
Two things: Reps vs Dems is obviously two sides of the same coin, so I don't think your example works. You probably meant trusting Fox News is objective about sports or medicine or other unrelated topics.
However, I will agree with you it still makes sense that everything Fox News reports on is permeated by their political stance; e.g. there are obvious political aspects to medicine and health (because of enacted policies that happen to be partisan, or touchy topics such as abortion laws, or healthcare, or the myriad of things that are touchy subjects in the US).
But it doesn't matter whether I think Fox News is reliable on any given topic, what matters is: do I think they should be deplatformed in most of the Western world, removed from YouTube and access severely hindered or completely restricted for most of their audience? No, 100% no. It's for me to watch Fox News and decide they are crap. Make it available. Let me decide. Do you want to plaster all over Fox News streams that they are "partially funded by this or that corporation" or "aligned to this or that political party" -- sure, go ahead. But let me watch and decide for myself.
> Does it make sense to expect [Russia Today] to be objective in reporting on Ukraine and Russia?
I don't think they are objective in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I wouldn't trust them on that subject (still, I'd like to see, unfiltered, what Russian media is saying about it. Not what the West reports that Russian media is saying, which is always filtered). But RT and affiliated channels also reported on Latin America, a subject I know better -- I live there -- and I know for a fact their reporting was good; better than most US media. And it also got blocked/removed.
AJ's journalists in Russia have been doing their best to ignore the insanity of the new media laws and get their message out there, against their own best interests, bless them. Which is weird because most of the Gulf has been neutral or pro-Russia in their stance so far.
Disclaimer: My other half is Qatari and she will now have me "disappeared" for speaking badly of her homeland.
I just can't help but to appreciate the irony of complaining about censorship on one major tech platform while publishing on another major tech platform. It seems Substack is much looser on censorship than other social media, but at the end of the day, anyone can be "deplatformed" from any managed service / platform for many reasons at any time, and they may never even find out why.
Why not run your own (e.g., Ghost) instance and mitigate that risk to protect your content and business upfront?
> I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin.
There’s a very simple reason for that, freedom comes at a price. The price is an open, but critical mind. It would and is easy to silence opposition, it has been done for the past few years increasingly in the US. Truly it’s been happening even longer, the internet changed that dramatically.
To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy? Those striping you of rights — no? It’s fair to argue aggressors in a conflict are an enemy as well. Both can be true.
Before you claim "they do incite violence" -- no: many of the now censored podcasts like Ahí Les Va never incited violence.
If speech is deplatformed in the Western world, even if not outright illegal, it is effectively banned. You don't get fined or arrested for watching, you just can't access it.
It's still not there -- you can still access RT's website and there are alternatives to YouTube... for now. How long till you cannot access them either.
It boggles the mind. So Russia blocks Facebook and Twitter, and we rightly repudiate it. Though I guess when we make RT and affiliates inaccessible it's ok?
And if you talk "protected", it's pretty clearly a legal argument, and that works as outlined (in the US). "Should Google/... have banned them" is a good and interesting question, but not quite the same.
Nothing happened to it. You're perfectly within your rights to go stand in a public marketplace and yell until you're blue in the face about whatever you please. "Free speech" does not and has never meant that any company or individual of your choosing is compelled to amplify what you have to say.
There's the purist view of free speech and then there's the practical one ("is it free speech if none can hear it"?). I'm obviously talking about the most important one: the latter.
Sure you can. Any loon can run a website or do things the old fashioned way (standing on a soapbox in a public square). You're perfectly entitled to seek the loons out; what you aren't entitled to are private subsidies that lower the otherwise basic level of effort required on your part.
PS: we are talking about news coverage and outlets, not "loons". Please don't add unwanted "color" to this debate.
If you want to fight against "current trends," then you need to stop delivering undue power to private corporations and expecting the government to haphazardly legislate you out of your problems (the basis for that legislation is left as a continued exercise, given that there is absolutely no 1A basis for compelling companies to distribute speech.)
Yes, in the West we're not quite there yet. We are just simply removing access to dissenting voices. Only for those we deem "enemies", of course. For now.
> you need to stop delivering undue power to private corporations and expecting the government to haphazardly legislate you out of your problems
I'm not sure where this non sequitur comes from, but regardless: which government? From which country do you think I'm from?
As you say, there are no free speech absolutists.
Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world (actions of other people with whom we have shared the information do not count as direct effects, or otherwise the legal system would get really messy).
If this were true, free speech wouldn't be worth defending or even debating. Speech has effects, which makes it valuable.
Note the word "direct" in the sentence you have qouted.
It has at times been stripped away, but the ideals are always something to strive for
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
It's a fun delineation. In 1968, the banning of draft card burning was ruled to not be a denial of speech rights. In 1969, black armbands were allowed as political speech for the first time and the KKK was allowed to preach in favor of violence as long as they didn't specifically mention when or where the violence was gonna happen.
The modern interpretation of what constitutes free speech in this country is less than 60 years old. We're less than 80 years from another case where they ruled that kids had no choice but to recite the pledge of allegiance.
Just because you have this pipe dream of the US being founded by some infallible saints doesn't mean they weren't a bunch of selfish pricks who were interested in protecting their own interests.
It's an ebb and flow, largely based on politics at the time. That said, it's also not uniform across the country.
It literally didn't exist in its modern form until the civil rights movement and the liberalization of the Court. The idea that it's "started to degrade again" is ridiculous. We even allow money to be speech now.
Before computers, I could maybe broadcast in real-life to a few hundred people by talking directly in public square. And it would be fully up to me to convince people to show up somehow. And there would be no archive afterwards, unless I take care of this myself.
"Public square for hosting" was never a thing. I don't see why you expect this to suddenly appear.
Was there ever a public square on the internet to host long form video content?
The internet itself is a public square.
Television stations were never under a governmental order to publish the words of every freakshow with an opinion. Neither were the radio stations, telegraphs, or the newspapers. You don't have a right to be heard. You don't have a right to a platform. You have the right to speech. How you go about distributing your speech is entirely on you.
> I'm a free speech absolutist - i.e. I believe in the first amendment, including the idea it should protect you from corporations.
The Supreme Court has repeated ruled that the First Amendment extends towards editorial decisions in the sense that editors can choose what they publish and what they don't. Do you really believe people should be forced to distribute whatever you want them to?
> To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy?
The Russian government who would strip me and my fellow man of the right to free speech just like their stripped their own citizens.
I think there’s a difference between “publisher” and “distributor”. Distributor can make decisions, to a degree, but we have “common carrier” status for a reason. If you’re given a defacto monopoly or monopolize a distribution channel, then no, I don’t think you have any right to block distribution. Again, they’ve taken the public square.
It would be like saying “Well, we sold all the parking meters in Chicago to foreigners (really, they did [1])”. Then that company decides to ban anyone who’s black from parking downtown. That would 100% be considered illegal. If we did it for a religious group, say Catholics - also 100% illegal. Now let’s say libertarians - guess that would be okay? No also illegal. You can’t take the public square from the people. The Supreme Court has ruled as such —- that said, I do think it needs to eventually clarify this; or more precisely legislation should be passed.
https://lastdropmugs.com/who-owns-chicago-parking-meters-llc...
> The Russian government who would strip me and my fellow man of the right to free speech just like their stripped their own citizens.
I agree Putin is a tyrant, but two tyrants don't make a democracy. I’d argue the US is no better at this point. Try questioning vaccines, 2020 election, Hunter Bidens laptop, protest at a school board, etc.
Again I’m an absolutist though... I think censorship is a tool of weak authoritarians.
Why should a private company be compelled to carry and distribute any of this material at a cost to themselves?
In the US we had the Fairness Doctrine until Reagan. That was to try to make publishers show balanced views. Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today.
The commons of "being able to publish your own content" is still as available as it ever was.
YouTube (and others) monetized a single spot to host and discover content - but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it.
YouTube itself isn't a publisher - they are a distributor. Publishers publish to YouTube for it to be distributed and monetized. The Fairness Doctrine applies to YouTube no more than it does to AT&T to insist that the phone calls that it carriers are balanced.
Fox and MSNBC are publishers. Charter, Comcast, AT&T, and Dish are distributors.
How do you go to the public square and take a speaker phone and start talking in the internet?
Google: blocks content
Twitter: blocks content
Facebook blocks content
DuckDuckGo: Deranks (possibly blocks) content
Reddit: Blocks content
... do you see the problem?
Company towns still had to allow free speech, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are the defacto town squares and if I can't pick up a microphone and speak my mind; then it is not as it once was.
Claiming I can "start my own town" doesn't work in this context. Worse, if I do how do people find my town? Can I advertise on these locations (nope, probably not). What if I use AWS? Well probably like parlor infrastructure would be pulled, if it becomes popular.
It is not reasonable for random people to declare that some private company's comment section is a public square and thus can't or shouldn't be moderated.
If you want to grab a microphone and speak your mind, stand up your own server and do it. However, no private company owes you a thing.
Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so.
If you want to have the government compel private companies to do things, then say it. If you want the government to takeover private companies to provide the services you desire, then again, say it.
As it is, the companies that you are listing are working as private companies in a context of "they're not breaking any laws" and "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying."
I also believe that going down that path of "you must host all content that isn't illegal" to a private company is as equally authoritarian as "you must not publish any content about X".
As it is, the companies are making decisions about their ethics and bottom lines (from however their content is monetized) and working from there to decide what is and is not appropriate to host on their systems.
That is literally a public space and you can protest there depending on the district (New York for instance). The better analogy would be banning a store from a state. Sure people can move to a new state, but you’re still banning discourse in the region everyone lives in. Then banning any advertisements, and you’ll actively take the wealth and infrastructure from the other state, if you can.
> Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so.
It’s devoid from any of our opinions. The question is where can I conduct commerce on the internet? The answer is one of these companies is almost certainly required to make a profit. That makes it the public square. It’s where commerce and information is shared. I can’t go to an alternative, I can’t build an alternative.
Technically true, but I have yet to see someone who actually believes it. Everyone has a limit somewhere, for some people that limit is wedding cakes for gay marriages, for others is discrimination on some certain characteristics of a person. The point is that this kind of policy at the end of the day makes our society slightly worse.
"it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying."
They are doing that but indirectly as to not break any law. See the senate hearings about facebook for example. They can force that via blackmailing (if you do not restrict X we will make a law that increases your tax or responsibility for what users post or whatever, deny funding or provide funding to competitors, prosecute crimes that we ignored before, etc)
That is, the court found that since not everyone could have their own broadcast television channel, the FCC could (if it chose) enforce something like the fairness doctrine. Note, however, that such rules are unconstitutional when applied to newspapers[2], or any other medium where bandwidth is not limited.
> Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today.
Fox and MSNBC are cable channels. The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable channels, and a modern reincarnation that tried would be obviously unconstitutional.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._F...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
(Not to mention which, the current supreme court is much more protective of free speech than in previous decades, and particularly of free speech exercised via corporate forms. Realistically, the odds of an expanded Fairness Doctrine passing muster in this court are nil.)
All of which means that whatever the solution ends up being, it's really not going to look much like the old Fairness Doctrine. Which, again, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist!
Stopping black people from parking would basically eliminate access to downtown. A publisher/distributor (I think that line's a lot finer than you make it out to be, but whatever) refusing to publish content just means a writer has to find a different outlet for their media. They could, for instance, start their own website.
Part of free speech is the right to keep your mouth shut, so publishers have the right to not distribute material they don't agree with
The absurdity of this when people are being arrested in Russia for protesting with blank signs. Go down to your local town hall with a sign about Hunter Biden's laptop giving you a vaccine to change your vote in the 2020 election, no goons will show up.
The basic truth is, you are entitled to free speech in the US, but you are not entitled to a platform from which to speak it. This is especially true if the platform is privately owned, as just about all platforms are. (I can't think of an exception offhand.)
It doesn't matter in the slightest if some platform has monopolized the market. They are still not obliged to carry your speech. End of story.
Or, to slightly paraphrase another pro-censorship cliche, freedom not to carry someone's speech is not freedom from consequences.
First of all, you are not disappeared -- just by the mere fact of you being able to post this. Want to give it a go and redeem yourself? Try writing some anti-war stuff in Moscow (you can even join your role-model).
Second, you are not Edward Snowden. And your comparison to him in the latter parts of the article do not do your point any justice. You risk very little by posting this, whereas Mr. Snowden became exiled from his home country by exposing illegal surveillance and is now wanted for treason.
Third, pick better friends and maybe don't work for propaganda outlets? I'm no saint myself, and I understand sometimes you have to put food on the table. But don't claim you're innocent (no snowflake ever feels responsible in avalanche, as the saying goes). Move on, do something better and be remembered for doing good things?
Exactly. So YouTube no longer has his shows. Doesn't he have his own copies? Can't he post them wherever he wants?
This doesn't necessarily imply total naivety - plenty of journalists would be used to it being the publisher's role to archive the work, not their own.
They’ve probably got it somewhere
Not everything on RT is a 100% propaganda. Maybe the low watermark is around 60% (as defined by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and this channel accounted for the majority of the content in that 60%.
However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry. Also, you should have picked your friends better.
Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about.
All of it has been blocked/blacklisted. Very sad.
"Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about."
Maybe thats why your mentality considers it fine?
The Azov Battalion is Russian?
Here's an experiment for Chris Hedges: try doing a show on RT denouncing Putin and his war on Ukraine. At the very least RT will do exactly what Youtube has done and refuse to carry it. Or how about doing a show on RT denouncing the much worse censorship going on inside Russia right now?
Hedges is practically the definition of the "useful idiot".
It allowed people effectively blacklisted by US mainstream media to have an outlet.
I think the talking heads who parrot government propaganda, stenographers to the powerful, on CNN or MSNBC would closer fit the definition of "useful idiot."
Can you find Zelensky's recent interview with Russian journalists on RT?
I sure wouldn’t.
I’m also pretty sure many people don’t want to see it.
It’s really hard to get around a lot of aspects of an anything goes forums.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-empl...
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
I can only imagine how 'free' and 'uncensored' it will be. I bet it's gonna host everything from ISIS beheadings all the way to porn or straight-up conspiracies to overturn the US gorvernment, but nothing bad about the great leader Kim Old Musk and his endeavors.