Sections of your government worked directly with Twitter to control what information you saw.
Much bigger organizations - Facebook comes to mind - must be doing the same thing every.single.day. And no one finds this even a little bit alarming?
The United States has a distorted view of free speech, as some people believe that it should be absolute and without any limitations. However, it is important to recognize that the collective good and well-being of society should always be a priority, and that includes protecting against harmful or extremist ideas that could cause harm to others. While it is important to protect individuals' right to express themselves freely, it is also important to ensure that this freedom is not used to spread hateful or harmful messages. In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
That this sort of under-the-table cooperation between three letter agencies and information companies has been allowed to exist and develop is completely outrageous. It should not be put into perspective, but stopped, right here, right now.
Once that is done, a discussion can be had about where it makes sense to create legislation to curtail various behaviors and content that are disturbing to social order. The current list of offenses is fairly comprehensive and includes things such as violent threats, child porn and terrorism recruitment, and any addition has to be well-motivated.
But as long as the cooperation with three-letter agencies happens outside a legal framework, the only proper response, as far as I can see, is pure outrage.
Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? Sounds like you either get in the good graces of the "intelligence community" or you are now harmful, as shown pretty clearly with the hordes of "intelligence community" people calling the biden laptop(whatever it had, its content is irrelevant) russian propaganda[0], while even the DOJ and FBI says it isn't[1]. And of course those officials making the stink are contracted by the news agencies to talk about it where journalists will just blindly accept whatever they're given.
The "intelligence community" isn't your friend(neither are the proper agencies but I digress), it never was if you're not an us citizen and it probably stopped being if you are after the patriot act.
[0]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
[1]: https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-doj-fbi-confirm-hunt...
An additional related question: Are they even capable of undertaking this task? Our current government officials and bureaucrats don't understand enough about how the Internet works to effectively police it. And more fundamentally, can a government act quickly enough to outwit how quickly the Internet adapts to roadblocks? Governments need to have policies, procedures, go through chains of command, etc. A lot of Internet culture, on the other hand, is driven by random people doing random things. If a topic is forbidden, instead of policing that topic, the government then has to police the 50 ways to get around the block as well as guess which one will take root.
It's similar to trying to win a war against guerrilla insurgents. The high level of organization of a government to some degree works against them.
As an American, I disagree. We are a sovereign country, and people from other countries don't have any say in how we conduct ourselves. It doesn't whether it's online or offline.
American Nazis and Tankies have the first amendment right to spread their dumb ideas. If they want to make their own websites, that's fine with me. The government should mind its own business unless there are actual crimes taking place.
The rest of the world doesn't have to like it. It's just the way it's going to be.
If I manage to convince 50.1% of the population of the same, should we be permitted to censor your speech, and enforce prior restraint on your future speech under penalty of law?
Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person. That is a completely different situation than what you are alluding to. I can just as easily prevent the reverse question: I have a blog with a comment section, and somebody I don't know posts a horrific, rude and distasteful comment that I don't want associated with my blog post. Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?
Did you read GP? If they were talking about comapnies and not governments, it certainly was not made clear:
>However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content, and this has led to increased scrutiny and debate about the role of government in moderating online speech.
>[...]In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
Where was GP talking about companies?
The initial comment says government has always used their influence through "newspapers", "television" and "social media", all of which have historically been non-government entities who take the government's input and decide if they want to follow it or not. There are obviously major historical cases in which private companies have defied what the government wanted them to do (NYT v Sullivan, NYT vs US, etc), but I'm sure there are countless examples throughout Twitter's history of the government asking for something and then not getting it, but I assume that isn't something those instances are not being highlighted that much as they don't fit the narrative.
The problem with this "Twitter Files" reporting is that it's not making the situation any clearer. If anything it feels like these journalists are being used to do PR work for Twitter's new owner in order to promote the idea that Something Really Bad Happened Here, but this advocacy makes it much harder to see the real picture.
It’s always jarring to discover the extent to which it’s not.
After all, it's a blog for a VC fund. I'd say a lot of people here are building things that do much worse than what the twitter files exposed.
Am I misinterpreting your comment?
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
So yeah, you are misinterpreting my comment. I've just realized what HN is meant to be, or at least what dang wants it to be. I think he's an excellent mod, and I respect the guidelines. I want to come here and see cool nerd stuff like "can you play minecraft inside doom inside minecraft" and as soon as I see something political it puts me in a bad mood. And yes, if you scroll my comment history, you will see that I post mostly in political threads. But I have learned my lesson - this place isn't for that. There's no revolution to be started here, given the userbase is mostly financially well-off tech bros who benefit from the status quo. Just like me!
>The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
You said you were flagging all of political content and then brought it back to Twitter files specifically to justify it not hitting the exception clause.
For me the Twitter files content themselves aren’t interesting, but the effect of the what seems like obviously non interesting content getting so many people up in arms just because a billionaire is claiming it’s bad is an interesting new phenomenon.
I understand this type of content might put you in a bad mood, but given that you weren’t flagging the content until you felt
> The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.
Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.
No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.
Yes, but when Musk talked about freedom of speech but not freedom of reach he wasn’t referring to flagging that leads to removal. He meant you might not get as many views as you had hoped.
So your approach of flagging is actually more extreme because the content will be completely removed in some cases.
I would say that government agencies trying to stop me from seeing information that it doesn't like is something most good hackers would find interesting.
“Crypto” is a bunch of people trying to get rich using some cool new technology they nobody understands.
See how much bigger the second is than the first.
As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?
What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)
What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?
What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?
What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?
What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?
Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.
Let’s see the hackers hack.
Because the people that were in control already figured that what they wanted to use the system for is to buy low and sell high for huge profits, and so it didn't matter if the network didn't perform well for regular commerce. You don't need a lot of TPS if your ideal scenario is to ever make two.
And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it, it's the same thing for Elon Musk, it's crazy how popular he was online and how everyone loved him, he didn't do anything bad between then and now (except insult a couple people here and there and other asshole things we have all done in the past) but went from "invented X" to "merely invested in X", and from "genius" to "idiot", etc.
The people who said they couldn't tame the internet were as wrong as those who said the same thing about crypto.
I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.
Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.
The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.
Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.
The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.
Thanks to dang I do find HN to be much more balanced on most viewpoints than the majority of sites. I can't recall a time here where I have been disgusted with someone's comment like I have on Arstechnica reading comments wishing death to Trump supporters or the unvaccinated.
In our system of governance, it is the responsibility of Congress to hold the executive accountable. All these agencies are part of the Executive arm of the United States of America. If there is over-reach by secretive agencies of the Executive, it is the duty and responsibility of congressional members, representatives of the public, to be rigorous in the exercise of their duty and hold them accountable.
https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/artifact/senator...
[p.s. Support archive.org .. ^ is archived below]
"Allegations of domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surfaced in the 1970s, triggering public demand for an investigation of federal surveillance operations. In 1975 the Senate established the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s reports exposed abuses and led to legislation governing domestic and foreign surveillance—most notably, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. House and Senate permanent select committees established at that time now oversee U.S. intelligence.
The critical question before the committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security."
https://web.archive.org/web/20180227204516/https://www.visit...
--
I'll admit I never read the Church Committee report before, but it's actually shocking in the sense that an official report from the Senate of the United States would today be read almost as a 'radical' position, which itself is a telling reflection of the changes that have occurred in the past 47 years:
"Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners"," sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens."
The Church Committee Report: "INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS - Final Report - 1976"
Is there a Mastodon server that straight up admits that it may include Russian disinformation and is primarily for entertainment purposes rather than factual discussion?
edit: Or a mix of both true news items and disinformation! See if you can tell which is which!
As soon as you start assuming you know more than the people and that you have a right to censor the information they can access because it's bad for them, you become a tyrant.
Am I the only one who finds this rotten?
I want to read disinformation, tell me the sky is green I don't care, I can stitch stories together and arrive to a conclusion myself, false things (won't use that "(d/m)isinformation" media clickbait word) don't make sense, real things do, sure there are false things that do sound correct, but trust the people to make the difference, have your experts argue against falsehoods, let the people hear those arguments, if your expert's arguments disprove X or Y the people will not believe it, if the Russian experts disprove your arguments, then they're right and you're the one spreading falsehoods...
I think labels that say who has determined something is disinformation, produced by whom, and why they have labeled it thus might be a better solution.
What in all of human history, would make you think that?
It doesn't quite admit it, and its a fork, but Truth Social may be close enough.