Twitter restricted in Turkey in aftermath of earthquake | Hacker News Reader

Twitter restricted in Turkey in aftermath of earthquake

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Turkish here.

This is unbelievable, but totally expected from the current "democractic" government. Social media usage is very high in Türkiye and people are coordinating using social media (mainly Twitter) for rescue operations in near realtime.

I'm pretty much sure some people will literally die under wreckage because of communication interruptions as the result of this block.

(For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks which also happened in the past, but not everyone is tech savvy and it's not reliable for life-or-death situations.

When you use quotes around “Democratic” do you mean the elections are rigged? I’m not familiar with the legitimacy or lack thereof of Turkish elections.

One incident even featured a pre-filled ballot indicating a vote for then-ruling parties.

Decades ago one of my profs described his voting experience in the USSR: they had a completely private (“Australian”) voting system where you picked up a ballot, entered a private voting booth, filled out the ballot, then deposited it in the urn.

Or you could pick up a ballot pre-filled-in with the straight communist ticket to save time and just put it straight in the urn. Naturally anyone in the room could see which you chose.

Perhaps more amusingly: he was an exchange student at the time (late 60s?). Because communism was a universal movement anyone could vote, so he thought, “well why not while I have the chance?”

They are not elected democratically, and they are not deciding on anything democratically, even though it is "democratic" on paper.

It's a very subjective judgement and everyone is entitled his or her own opinion. But that one is very biased. As far as elections concerned Turkish election system is very solid as a process and implementation is solid. In the end Erdogan lost Istanbul in the last elections even after that election repeated for only Istanbul, and worse for Erdogan, the second round was much more decisive. People didn't like the election were repeated.

Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

Erdogan literally imprisons any opposition leader who comes close to be an actual challenger. He's done it twice already in the last 7 years.

It's just not funny anymore. Some people in Turkey might enjoy living under a dictator (after all, many did in Italy and Germany, and many do in a lot of other countries today), but let's not pretend that water is not wet.

To give everyone an idea of how solid the process is: consider that the opposition candidate widely considered most capable of beating the incumbent president was recently sentenced to two years in jail and removed from politics on the weakest of pretenses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Ekrem_%C4%B0mamo%C4...

Here are a few other biased sources offering their subjective judgements:

- https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/turkeys-local-elections-wer...

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_and_violence...

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

- https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/report/turkey/december...

This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election. However, the upcoming election will not be free and fair as those terms are commonly understood.

> This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election.

This is kind of skewed though, if people can't go on TV or Twitter and say "Erdogan doesn't know what he's doing and his policies are foolish".

This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon: have reasonably(-ish) fair(-ish) elections, but also rig things in such a way that people only hear one side of the story. It's not a surprise people support Erdogan if they only hear how brilliant he is with tepid criticism at best. Control the narrative → control the vote. Ergodan, Putin, Xi all play by this book.

Having a free press and free investigative journalism is critical; without it you don't really have fair elections, even if the actual business of casting and counting ballots is sound and free of fraud.

> This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon

Hardly: Mussolini also had some sort of elections. It just happened that parliamentarians who were too much of a nuisance had unfortunate encounters with groups of hard batons, or were required to live on remote islands. In Putin's Russia they fall from balconies.

> Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

Exactly! I'm from another global south country. Usually when someone on these sites say "${their_country} here" I prepare myself for the worst takes because I know this happens in my country, usually it's some liberal who read/work in western leaning media and repeat what they hear. It's an echo chamber so huge that you can't touch it's walls so it's hard to know you actually live in an echo chamber.

It’s not quite Russia levels of vote fakery, but rather similar to many other backsliding democracies - the incumbent is credibly accused of using their influence to insure victory. See “controversies” on this page, which describes the election where they modified the constitution to give erdogan completely unchecked power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_elec...

The subject of that referendum—abolishing indirect election of the president and moving to direct election—is something that people want in America. And the close result on the referendum seems to match opinion polling.

Maybe the referendum was rigged, I don’t know. But centralizing more power in the executive, if that’s what the people want, isn’t necessarily anti democratic.

I know “checks and balances” aren’t exactly written in stone by the Athenians, but they seem like an objectively good idea - I’d argue that any attempt to remove them is anti-democratic in a pragmatic sense. See: the situation in Israel as Netanyahu attempts to consolidate power away from the judiciary to protect himself from corruption charges. Also see: “ turkey accounts for 1/3 of the world’s imprisoned journalists”

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

The real story in Israel is more complicated; the courts have taken power from the other branches; it's about time for there to be some kind of correction, and is often the case, the rebound might very well go too far in the other direction, ruining the possibility of a real system of checks and balances. Netanyahu himself may be going along with it to penalize the courts, but it's unlikely to help his court cases directly. The idea that it's supposed to somehow magically help him is a talking point for some of the political parties, but he would probably need some kind of new legislation to grant him immunity.

>is something that people want in America.

Speak for yourself; as someone who understands what (note: what, not who) POTUS represents and why the Electoral College even exists, I hope our system does not change for vapid reasons.

Direct election of POTUS across state lines is going to reduce democracy, not increase it.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/02/04/getting-...

Erdogan famously remarked: "Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination"

Erdogan is a fascist thug. He’s jailed most of his opposition.

For one nonpartisan quantitative analysis, Freedom House gave Turkey a 32/100 ("not free") score on its 2022 global freedom scale [1].

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

Isn’t freedom house the same one who in 2020 gave top scores to countries that literally arrested people for walking around outside? That forbade people from running their businesses and customers from hiring their services?

All of these restrictions on freedom might have been introduced for good reason according to some people, but they very much have been introduced, and very much restricted freedom, so if those don’t count according to freedom house, I can scarcely consider this “quantitative nonpartisan analysis” to be worth much.

Not (AFAIK) the elections, but everything else. Highly restricted media (many journalists in jail) and now social media. Many opposition leaders, judges jailed, exiled or otherwise "purged." Over 100k of them. Constant fiddling with the constitution and election system to increase his own power.

"Democracy," in the sense that refers to the democratic systems of government in existence, is a bundle. Elections without free press, expression, freedom to organize and such... That's no longer "democracy" in that sense of the term.

free and fair elections require more than votes being tallied faithfully. They need all the other facets of democracy to function faithfully as well. Such as a free press, freedom of expression, etc.

Is there anything specific about Twitter here, or is it just the most popular? I don't see why they couldn't do the same on Facebook, Telegram or some other platform.

probably because other social media sites have already proven time and time again they are happy to weaponize their platforms against a population if the leaders of that country ask them too.

> For anyone telling to use VPN, yeah, many people are used to using VPN because of these blocks

not to mention, imagine learning to setup a VPN (Beacuse your life depends on it) while you're buried under rubble..

Exactly. Imagine a government willfully ordering ISPs to block access to Twitter where people under wreckage are trying to reach for help using social media.

There's a very dark WikiHow article in the works here, or a SNL sketch

The Diyanet said "Do not look to social media for hope in finding loved ones, look to Allah". A few minutes later twitter was blocked. I think god is jealous of Twitter today.

…so do nothing and forget about them in other words?

Exactly. "God will save".

Inshallah Tayipp will find himself hiding from 10 million furious Turks storming his 1,000 bedroom palace by the end of the week.

It's time for this criminal go to jail or flee to moscow.

There's a joke that goes like this.

There's a man who gets warning that his village is about to be flooded and he gets a warning he needs to evacuate immediately. He says he places his trust in god and decides to wait for god's help. A while later a tractor comes by and asks him if wants a ride out of the village, he tells them he places his trust his god to rescue them and tells them goodbye. A while later a bunch of cow herders and asks if wants a walk out of the village, he tells them .. trust.. god. Now water begins to come into the village. He climbs to the top of a hillock. A while later a few people arrive in a boat and ask him if we wants a ride out of the village, he tells them .. trust .. god. A while later he dies and then complains to god about help not arriving. God asks what else but help was the warning, tractor, cow herders and boat were?

There's a joke in here that Twitter is how God wants to help.

The networks are already overloaded, introducing a VPN into the mix might even make them unusable for some people!

Unfortunately, this is a tragic situation.

Off-topic: Do most people there prefer "Türkiye" or "Turkey?"

There was an official name change [1] to Türkiye.

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye...

I'm very well aware of that.

Whenever I've been on the receiving end of a name change like that, I (and everyone I knew) found it obnoxious.

However, cultures differ. Turkey has a long history with name changes, and has been rather aggressive about them. When it became "Turkey," the post office wouldn't deliver mail unless the new name was used. Likewise, the capital has gone through two names since "Byzantium."

I was genuinely curious about local reaction. I have no idea, from the other end of the world, whether this was imposed by Erdogan as a crazy policy to everyone's annoyance, or whether it is wildly popular. I assume somewhere in between.

They got fed up with Google search returning stuff about birds.

Who is “they”?

> Erdogan released a memorandum and asked the public to use Türkiye to describe the country in every language

I wonder how that works. Does Eredrogan expect every country to write and say "Türkiye? Does it work the other way around - can Germany change their official name in Turkey/Türkiye to "Deutschland"?

>Does it work the other way around - can Germany change their official name in Turkey/Türkiye to "Deutschland"?

Probably not in the same way, as Turkish is not a UN official language. They could request their name be changed in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Arabic though.

The problem is, the bird is supposedly named after the country, and that if the country had changed/clarified its name, so should the bird, against Turkish intent.

In some years, this will become a non-issue

It will become a non-issue once all keyboards have a "ü" button. :)

Which might not actually be that long.

Why is everyone focused on the umlaut? If you don’t have the button, use a “u” and move on.

The umlauted u is not just a u with some visual flair. "ue" instead would be a more accurate transliteration, but Tuerkiye looks... awkward.

Got it, but I’m saying that using “Turkiye” is better than using “Turkey”.

Things like text search and exact string matching.

As minor as it might sound, if 199/200 countries work in your system, capitalism dictates that below a certain business size, the logical thing is often to just ignore the one country and move on.

These things have odd cascading effects.

I have good news for you - text search for non-ascii version of latin characters like ü is a long solved problem. That's because even in non-english speaking countries some people don't bother with diacritics, or they don't have a correct layout at that point, or the text is in source code and has to be ASCII, etc.

You can try that now - my browser highlights Türkiye when I search for Turkiye.

Great! Now do a JOIN in a database with Türkiye in one column and Turkiye in another.

It's a problem with well-known solutions. That's not the same as a solved problem.

It will be a solved problem when processing a log file in /var/log with Python (or any other tool of choice), it works automatically.

They are completely different letters. You'd be misspelling it.

Context matters. Is it better to use Turkey then?

Because it’s hilarious to try to force the english speaking world to pronounce a name with letters they don’t have.

That's not a keyboard issue. Everyone in my country uses a standard US keyboard, we just press AlgGr to type some characters. I even learned some foreign lanugages, so I use a (standard, included by default in every linux distro) keyboard layout that allows me to type most characters used in European languages by using chords - for example, alt-shift-2 + u = ü.

So this is not a keyboard (hardware) problem, just a keyboard layout (software) problem.

> standard US keyboard, we just press AlgGr

Standard US English keyboards don't have AltGr. But you may mean ctrl+alt on windows or the 'option' button on macs.

It's the right-alt key. If you're using a layout that defines AltGr, the key will just work like that on a US keyboard. Even with just the US keyboard layout, the right-Alt key can still be used with numbers in Windows to type any unicode character.

> If you're using a layout that defines AltGr

Which the parent was pointing out is nonstandard. There is no alt-gr key on a standard US keyboard. You can certainly remap alt-right to alt-gr but that is nonstandard and doing so does not mean that the key exists on the physical keyboard.

For example my caps lock key is mapped to ctrl-left. That is nonstandard.

You're wrong:

* Pick any European keymap under Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac with your US keyboard * Hold right-alt and press a key

You'll get something like ń or ą.

Bonus: Under Ubuntu, you might also have other keys remapped to let you type things like x²≠¼.

Bonus hack: Add a Greek keymap, and you can even get to things like Δx = π·y with an alt-space in between.

AFAIK neither Windows nor X11 have a concept of an AltGr key - it's just the right alt key so there is nothing to remap. The only difference between US and european layouts is its use as a modifier key.

I still read Czechoslovakia every now and then instead of Czechia, and it has been a few decades since they split off now.

As a Turk, I do not trust people who are using Turkiye in English. That is virtue signaling which is saying they are populist, nationalist etc. etc. I also find the change idiotic at the least though I understand why they did it.

When working with people of different nationalities and ethnicities I emphasize trying to pronounce their names correctly. Why is this different?

Because it's a nationalistic thing to insist that all languages spell your country's name in the script and spelling of the source language. It's a stupid move by the Erdogan government to get people to stop thinking about türkiye birds when they think of the Turkey country. Other countries get by just fine.

Germany, Alemania, Deutschland.

Mexico, Messico, Méjico.

Japan, Nippon, 日本.

China, Zhōngguó, 中国.

Every country gets by getting called different things in different languages. But Turkey insisting on the spelling just because they don't want to be associated to türkiye birds, where the birds are literally named after the country, is a silly move designed to stir nationalistic pride for their near totalitarian government.

One funny thing is that in Portuguese the word for turkey (the bird) is Perú… also the same word as the South American country. Turkey is Turquia though…

> Turkey is Turquia though…

The bird is named after a series of misconceptions, with different results in different places.

The country is named after the Turks; you expect it to be the same everywhere.

That's not always the right thing to do.

I'm from a language where you'll never get it right, and most people are pragmatic and don't care about names being the way our mothers do. That's a very Western thing.

Forcing us to try to teach you our language, or half-way butcherings, are considered obnoxious. Go with the English pronunciation. Do anything half-reasonable-sounding, and it's okay too. Don't visibly struggle each time you try to say my name.

For my name specifically, there's also an uncanny valley phenomenon. My name pronounced obviously wrong by an American doesn't raise flags. Americans mispronouncing my native name sounds horribly wrong.

Not a Turk here, but I'm guessing it is equivalent to using latinx or Latin@. It is a signal that you are from a bubble that is out of touch with your intended audience. Most Latin people don't use these terms and don't particularly care for them, so it signals that you are more aligned with a third-party then with Latin people.

What? If you would try to say my country's name in my native language instead of the English version when speaking English I would think you were a nutcase.

Similarly my given name has an English pronunciation that I prefer people use when speaking English. Someone trying to pronounce it natively without being native would feel extremely awkward and not respectful at all.

It might depend on country or person, but my name is already very hard to pronounce, asking me 2 or 3 times just prolongs the embarrassment

I find that impossible to achieve and believe others do. I have no expectation people getting my name right because, apart from other reasons, it contains sounds that do not exist in many standard languages. It would literally require training one to be able to produce new sounds, and that is just not practical at all, not to mention outright impossible for many to do accurately. I guess it is good to try to pronounce things good enough, but "correctly" I doubt.

US State Dept has started using Türkiye for its communications...

Governments are different as they legally have to do it.

I don't think it's a legal requirement, they just choose to respect the wishes of the receiving government.

Of course. The will (and should) use the name the country officially defines to be the correct one. Why would they refuse and cause a diplomatic fuss over such a trivial thing?

This is AFAIK a result of trying to get Erdogan to accept the NATO application from Sweden and Finland.

NATO head Jens Stoltenberg started saying Turkey but then changed to Türkiye before the big NATO summit in Madrid last summer.

Interesting. From the State Department:

"Note: The official conventional long-form and short-form names remain “Republic of Turkey” and “Turkey”, respectively. “Republic of Türkiye” should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside “Türkiye” in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public."

Source: https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-turkey/

I do agriculture stuff in Turkey. This has been a useful heuristic. I estimate that 90% of the people I have faced who get angry or make a big deal about this are bureaucrats who didn't get into their position by merit.

Aotearoa New Zealand will be same

This is nothing about trust. I'm using the officially declared word to describe the country. Nothing to do with ideology or views.

Serious question here. As someone with closer ties to the Middle East than me, how do you look at people who pronounce Iraq correctly, as "Ih-rahk," compared to the usual American pronunciation, "Eye-rack"?

As someone who was in that country for a year all over the place with a rifle attached to my chest, Americans always ask me about my exciting vacation there. As an American convervative myself, people's heads are blown whether the are left or right leaning when I pronounce it as "Ih-rahk." At this point I find the reactions fairly comical and get a kick out of experimenting on people, much to the dismay of my wife, who thinks I should just go with "Eye-rack" to stop embarrassing her.

By the way, I pronounce Turkey as like a Thanksgiving "Turkey."

Anecdotally I was told once upon a time by a first generation immigrant from Oman that you should pronounce a countries name as they pronounce it, as a respect thing. I thought more about it, and if I heard someone say United States as "Ooonited States," I wouldn't care one bit, but there really is only one way to pronounce the United States it so it's not really a fair comparison.

Erdogan wants English to use the Turkish spelling because he's tired of English speakers thinking of the bird when they're talking about the country.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyNaymeIs

The funny thing is that through a bunch of funny historical accidents, the bird is literally named after the country, so we could just spell the birds türkiyes too.

Why do people need an alternative spelling to a country whose name is spelled in a latin alphabet?

Should we spell England, wing-lunge for fun?

In honor of Erdogan, I'm going to start calling it Turkiye.

The bird, not the country.

Why not be more explicit?

Turks call India "Hindi-stan". Which in Turkish is "Turkey-the-bird-stan". Including the Persian etymology would literally make it "Land of the Turkeys." If Modi wanted to pick a fight with Turkey it would have made for an entertaining UN session.

I don't like using Turkiye in English, it sounds out of place to me. I'm native Turkish speaker.

Turkey, "Türkiye" is just another useless show from the "president".

It's going to matter who you ask, but as a foreigner you're more likely to be talking to someone (relatively well-off, educated enough to have fluent English, probably not a fan of Erdoğan) who'd have preferred it to stay Turkey.

It's just another step in the trend of undoing Atatürk's reforms that has defined the current regime. To summarize a lot of history, the foundation of modern Turkey was a pretty massive upheaval. Atatürk (the first president of Turkey, and is viewed pretty similarly to the US's founding fathers) worked pretty damn hard to drag the country away from its Ottoman roots and towards being a Western, secular, country. Under the Ottomans, the head of church and head of state were the same person, under Atatürk, church and state were separated. Atatürk's government outright banned the wear of most religious garb in public, such as fez's and headscarves. Women were given full rights. The entire alphabet was changed from an Arabic script to a Latin one. And these are just the big ones I can pull off the top of my head.

Basically, imagine if George Washington had banned crucifixes from being displayed in public and switched the US's alphabet to Cyrillic.

It is impossible to overstate how radical these reforms were, and most were intended to bring Turkey closer to Europe both economically and culturally. The following 85 years of Turkey's history, up to the modern day, has been marked by tensions between those that generally like the reforms, and would like to see Turkey continue towards being a well-respected member of the West, and the conservative faction who want Turkey to backslide into an Islamic theocracy.

The name change is one of many postures Erdoğan has taken to distance himself from the former group, and amounts to a dog-whistle for the second.

TL;DR: It's whole fucking can of worms.

Also a lot of the big VPN brands are blocked so its hard for a regular person to get one. I recently helped someone out to get one required us to iterate through a number of providers each time me sending them the binary over signal so they can try it out. Spoiler: mullvad vpn was first to go through

If you use a smartphone, get Briar from FDroid. It works over Bluetooth/Wifi/Data and it's perfect for emergencies.

It's not available for iOS and you can only communicate with others who have it installed (which realistically will be next to no one). I wouldn't call that "perfect for emergencies".

THe rest of the world it's mostly Android based.

IIRC a quarter of all active smartphones are iPhones globally. I'm not in the US, lots and lots of iPhones in circulation here. Also, no Briar on nearly all of those Androids, so they're just as reachable as iPhones.

The APK can be fetched from FDroid and be shared over Bluetooth sharing. On iPhones, sorry, but Europe it's basically Androidlandia.

> The APK can be fetched from FDroid and be shared over Bluetooth sharing.

And people are supposed to just figure that out while under rubble?

> Europe it's basically Androidlandia.

Only Eastern Europe. Western Europe (incl Germany) and the Nordics have between 30-60% iPhones. [0] Also Albania, for some reason.

That's also pretty much the browser distribution you get when looking at analytics data from various European countries, and it matches what I see people use here (Germany).

0: https://mezha.media/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/iPhone_Europe...

Well, I'm from Spain and I can perfectly say that Spain, Portugal, France and Italy are not an iPhone domain by a huge margin.

I live in Turkey and was very close to the earthquake epicenter. I can say that communication in affected cities is very limited and Twitter had a real positive effect on organizing help and reaching out to lots of people in the area.

So blocking Twitter right now is pure evil. They are only interested in the optics and looking strong for the upcoming election and do not care about anything else.

I saw some people waiting for their relatives to get rescued around collapsed buildings dare to say that they haven't received any official help so far in the news. And they said that "government can come and arrest me for saying this - so be it". I don't think the Turkish government is reading HN but still feeling a little bit anxious while posting this after witnessing so many weird things here.

It's a tragedy no nation should face alone. There should be no "looking bad" here, just opportunities to help. Why not embrace that and do whatever you can? Any city would face horrible losses in this situation. Heck, Miami lost half a building on a normal day...

Do you think it will actually harm Erdogan's support though, anger over blocking twitter?

Is his popular support relevant when he has his hands on the levers of government operations?

I'm curious if Erdogan will attempt an I'm-president-until-I'm-dead move the way Putin and Xi Jinping did.

I think it's probably relevant, yes -- he is in fact fairly popular, historically. (So is Putin). It's harder to keep your hands on the levers of power the less support you have, even if it can still be done with increasing force, it's a threat.

But I'm interested in hearing with Turkish HN users think.

Note that the comment I replied to, from a Turkish user, suggested "They are only interested in the optics and looking strong for the upcoming election", suggesting that, yes, Erdogan cares about popularity.

The upcoming election(on May 14th if it doesn't get postponed due to the earthquake) will be unique across other elections Erdogan participated in over the last 20 years. This was the first election he might actually lose(by a margin of 5-10%) according to election polls before the earthquake.

So he did care about his popularity as he was the most popular one so far. Voters and the system were surely manipulated by the ruling party in the decade but opposing a decisive election result is a new line they haven't crossed yet.

Yes it is relevant. He doesn't have his hands on all the levers yet.

> Anger Over Quake Response Challenges Erdogan Ahead of Election

> A furor is building among some survivors over the government’s handling of the crisis. “I have been voting for this government for 20 years, and I’m telling everyone about my anger,” said one. “I will never forgive them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/europe/earthquake-t...

Erdogan's first speech was almost 2 days after the earthquake and he said "We are monitoring who said what on the social media and tried to provoke the people. Today it's not the day to go after those but we take notes and when the day comes, we will go after them".

Just look at his face when delivering this speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4

It's like from V for Vendetta. The lighting choice is very particular.

Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control.

The head of communications of Erdogan even introduced an app to streamline "reporting disinformation". Like, it's the second day after a massive earthquake and they published a f*king app to snitch people. Here is the announcement of the app, early at 05:00 local time in the morning 24 hours after the quake: https://twitter.com/fahrettinaltun/status/162277720485259264...

Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative.

Yesterday, some people with prominent accounts who shared the tweets from the people in the region began reporting that they were taken into custody by the police. I guess the day has come quickly.

This is one of many, many reasons why western countries and social media companies should not normalise censorship re-branded like "fighting disinformation".

Not sure that would make a difference. Western societies have an issue with genocide, so Russia claims Ukraine was committing genocide against Russians. If Westerners didn't care about genocide, Russia would've claimed something else, Putin certainly has no issue with genocide.

So if our thing du jure wasn't misinformation, I'm sure they'd just claim they're using their powers to combat hate speech or whatever else is culturally okay. If there's really nothing available, there's always "we need to protect the children from predators who are trying to abuse this dire situation". In the end, it doesn't matter if you're in power. Your tribe will always be with you, no matter the reason you're giving, and the opposition will be silenced.

You probably don't understand nuances of why Russia says what, it is not only about the western values, but just a very effective tactic in the information warfare.

I know about at least three major points:

* Russia always blame other party of the crimes it about to commit. It ties the enemy and allies into the "you did, no your did" kind of arguments. This also helps to push all sorts of fake narratives into the enemy population. We witness this over and over.

* It is a power play. Russian people enjoy very much the fact that their officials can say and do whatever they want, and the world can do nothing. This gives Russians true joy (as witnessed first hand). It also demoralises enemy heavily, because instead of pointing to the obvious crime, "not everything is so clear" now.

* It cements alternative history. For example, children in school all over Russia will learn about the current events based on the "official" alternative reasoning.

I believe the Western values are what makes it an effective tactic, and it's the same reason why they're calling the Ukrainians Nazis while simultaneously running towards fascism: if you say that X is a Nazi and is committing genocide, you'll have a visceral reaction in the West that creates sympathies/doubts of other narratives in at least part of the population (this will not work the same way/to the same degree in non-Western societies). If the West was fascist, I'm sure Russia wouldn't be talking internationally about Nazis and genocide because it wouldn't have any impact.

You're very right about the historical narrative as an internal component. Connecting current conflicts to WW2 will make people fall in line much more quickly than saying "it's about natural resources that were mistakenly buried on the wrong side of the border and also we want a land connection to Crimea". Much like Americans will always invoke freedom because it's part of their national identity and people are less likely to question why they're invading Iraq if you mention it. Russia being threatened by fascist forces in the West is a continuation of the existing historical narrative and neatly ties into it.

It's definitely a much better PR strategy than Germany had in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom where our secretary of defense prominently said that Germany's security was being defended at the hindu kush. It's makes sense in abstraction ("we need to confront those who disregard human rights even if they're 5000 km away") but it's not concrete and it didn't increase support for the war at all.

Maybe... but Russia has for decades carefully tended to the WW2 mythos of Soviets defending the world against nazis.

The anti nazi propaganda is not only for foreign ears, but for domestic consumption as well. "Us against the world, who is out to get us. All current problems stem at its root from the blow dealt to us during the Great Patriotic War."

You're being naive.

This has happened because 'western countries and social media companies ... normalise censorship re-branded [as] "fighting disinformation"'.

They've literally shown the rest of the world how to do this.

These companies are already in the dark deep of hyper partisan censorship. Take reddit for example. Nearly every sub is a left wing echo chamber, with essentially the same comment being made, and opposing viewpoints hidden, shadow-banned, or deleted under the guise of 'disinformation' even if they are factually accurate. Some of it is partly driven by liaisons within US and other governments, and supported by media. That is both problematic and terrorizing. Media was always supposed to be a counter-balance to government over-reach, but today, media is in on the scheme.

Except you can start your own subreddit and choose your own moderation policies. The inaccurately named /r/conservative has a lot of traffic and there are many more.

I think some people tried that once…

That's a funny joke considering 99% of subs which don't carry water is eventually banned for "misinformation" and is filled with bad actors and sock puppets.

Being able to start a subreddit is meaningless, when right-leaning subreddits are systematically shut down, or restricted to the point of becoming inoperative, as soon as they pass a certain threshold popularity.

Citation needed

In practice, the threshold of popularity seems to be that where the members of the subreddit feel comfortable raiding others.

Many were banned.

That depends where one finds oneself on the political scale. A communist is only going to find neoliberal semi fascist conservative consensus where someone on the extreme right finds a socialist echo chamber.

What reasonable viewpoints do you perceive are being deleted and accused of being disinformation?

Reddit is pretty right wing overall.

Stuff like /r/shitredditsays exist/existed to point out reddit being misogynistic, and capitalism is the name of the game for all the large subreddits.

I don't think you'll find a large subreddit that is actually leftist. It's just centered on what the population thinks, both for overall trends and for the reddit user base.

This doesn't match US politics because US politics don't match popular opinion, driven instead by the arbitrary layout of states and congressional districts

Sad to see this being downvoted. Rational voices have been censored on many western platforms for saying things that went against the popular narrative, the most recent obvious example being during the pandemic. Some of the things censored were batshit crazy, some of them not, but blocking discussion and letting those in positions of power decide what is "disinformation" and what is "information" isn't the way to deal with the crazy stuff.

How do you propose western countries and social media companies fight disinformation?

The solution to bad speech is more speech. Not less.

I see your “The solution to bad speech is more speech” and raise you a “A lie can spread around the world before the truth can get its pants on”. Call or fold?

Call. It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end. Despite us humans being a lying, cheating bunch, knowledge and access to education continues to grow all over the world. That's certainly not thanks to censorship!

Not so fast, pardner. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

You are making two mistakes here: the simplest one is thinking that the winner of the argument is whoever has the last word. This is very frequently not the case, as any troll could tell you. Often, the power move is to get opponents mad and then move on, leaving them impotently fuming about how terrible that person is.

You're also identifying with the larger group at the societal/species level, which is valid, but is also a way of ignoring problems in the here and now. It's like zooming out from a bloody battlefield to look at the earth in space. With an extraplanetary perspective, Earth looks so beautiful and peaceful...but that doesn't help a single person who is impacted by the bloody battle.

>It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end.

This is contradictory. Not every reader is going to "stay in the end" to learn what's really true. The past few years have given plenty of evidence for that.

> It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end

And that's where authoritarian regimes get you. People usually aren't that invested in a conversation, or in disproving firehose of falsehoods style comments placed by people incentivized monetarily to make sure the correct opinion stays in the end. If the platform has rating system they also generate accounts to manipulate it for the same purpose.

Call.

How do you define a lie? Please be precise. What source of truth is used to evaluate possible lies, and who gets to make the final determination? What level of confidence is required? Does intent matter? Does a statement count as a lie if it is factually correct, or at least not provably incorrect, but still potentially misleading or lacking relevant context?

Ah yes. The "alternate facts" angle. No one can know anything. Donald Trump won the 2020 election is just as true as Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Do you also unquestonably accept Putin's, Xi's, Kim's and Erdogan's elections results? What reason do you have to believe that the situations there are different other than what you have been told? I have no reason to believe that Trump won in 2020 but elections are something that inherently requires trust in the institutions running them which makes the result something very much different from an unquestionable fact if that trust is broken.

That would only be the solution if the problem was bad speech. The problem is that algorithms optimise for engagement and therefore amplify increasingly extremist views. You cannot talk your way out of that position, it surely must include intervention?

Maybe you also cannot algorithm out of the position that algorithms took you in.

It sounds like the problem implicit in your framing then is "algorithms", not extremists--a stance I agree with--which would imply the disinformation isn't coming from big tech's users, it is caused by big tech itself, and maybe it is the algorithms that should be limited and regulated instead of the discussions.

I doubt this, because it was possible to 'go viral' to a limited degree way back in the days of Usenet, with any algorithmic selection or amplification going on at all. preferential attachment is a social phenomenon which businesses leverage for profit (not just int he era of social media, but since the establishment of brands and before that, the awareness by politicians and theatrical promoters of how compelling parasocial relationships can be). Algorithmic manipulation is a problem, but you could switch it all off in the morning and you would still have the same issues. Any system can and will be gamed.

These algorithms are a multiplier to the problem, but they aren't the root cause. You can find plenty of misinformation on cable news and you can't blame that exclusively on algorithms.

Not the root cause, no. I'd say the root cause is reliance on advertising for income because that means that you now need to draw as many viewers/users as possible, and that's why they start to create content which maximizes reactions or engagement.

But advertising still isn't the root cause. Why does this type of content draw more viewers?

Are you trying to say that biology is the root cause? The content is successful as it emits a reaction from us. Whether a good reaction or a bad one, we still engage with it. Whether you're binge watching a TV show you love or hate scrolling a subreddit that makes you angry, the content is designed to elicit some form of reaction that keeps you coming back or memetically passing it on.

However that is not a new development in our biology, we've always been that way. It's just that we're exploiting those aspects of ourselves more and more. Weaponising it to extract as much profit as possible.

You could go another way, I guess, and say that capitalism is the root cause as "profit at any cost" allows the justification of these actions.

There are two aspects to the root cause. You mentioned the first part, basic human biology pushes us towards content that elicits a reaction. The second part is that lies inherently have an advantage over the truth to elicit a reaction because they are only limited by human imagination while the truth is limited obviously by the truth.

As long as humans have the free will to engage with whatever content they choose, there is a natural human reaction to engage with lies. Therefore, the idea that truth eventually wins out over lies is inherently flawed. It isn't the fault of capitalism or algorithms. The problem is human nature doesn't respond properly to bad speech. We can't change human nature, so the only option left is stopping bad speech.

We haven't recently invented the concept of a lie, so the idea of "that's just how we are" rings hollow. People are being radicalised by qanon, incels, redpill, the alt-right, <insert the group you dislike> at an increased rate because they're being force fed this content on a daily basis, and they're being siloed into custom fit echochambers by algorithms optimising for their engagement.

Which brings us back to my original point. Algorithms are just a multiplier.

If you give people two history books, one with actual history and one with interesting conspiracy theories sprinkled throughout, most people are going to find the one with the conspiracies more interesting. Stopping people from photocopying the book will help slow the spread of the false information in the book, but it does nothing to stop the underlying problem that people are writing fake history books.

It's a multiplier sure, but this is a completely new issue we're having (at least on this scale). It's caused by social media, that's not really up for debate.

You cannot prevent lies or deception, that's not within the realm of what we're capable of. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.

This isn't a new issue created by either social media or the internet. It is an innate problem with absolute free speech and has directly led to the US entering multiple wars over the last 125 years. It doesn't matter if the lies are disseminated through newspapers, cable TV, or Twitter. Mass media is just an amplification device. That has been true for centuries. The only new aspect is that the rate of amplification is increasing which leads to the underlying issue becoming even more problematic.

I don't blame you for having a US centric view point but I will say that this issue is affecting far more countries than just the US.

[edit] Sorry, to directly reply: I'm unsure what it is that you would prefer happen? Nothing? It's just the done thing?

I would argue that the reason this is becoming a bigger problem across the world is because the US is exporting its ideas of free speech through the internet, tech companies, and social media in a way that wasn't done in prior generations of mass media.

I think we need to change the way we think about free speech. We already have laws that restrict free speech when that speech it defrauds or defames an individual. We need more general laws when it is society at large that is defrauded or defamed.

Would Chinas inability to contain conversations give you pause as to how achievable that goal is?

Would you be looking at criminalising lies and the spreading of them, even without knowing its a lie? If so, how many people would be prosecuted? If not, how will it help?

China is trying to control conversations as a means of controlling the population. That comes with its own problems that are unrelated to regulating speech.

>Would you be looking at criminalising lies and the spreading of them, even without knowing its a lie?

I don't know what you mean by this. We don't know whether a potentially defamatory statement is a lie or not until there is a trial. This would be no different. We don't need a Federal Truth Commission or anything. American society already seems satisfied letting a jury decide what is or is not a lie today.

So in effect you don't care about the issue and are content with how things are? I'm sorry, I'm not sure that I understand what stance you're taking. Misinformation is not an issue to you, would that be correct?

Requiring a trial to do anything about a lie on social media would mean that there would be no change. By the time the trial comes, the lie is old news and there is some new conspiracy taking grip.

That would be, essentially, meaningless. Not in any way, shape, or form preventative.

If we lower the speed limit of every road in the country, the average speed of cars would drop even if we didn't increase the number of people we ticket for speeding.

We should change our laws to allow for more restrictions on purposeful lies that damage society. We shouldn't allow ExxonMobil to spend decades researching carbon emissions while knowingly lying about the conclusions of that research to the public. They should face repercussions for that as well as the people who knowingly spread that misinformation. I think that would be more effective than what you seem to be proposing which appears to be either limitations on recommendation algorithms or ad supported content.

ChatGPT integrations to online forums: Hold my beer.

Give it 3 days, and it will populate the myth that purple elephants are responsible for 9/11, because their pink mousy overlords demanded more moon-rock cheese with lizard-flavor.

People do a good enough job of making up their own nonsense about 9/11 being perpetrated by the usual suspects using space lasers, holograms, mininukes, etc. We don't, and shouldn't, censor any of that.

the low s/n then makes it about who can be loudest and/or most provocative. i don’t disagree that disinformation shouldn’t just be squelched, but it’s not as simple as “education” or “more speech” and as humans we tend to prefer the path of lead resistance.

DDOSing humans rarely benefits the truth. In case of cognitive overload, humans tend to favor the simple answers, not the correct one.

I really don't think that's the case. What makes you think so? In my experience exposure to more viewpoints, even flawed ones, increases understanding and helps critical thinking.

> What makes you think so?

Experience. We've also basically seen in it in the pandemia all over the world happening in the last years. Though, this was a bit of an extreme situation for everyone.

> In my experience exposure to more viewpoints, even flawed ones, increases understanding and helps critical thinking.

Simple exposure is only helpful if the people are able to handle it, and willing to invest the time, and the one delivering it has no bad intention. The ones where it will not work, are left as the victims of this strategy. Maybe they will find their way after a long painful process. But then the harm is done.

> We've also basically seen in it in the pandemia all over the world happening in the last years. Though, this was a bit of an extreme situation for everyone.

You mean the pandemic where alternative viewpoints were systematically suppressed in the western world?

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. A lot of social media dynamics are not reasoned arguments, they are the product emotional outbursts which can be manufactured and herded.

The world is not made up of Spock-like rationalists, and although most people are capable of rationality, many social settings are not conducive to it. Look at stampede disasters: every year people die because panic breaks out among a crowd in a constricted space and people start to operate on instinct instead of thought.

This is a very interesting perspective but I don't think it's an argument in favor of censorship. Rather I think it's an objection to the way in which current social media "spaces" are "laid out" in a functional sense. Similar to how building and fire code both take various dangers into account.

There's also an element of individual freedom involved here. If you choose to keep climbing into the boxing ring and then trying to have a reasoned discussion and failing, perhaps you are the one making poor choices. That doesn't necessarily mean that outlawing boxing rings or otherwise regulating who can participate when and how is either a good or workable solution.

You've been exposed to alternative viewpoints about free speech right here in this thread and it hasn't changed your thinking one iota.

Most people aren't interested in changing their minds.

This is disingenuous. I've been exposed to alternative viewpoints, saw what I consider obvious holes, and either expressed disagreement or disregarded them entirely. If someone can convincingly (from my perspective, not theirs) illustrate a flaw in my reasoning at that point I have changed my mind by definition of it being convincing.

When people say thing like "other people aren't interested in changing their minds" what they really mean is "other people didn't find my arguments convincing".

I mean this is well-known phenomenon. People not only disregard others' arguments, they even reject facts if they contradict a core worldview.[1][2][3][4]

You trying to rationalize this as "other people didn't find the arguments convincing" is a meta version of this. A deliberate ignorance of this cognitive bias even when given documentation of its existence.

1. https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds

2. https://today.uconn.edu/2022/08/cognitive-biases-and-brain-b...

3. https://research.com/education/why-facts-dont-change-our-min...

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5698037/

> it hasn't changed your thinking one iota.

You don't know that.

This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light". Speech is not the point, it's just a medium for useful information. More speech is only good to the extent that it proliferates useful information. If useless spam speech is used to overwhelm useful speech, then that undermines the whole point of the principle of free speech. And with the advent of modern technology, overwhelming the useful speech is easier than ever. Our historic ideas of free speech are wholly unprepared to deal with the overflow attacks that are possible in the modern age. Is it not "censorship" to shout over someone so loudly that they can't be heard?

People learn to wear sunglasses. Just stop trying to give them "the right amount of the right kind of light".

> This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light"

Completely untenable analogy. Why people say is that the solution is more speech is due to the antecedent concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die. You cannot have this sorting process in a system that stifles free speech.

If you want to attack free speech absolutism, at least attack Mill's axioms, not some made-up poorly-formed straw man of an analogy.

>while the bad ones die.

I am really not seeing this.

A.k.a. "the marketplace of ideas can remain irrational longer than free society can remain solvent".

> concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die

This might be the core of it then, because while I generally agree with the idea of Free Speech in the abstract, I don't think that it's been having good outcomes for society in the era of the cultic milieu, and I think that has to do with this 'marketplace' idea not really holding water. (Maybe I just don't want to admit that my sense of what makes a "good idea" is wrong, and the success of eg Qanon as a meme means that I should just change my thinking and accept it as a winning meme and therefore a Good Idea.)

The problem with alternatives to the "free marketplace of ideas" is that they are all (by definition) authoritative. And who's the best "authority" here? The government? Me? You? Who decides what ideas get to be censored? Imo, there's more problems with the authoritative model than the marketplace model.

Kind of like Churchill's famous quote about democracy: "it's the worst form of government, except from all the others that have been tried."

This was true in practice before technology made communication and synthesized speech trivial. Unfortunately for us all, we no longer live in a world where "more speech is unambiguously better" is true. Technology has ruined the meme of free speech. I'm not saying there are any unambiguously good alternatives; we are all diminished by its loss. But clinging to its corpse isn't doing anyone any good.

As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. An uncompromising philosophy like "more speech is always better" is quite a different thing. We need a new rallying cry to replace the meme of free speech, probably something to do with the notion of signal:noise ratios, but it's beyond me to invent such a meme.

> As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise.

But it's the same with free speech: you said it yourself, there's a lot of noise, that's the compromise. You don't know what the "one true Good Opinion is" until you hear from everyone, and that might include racists or nazis or whatever. I don't really think technology has anything to do with it. In fact, the printing press probably made a much larger impact on speech than the internet did (and we got through that just fine).

I think a large part of the problem we have today is lack of attribution. It is too easy for participants to pretend to be 1000 voices instead of a single voice. I don't think being able to pretend to be multiple people is particularly helpful to the "marketplace of ideas". Conversely if I see/hear the same sentiment a 1000 times and can distinguish between "1000 voices" and "one voice a thousand times" then that is useful for me determining how much weight to give to those ideas when forming my own ideas.

The other nice aspect of attribution is that there is a factual answer to "who is speaking". I don't need to evaluate the merits to your speech in order to understand who is speaking. In today's world it may not be easy/possible to know the specific answer to "who is speaking", but by observing any speech I know that there must have been _someone_ speaking.

As for how to get to a world with attribution... not so sure what the options are that don't suffer a lot of the same problems. But it at least seems like an approach that doesn't require authoritative assessment of the underlying speech itself to yield societal benefits.

Re: "the marketplace of ideas", there is a modern philosophy that ascribes mythical qualities to markets, but the fact is that markets are not magic, they are merely useful tools that are appropriate for some contexts and inappropriate for others. There are numerous ways markets can either fail or be worse than useless, and one of those ways is by obscuring information about the market, and it's increasingly trivial to use unfettered free speech to effectively censor any other market participants, thereby distorting the market.

Cliches aren't an argument, but they're good for clicks. You can do better.

The solution is not as simple as 'more speech' because we are dealing with a historically unprecedented volume of amplified and recorded speech at scale, so things like signal:noise ratio become very important. Simplistic responses like yours suggest an unwillingness or inability to engage with the complexity of the issue.

A simple example of why you're wrong is that it's easy for an actor with access to an echo chamber to launch a viral cascade by modeling outrage over some made-up or minor issue to boost engagement. Fans of the actor share it out of agreement, amusement, or for the pleasure of owning their opponents, while opponents of the actor either deride or argue. The actor gets to appear in the day's trends, gain new followers/subscribers, boosting influence and financial intake.

But there's also a more subtle transfer of wealth, not so obviously measurable by the metrics of the social media platform. The actor spends 1-5 minutes composing their message, like you spend only a short period to select and repost your cliched response. The time that other people spend replying takes at least as long and often longer. So while the actor may have invested 5 minutes out of their 24 hour day in amplifying their own profile, by saying something deliberately controversial, they've caused others to put in significantly more time to responding.

Here, that's not such a big deal because HN discussions are not that complex and people have time to read and consider every comment in a thread they're interested in - so your claim has some validity. But on large social media platforms, the scope is radically different. A provocative tweet can generate thousands of negative replies, so that an investment of 5 minutes by the provocative actor can cause people to collectively put hundreds of hours into their responses, which unconscious social labor serves to amplify the provocateur. There are lots of influencers who have this down to a system and do it on an almost daily basis. It's essentially a theft of time - a little from their fans, a lot from their anti-fans, with that time being converted into engagement and increased reach.

This is why your reflex response is wrong. Bad speech can be designed to yield more speech that amplifies the original bad message for fun and profit. Your concept of reasoned debate only functions in forums where there are some leveling factors like equal time allocations or legal procedures for the allocation of time. Here on HN and on many small forums, that function is done by moderators (who can ban intentionally disruptive users or manage anti-spam filters) and to some extent by users (whose expressed preferences have direct weight like downvotes or flags, and indirect weight by their long-term community participation making them familiar to each other). On big platforms, the calculus is completely different and your model of reasoned debate breaks down.

Force is only justified in response to force.

So true! Now please step into the boxcar. If you resist, you're the one at fault.

Why is it up to companies and "western countries" to fight disinformation? Especially when it often turns out they are the biggest propagators of it?

Because their customers/voters want it? Me, I very much prefer censored HN to free speech 4chan. The question is, what are you doing here if you prefer 4chan where the "truth" is not censored?

As someone who visits both HN and 4Chan, I like having the choice. I definitely don't want the government deciding that 4Chan is illegal and wiping it off the 'Net because it contains disinformation.

When you ask, "How should governments fight disinformation," what you're really asking is, "How can governments deny their citizens the right to choose what information they read, watch or listen to." When it's phrased like that, it's not so appealing, is it?

No, it is the other way round. If there are no places where companies and/or governments censor/limit free speech/fight misinformation, every place turns into 4chan and you lose your ability to choose. I'm happy there are places where speech is not restricted. And I'm even more happy that there are places where speech is restricted. Do you think HN should stop moderating discussion?

Do you believe every online forum accessible to Americans should have as strict, or stricter moderation than HN, because it's been demanded by a subset of voters?

> I'm happy there are places where speech is not restricted.

that means no. Do you want to remove _every_ moderation made by companies/governments in all online forums, including HN?

There's a hidden assumption in your argument that the only way that forums like Hacker News, etc, can moderate is if the government allows it. Else why would you mention governments and private forums in the same sentence?

I support private forums being able to moderate. I oppose governments having that same power.

Definitely not by telling we are the good guys hence hold the monopoly on truth.

I propose they don't. That's not their job.

Block only speech is actually illegal by the laws of the country. It's not their job to decide what is true and false.

well, we see where that ends by looking at 4chan. Why are you posting here and not there?

> Why are you posting here and not there?

That's the point - they can post what they like, and I don't have to look at it.

There isn’t a way to fight disinformation other than helping people get better at critical thinking.

Using censorship to fight disinformation just means we’ve picked some group of people that get to decide what the “truth” is.

Should they? One political party's disinfo is another's creed.

The same way they ought to fight drugs.

Don't.

Dmytro Zolotukhemin at the Institute of Information Security in Ukraine has an interesting take on this which he talks about in detail on an interview with Silicon Curtain on YouTube. He asserts that the idea of disinformation is so slippery and hard to work with that it is not worth it. What we really have is stories that people share. His idea is that the right way to regulate this is to provide people with tools for assessing information themselves. Basic critical thinking and internet searches can go a long way to revealing both truth and ambiguity. This is a specific variation of the idea that the answer to bad information exchange is more and better information exchange.

The solution is obvious, it is called education and critical thinking. But the same kind of gov are also very afraid of a too educated population that could challenge their authority!

Exactly! In the US we routinely have "blessed" media organizations openly discussing the need to legislate/limit threats to their ability to "control the message"...but Erdogan cuts to the chase and everyone flips out.

I mean...the day Musk took over Twitter, lots of comments here were calling for twitter.com to be kicked off the internet...

Curiously, all the people that support such censorship in western countries are actually against it in this instance. Almost like whether or not they choose to support a policy depends not on what it does but instead on who it’s being done to.

I hope you actually went and asked everybody.

Starting with you, do you support social media censorship in the United States? And do you support social media censorship by turkey? Those are yes or no questions.

If he considered himself a counter-example to your claims, he probably would have said so upfront.

No and no.

I don't support any censorship at all for any topics even those that deeply offend me.

The only exception would be actual death threats and things that are illegal to do.

This is tautological. Death threats are illegal speech because we decided to make it illegal speech. Something we could do for other types of speech.

Do you support Elon's censorship of antifa accounts?

Difference between me stopping you from wearing shoes in my house, and me stopping you from wearing shoes in yours.

Not really, no. All three cases (US Gov, Turkish Gov, Elon) are censorship of the public square in the end. I'm against all of them. As far as I'm concerned the US constitutional standard for free speech should apply to any platform above a certain size in terms of daily active users that facilitates communication between those users.

So to you, there’s no difference in preventing me from wearing shoes in your house and making it illegal for anyone to wear shoes in their houses?

yes, I found that claim bizarre as well. How does one even form such an opinion about "everyone" who holds x opinion?

I have seen the same thing, but I think the cause is more that maybe the overwhelming majority of people can’t meaningfully do abstraction? Like they blow a gasket between conceiving of individual actions and beliefs vs policies related to actions and beliefs?

So people like this will say sentences like “censorship is wrong” but implicit in the sentence for them is “censorship of correct and/or my information is wrong” because the sentence in their mind must be concretely about something like “correct information”. There’s no way for them to easily think the thought “censorship is wrong in the abstract.”

This also feels related to being able to use “veil of ignorance” type reasoning. I don’t think they know how to imagine being not only a different person, but an unknown person.

I also don’t think they know how to imagine being wrong in some sense, not in the epistemic humility sense (although, yes, that too, much of the time), but in the “suppose I’m just deeply confused about everything, how would I want to be treated? How might I recover?”

I think all these are bottlenecked on a mental abstraction ceiling, and I think all these things work together to contribute to the effects you noted.

The way American public schools (and I presume other schools) teach kids about censorship and propaganda probably has something to do with it. It's not "propaganda" unless it's telling lies. And it's not "censorship" when it seems justified. Propaganda is taught to be synonymous with the promulgation of falsehoods, but in reality propaganda will tell the truth whenever the truth is convenient to the propagandist. To a propagandist, truth and fiction are simply tools to be used whenever either helps the propagandist accomplish their objective.

I agree, probably almost no one truly believes censorship is wrong in the abstract. Similarly, very few people believe in absolute freedom. I’m not sure there are really any belief systems where those two things can be really consistent. There is a real issue with people wrap themselves up as absolutist ideologues while spouting “illegal for thee, but not for me.”

> Almost like whether or not they choose to support a policy depends not on what it does but instead on who it’s being done to.

Well, or they have a more nuanced view than "censorship no" or "censorship yes"

For example, I support laws preventing stores from selling 3 watt LED bulbs in packages claiming they're 5 watt LED bulbs; or selling generic LED bulbs in packages claiming they're Phillips bulbs. Even though the printed text is surely the manufacturer's speech.

Must I support all censorship, because I support this one bit of censorship?

Exactly this. Censorship should be a nuanced topic if anyone gives it any serious thought. Not all censorship is at the same level, and there is obviously a difference between shutting down Twitter and not letting folks criticize the government and, say, not telling folks misinformation that can lead to another's harm or death (fake cures, for example).

The problem with allowing the interpretation of whether something should be censored be based on the obvious nuances that it entails is that the exact nuance is not universal among all people. This is why ZERO censorship is the only reasonable form of censorship.

I have trouble grasping the extend to which you appreciate the degree of thinking done by other parties for your own benefit.

It is the case that unless you are a polymath with copious amount of time and money, you will never be able to accumulate sufficient information to make fully educated decisions in a world truly devoid of censorship.

By fully educated I mean starting from the bottom up and going all the way through to reach a conclusion.

This means that every single resource you will use has to be verified, all experiments need to be conducted and evaluated.

If we don’t censor anything, then there is no point in books because editors are censoring information there.

What’s the point of journals and publications without a review process to filter out the garbage?

You could very well be a reasonable person, but without censorship to varying degrees your capacity filter garbage is hindered by simply not knowing anything to a reasonable degree of certainty exactly because no form of censorship exists. Thus your capacity to limit information based on prior knowledge is hindered as there is not an authority of any kind that you may trust exactly because there is no way to measure quality of one’s speech outside the scrutiny it passes through through established channels and authorities that already have a reputation and we may trust.

The reason we do censorship is because not all speech is benevolent, useful, or true. People will abuse the absence of censorship to attack “unwanted” people, to push lies, to misrepresent information, and to push an agenda instead of letting facts do the talking.

Why is it difficult for facts to do the talking?

> Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."[1][2]

Now, the more bullshit that floats the more bullshit propagates and thus the less true information exists, eventually suffocating us in information garbage.

If you wish to see this in action, look into antivax groups convinced that vaccinated individuals will start dropping like flies within the next $LATEST_GOALPOST.

Or, take a look at how long it took me to explain why absolute absence of censorship simply does not work just from a view of having a consistent world model and having nobody to trust and no way of doing so.

One could extend my comment to include damage done to people or entities intentionally or otherwise. Notice how Musk pivoted out of absolute free speech when advertisers left?

Care to tell me what I did wrong to warrant this reaction?

I understand that you mean zero censorship for adults. I am interested in your position regarding people younger than 21/18/16 (exact age depends on the country I guess).

It would be interesting to get your opinion on censorship again if a specific lie was gaining exponential traction and threatened the livelihood of your family. Or even if there were something less direct, like if you couldn't go see a movie in a theater because a huge tiktok trend of yelling "Fire!" and filming people trample each other gains the spotlight of millions of users.

And it would be interesting to get your opinion on censorship if saying things you believe in meant the government would hunt down and execute your entire family.

Of course that is a ridiculous scenario, as are most straw man arguments.

And the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" trope was original made in support to argue for censorship of speech opposing the draft during WWI so if anything it's an example for why we should absolutely defend free speech even if there are seeming arguments to restrict it. The better solution to prevent stampedes in crowded spaces is to have safety regulation requiring adequate exits and occupancy limits, which we do have. Movie theaters are also not public spaces so they can easily ban people for causing a disturbance.

I worry that the nuance here is not actually down to interpretation, but the consequences of extremely rapid dissemination of information. I don't even think those of us in tech have come to grips with how that matters, let alone if/how we should make efforts to get around it.

The latency on information coming from a newspaper or even TV news is limited to how rapidly those sources can vet the information before publishing it, and then the latency of the publication method. If someone wants to use those avenues to spread misinformation, they have to do a lot of legwork to make the lie sound plausible enough that the publisher will put the effort into publishing it.

What's the legwork for someone planning to spread misinformation via twitter? How long does it take "for new facts to emerge" that address the misgivings incredulous consumers hold? The power of social media is that the real truth can emerge very quickly, regardless of what the powers that be want. But the threat of social media is that there's basically no organic way to prevent abuse of that power.

Others are right that the line between misinformation and difference of opinion is often quite narrow. But I don't believe there is no difference, and every society must choose and hold its line, according to its own values.

Your scenario is not equivalent. A buyer and seller shake on an implicit contract when a purchase is made, and enforcement of a contract you agreed to is not censorship. A more accurate comparison would be me posting a picture of a 3 watt bulb online, claiming it is a 5 watt bulb. I don’t believe that should be illegal, and you would if you were consistent.

You've missed the point. It's not desirable to have listings which contain false advertising; the remedy for that is to restrict false advertising, not make every buyer chase the seller in a contract dispute after the fact. That would be insanity.

Nope, your comparison is just not equivalent. A sale is a transfer of property. We enforce the implicit contract that goes along with that. The buyer will pay, the seller will deliver, the product is accurate, etc. This discussion is about speech, for which no such contract exists. If you disagree, then you should have no problem arresting people for showing off a 3 watt bulb they claim to be 5 watts.

Holy false equivalent, Batman!

The poster's point was pretty simple: there is some speech which doesn't deserve to be fully protected to the highest possible level. Untrue commercial speech like false advertising is pretty much in that category. This is why we allow attorneys-general to bring cases against false advertisers, for example.

Usually the remedy is monetary damages, but injunctive relief is also available.

I can easily maintain that this is sensible and reasonable without "arresting people for showing a 3 watt bulb they claim to be 5 watts."

Is there a sale or not? If there's not a sale it's not advertising. If it's not advertising it should be allowed, false or not. If it is advertising it's not just speech. You lack the consistency to make your argument work. So again, I guess you're fine with arresting people over light bulbs.

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

This is a really strange perspective. Advertising is only advertising once the advertised product is sold? A billboard is simultaneously an advertisement and not an advertisement depending on whether the observer has purchased the advertised item?

Not the GP but no, I'm not fine with arresting people over light bulbs. I am totally cool with arresting them for fraud if it meets that standard. I am also cool with the business being fined or otherwise sanctioned for false advertisement. The product is beside the point. The deception is what the punishment is intended to address.

There’s an implicit conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. For there to be advertising, one of the two has to be true. If I’m showing off my car, am I advertising anything?

Strictly, yes..

If you show off your car you are indeed, by definition advertising it.

I know that's not the definition youre referring to, but the word does mean to call attention to, especially in a boastful or ostentatious manner.

But anyway, it's still advertising because the car has the manufacturers badges, it's just not first order commercial advertising.

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

I just can't anymore with HN. Who are these people who are redefining common terms to suit their own views?

What am I redefining? Can you point me to an example of advertising without the intent to sell?

You've introduced this 'intent to sell' bit when for most of the thread you were requiring the transaction to proceed to a sale before the advertising can be advertising.

No one has claimed anything about advertising without the intent to sell. Indeed, that's been everyone's point since this bit of the thread started with michaelt's comment. Commercial speech is an area were most people agree that some constraints are useful. Hence it was used as an example of why censorship is nuanced not binary. People have different standards for what's reasonable and what's not, but only the most die hard free speech advocates would not have a standard at all.

You have frequently taken examples that are clearly in the advertising with intent to sell context and treated them as if they apply in a non-commercial context. This is how we get to you accusing people of being OK with arresting people over light bulbs when they're actually saying they're OK with laws against fraudulent advertising.

As I said in another comment, there’s a conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. The same way if you were against murder you’d implicitly be against conspiring to murder.

If you are selling or intending to sell something, and you choose to have it mediated by the government, whether or not you’re allowed to falsely advertise something has nothing to do with freedom of speech. We aren’t agreeing that censorship is allowed. Censorship isn’t voluntary.

But now YOU are deciding that “if a sale is involved, speech can be restricted.”

Why can I not decide “if it would result in people dying, speech can be restricted?”

I mean, if you told me I could only restrict one of these, then surely I would pick the second anyways.

No, I’m saying that if you decide to make a sale, and decide to have it mediated by the government by paying sales tax, then whether or not you get punished for false advertising has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Whether such taxes are voluntary in the first place is a different argument, but I think they should be. So there’s no inconsistency on my side.

It sounds like you have replaced a moral framework with a legal one. But the question of censorship is fundamentally a question of morality. It matters not how legal or illegal specific actions are in this discussion, so the legal means of enforcement that you rely on for your argument are a red herring.

Then you heard incorrectly. What I said is what I believe to be moral. You can’t arrest someone over non violent speech. Force is only justified in response to force. And at the same time, if you agree to enforcement you aren’t getting your rights violated.

Neither "enforcement" nor "arrest" carries moral content. But you use both terms freely in justifying your allegedly-moral position, unfortunately implying your conception of "rights" is one based only on those granted by an enforcement body.

It is hard to discern any moral content here, and I suspect there is none.

What? If I’m morally against using force to prevent non-forceful speech, why would that not also be my legal position?

Isn't the crime of false advertising in the failure to deliver what was claimed, and not the claim itself? You can very well falsely advertise your product however you like provided you don't actually sell it to anyone, because once you deliver them a product that isn't what you claimed, that's when the actual crime occurs.

Advertising is speech; there is no sale.

If there is to be no sale, then is it really advertising at all? If I "advertise" that I own a thing with no intention of selling that thing, then laws about honest advertisement don't apply to me.

My car (not for sale) has a nuclear reactor and can travel through time.

yes

No, not in a sense that triggers truth in advertising laws.

If you advertise a product without intent to sell, you're also breaking truth in advertising laws: you're selling vaporware.

FTC

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/advertising-...

Counter-example:

> What can my company do if a competitor is running an ad that I think is deceptive?

> Explore your legal options under federal and state statutes that protect businesses from unfair competition. For example, the Lanham Act gives companies the right to sue their competitors for making deceptive claims in ads.

> Are advertising agencies subject to the FTC Act?

> Yes. In addition to the advertiser, the advertising agency also may be held legally responsible for misleading claims in ads. Advertising agencies have a duty to make an independent check on the information used to substantiate ad claims. They may not rely on an advertiser's assurance that the claims are substantiated.

I don't see anything about false advertising requiring a sale.

You are getting lost in the weeds of an imperfect metaphor.

But I have a perfect metaphor. Should it be illegal to post a picture of a 3 watt bulb, captioned as 5 watts?

Depends on the context. If it's part of an ad for a lightbulb you're actually selling, yes. If it's a stupid meme, no.

People can be victims of false advertising even if they don't actually complete a transaction with the offender.

“These other products give you cancer! Only use Febreze to mask odours in your home.”

viewer goes and tosses out all their presumably-cancer causing products, never purchases Febreze

In a similar vein, there is a "fruits and veggies" vitamins commercial that advocates skipping meals to afford the vitamins, as they give you all you need.

Not a lawyer but I could imagine a situation where you're in a store and you see an advertisement for a blue light bulb that says that blue light bulbs are proven to disinfect surfaces. You remember you have some blue light bulbs at home, so you go home and screw them in. Or maybe you go on amazon and order some blue light bulbs because they're cheaper, even though different brands are not making that claim, the first one tricked you into thinking it was true. You haven't entered into any contract with the manufacturer making that false claim, yet you are still harmed by it.

Right, but people (and companies) lie all the time, and it's not something that's illegal. It's amoral, but not illegal.

I'm not sure where I stand on the matter personally.

Like, taking the constant social turmoil in America as an example: anything people dislike they call disinformation/fake news, but are equally guilty and okay with of spreading and allowing the same behaviour if it furthers their agenda. Or they will at least be more lenient to their side of the arguments indulging in it, since it aligns with their biases.

I've seen this happen from both right wing and left wing members one Twitter and on Reddit. I personally don't use these platforms, but I've seen various threads with insane amounts of hypocrisy.

There's so many nuance and unresolved problems.

Like, how do we know truth isn't what's being censored?

How can we even tell in this day and age when the truth is? It's often diluted with some hidden agenda. Either political or corporate (or oftentimes both). I can't sit for hours fact checking everything I read from different sources. I have a job, and I also don't want to spend all my free time on it. But on the other hand it's also topic I care about (just not THAT much I guess?). Who to trust?

And I feel like this "the ones in power control what's true" generally feels like a slippery slope.

I also hate that I'm beginning to sound like a crazy tinfoil-wearing person.

Idk, humans are complicated. Social media in its current iteration was a mistake, since it created platforms for some very dangerous and narcissistic people

No, his scenario is not equivalent, but here's a few more:

"Hello, this is just a reminder that your voting station will be open between 5 pm and 9 pm in (somewhere where it's not actually located), please remember to vote!"

"Hello, if you would like a free ride to your voting station, please text us 'YES', and wait at (location) between X and Y pm (Nobody will show up)."

"Hello, we have a great offer for auto insurance, blah, blah, blah."

"Hello, just a reminder, millions of trustworthy people believe that <opposition candidate> was responsible for <something untrue and horrible>. This isn't slander, because we are just strongly implying it in this robocall. Also, they live at XY address, and won't someone rid is of this meddlesome priest?"

"Hello, all the doctors are lying to you, buy our snake oil wellness supplements, instead. They are supplements, not drugs, we don't answer to the FDA."

"Hello, let's go down to sixth and Broadway next Tuesday, and make some noise/put the fear of God into <group>"

"<Ethnic minority group> is burning this country's forests down using space lasers."

"Hello, please be aware that it's illegal to discuss your salary with your coworkers."

“Hello, X is hosting strip shows with men dressed in women’s clothes and are grooming your children!”

Except for the last, those are just lies that people in power find inconvenient. People were saying way more ridiculous things in the summer of 1787, and yet the country I live in enshrined free speech rights.

They also enshrined slavery, assuming you mean the US. Who cares what they enshrined? They have no credibility. If the merit of the argument holds no weight, then the fact that “the founding fathers” made it doesn’t make it more (or less) correct.

> Except for the last, those are just lies that people in power find inconvenient.

A few of them are plain-old voter suppression, and ~50% of the time, people in power find them incredibly convenient.

You don't see them very often, because in most free countries, trying any of them is an incredibly serious offence.

That depends entirely on who does it. An individual versus a government official.

The overarching point still stands. That people being in favor of censoring "disinformation" (ie speech by private individuals) in certain instances but not others is an inconsistent stance that carries a distinct appearance of partisanship.

Just so I'm clear, is your argument that these statements should be censored?

Lots of these seem reprehensible, but totally within a reasonable space of legitimate free speech. Barring the cases with calls for imminent harm (e.g. turbulent priests and such), it seems that there's a big risk in trying to draw a legal line here.

In your polling station example, for instance, that has some clear negative impact. If I instead said "The library will be closed for the next month", is that protected though? What if I say "Arby's will be giving out free sandwiches from noon to two o'clock tomorrow"? All of these statements have negative impact.

The rationale for more extensive free speech is that it is expected that individuals have the right to hear what others are saying, and evaluating how bogus those are.

To be clear, some censorship is absolutely accepted in society today (e.g. libel laws, imminent threats, marketplace standards, etc), but the fear of an ill-defined line that can be shifted to suit political winds seems like a very reasonable one.

Half of these scenarios are just variations of the comment I replied to. Again, there's a contract of sale. Your speech isn't being violated when you sign a contract promising you're selling what you claim to be selling.

As for the rest, you're free to make whatever lies you want about others. Free speech doesn't allow you to initiate force against others so I'm not particularly concerned with any of it. We have gun rights to deal with people that try to enter your house or attack you over your skin colour and space laser accusations.

That's not censorship. That's preventing fraud. Censorship would be preventing you to talk against those frauds.

>Even though the printed text is surely the manufacturer's speech.

This is a terrible analogy, and evidence that the people who claim we can't protect all speech have no idea what "free speech" actually is.

Hint: no, it's not fraud.

Now that you've accepted that we should censor fraud speech you have to define the grey line between unacceptable fraud and acceptable disinformation.

> fraud speech

This is you fundamentally misunderstanding what is meant by "speech". The statement itself is not illegal. The act of misrepresenting the transaction being agreed to is what's illegal.

A specific act that involves many components, only one of which happens to be speech, has been made illegal. The speech component itself has not.

There are certain situations where speech itself is restricted. This is not one of them though.

This is just wrong. There is all kinds of commercial speech, especially around advertisement, that is banned before any transaction is agreed to.

Fraud and censorship are different.

Saying these bulbs have 5 when they have three is a lie but shouldn't be censored. Selling someone 3 but saying it is 5 is fraud. Selling/buying have different laws and standards.

Government censorship (and arrests!!) are in no way comparable to the “censorship” happening in western countries. (Namely, ToC violators getting banned, and government figures suggesting misinformation to look into.) The comparison is just obnoxious.

It’s not. Traditionally the government is in charge of the public square. If a private company is enforcing TOS violations while operating a public square, and operating a public square is traditionally a government function, it’s valid to argue violators are entitled to free speech protections.

It's almost like the goal is not censorship for censorship's sake, but rather the goal is actually protecting the more vulnerable (which in this case is clearly the Turkish people and not Erdogan). It's almost like there are principles at play!

My principle is that force is only justified in response to force, and speech is not force (unless it makes a threat), false or not. If you don’t agree with that principle then I’d like to hear it explicitly.

I don't agree that speech is not a force unless it makes a threat.

Think about what makes you consider "threatening speech" a "force": presumably it has nothing to do with particle physics... is it perhaps that the act of speech itself causes people to adopt behaviours they wouldn't normally adopt? ie.: that it can carry some coercive weight? That it can be used to exploit/endanger vulnerable people in some circumstances?

Speech may be a very very weak force in most (or even "nearly all", just for the sake of argument) circumstances, but there are tons of examples of speech being a powerful force, causing large social and historical shifts. There are both positive and negative examples of this.

I don’t consider threatening speech a force, I’m opposed to it because it threatens force. You can argue that’s an exception to my principle but it’s not far out of line. I don’t try to ban other forms of speech, however much they hurt your feelings, because they don’t threaten force.

Hurting feelings is unfortunate, but generally not considered to be a reason to suppress other people's speech: we rather choose to suppress our own speech when we think it might hurt other people, and choose to do so freely.

Almost all "contemporary reasonable censorship in functioning liberal democracies" are attempts to prevent people from exploiting the vulnerability of others: speech that causes people to make *patently insane and irrational* medical decisions, for example. Really stupid things like fake cancer cures, and suggestions to drink bleach. And typically, for proponents of censorship, there is a whole spectrum of acceptability as well: the more it's a grey zone, the less the censorship is acceptable. When the censorship clearly and obviously only constrains the actions of malicious actors, and clearly and obviously protects vulnerable people, it's seen as a win. This is always highly contextual, and limited by the extent of scientific knowledge.

A common theme is that censorship to protect those in power (the government) is bad, and censorship to protect those who have the least amount of power is... well, not great (it's definitely always better if it's not needed), but not bad in the same way.

Speech can’t hurt you. Speech can threaten to hurt you, which I already stated I’m against. Other instances of censorship are blatant violations of the principle that force is only justified in response to force. Telling someone to drink bleach is not force. You’re trying to bend definitions to be able to make it seem equivalent to forcing someone to drink bleach, despite no force being involved.

IMO the issue in the entire discussion of "censorship" shouldn't be between censorship vs no censorship but about the outrage amplifiers social media has become. It makes the already huge problem with Bandolini's Law / "flooding the zone with shit" so much bigger by amplifying random voices that drive engagement which is most effectively driven by outrage. I'd wager that addressing this issue will suddenly reduce the number of discussions about "censorship"

I am old enough to remember when Turkish army was overthrowing its government on behave of the West and abusing its own citizens, none of you bleeding heart liberals where shedding any tears.The world does not subscribe to liberal secular values, and Muslim world does not. You can censor all you want, but when Charlie Hebdo published cartoons making fun of earth quakes and while ugly hordes of Indian gloating over the death and destruction, it is only prudent to censor this kind of garbage.

If you are unhappy living in the West, there is no reason whatsoever why you cannot move to a country with more compatible values. Russia is accepting new immigrants and that is certainly an option available to you.

Nonsense, if you tolerate disinformation you get more disinformation. Countries that fail to address it will fall and the world will be worse off because of it. The right to free speech does not include the right to a free platform or free promotion.

Agreed, disinformation is dangerous and it should be treated as such. Just because you say/write it doesn't mean I'm required to host it. Freedom to promote stupidity does not outweigh my right to unplug my microphone.

Who decides what's disinformation?

This narrative has killed many republicans who feared getting vaccinated, and it will only kill more. One could argue that it is their own actions, but I am not keen on blaming people for their circumstances.

The answer is we decide what is disinformation through our institutions and the value we place on them. Your and I's opinion on certain matters should never weigh remotely as much as an expert's on a particular topic unless we are such experts.

We ought to measure the value of one's speech through the scrutiny it has to go through to be published at trusted channels.

> at trusted channels

The public square is not in and of itself a trusted channel so I doubt you are talking about the same thing as the person you responded to.

i assume you take it that twitter and FB are public squares?

Well, I don’t.

I hear this question posed a lot in this context, but we already done this now don't we? Someone (or ones) decides which laws are valid, which educational material to teach our kids etc. Are those not ok because some person or body of people have decided for the rest of society?

It does include the right to access the public square though. And if a particular free platform has become a public square by virtue of size then I think it does include the right to access that platform.

Such platforms should probably not be permitted to promote in a general and unrestricted sense the content of particular speakers that make use of them. That's no better than clandestine government propaganda. An obvious wolf in sheep's clothing.

However disinformation may very well lead to totalitarian regimes, propped on distorted reality and fake news. A democracy must be able to defend itself.

Democracies have always survived by making their subjects invested and empowered in the future of their country. There's a limit to how far disinformation can go, and, frankly, the only thing people are trying to achieve with censorship is moving that line the wrong way.

The spread of wrong information has always been overwhelming. This is nothing new, nor is it (imho) more irritating now than is was 20 years ago. And if the history books are accurate on how bad it was 100 years ago ... This is not what's destroying democracies.

That's unavoidable when moderation is routinely and deliberately conflated with political repression.

What a fool. He should have said he was fighting earthquake misinformation in order to preserve the rich democracy of turkey.

Why does this make Erdogan a fool?

edit: I legitimately have no idea why I am being downvoted. Can someone explain?

Because when western leaders want to censor information, they claim said information is a "threat to democracy", and everyone just trusts them. (not that it would work - it seems like turkish people actually know how to protest)

What a weird comment

Erdogan has for past the decade regularly arrested critical journalists and opposition politicians on very flimsy trumped up charges.

In America there is a massive and lucrative media industry dedicated to attacking whichever politician/party happens to be in power, alongside half of social media at any given time. It's pretty clear political freedom in the West is much stronger than in Turkey right now

Because people can downvote things when they simply do not like your opinion disregarding of merits.

> Also there were many incidents of the mainstream media cutting of talks or turning away the camera when people said or did anything discrediting the official narrative.

Twitter itself pioneered this during covid. It's no surprise others learned from it.

> Just look at his face when delivering this speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doy38aKbMw4

I'm only half-snickering here, because the atmospheric choices are indeed very particular and telling.

But the face (and its expression) has looked like this at least in the past 10 years. That's telling as well, you may say :)

> Twitter was heavily used to seek help by people in turmoil, even hundreds of people were posting from under the rubbles. The officials were claiming that everything was under control and they are helping everyone but people were posting videos showing the situation on the ground and the situation didn't look even close to being under control.

Social media is the first target no matter the country

The US do the exact same [1], they control them with CIA agents [1*], so it is easier for them to do profiling rather than blocking it

In fact, it's the first thing the US want to do for foreign apps, to ban them, just like with TikTok [2], they are recent talks about a global ban too

So we can't just throw the stone at Turkey, you have to examinate the situation, they had a terrorist attack in Istanbul in november [3], mossad agents doing shady things [4], wich btw gives flashbacks of the failed coup by the mossad [5] (imagine if the coup succeeded knowing how the Ukraine-Russia conflict developped and the current issues in Azerbaijan-Armenia, they dodged something sinister)

Twitter is known to be a place with lot of political activity, it's easy for a foreign country to spread misinformation, there are lot of noise

And Twitter is not the most popular social media app in Turkey, plus the population in that region is not tech savvy either

[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...

[1#] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562433/Facebook-r...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/30/us-tiktok...

[3] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63615076

[4] - https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2023/1/11...

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

> they control them with CIA agents [1*], so it is easier for them to do profiling rather than blocking it

I don't understand what you're suggesting CIA agents are controlling. What is "them" in "they control them"?

The article you link to involves surveillance (rather than control) by the FBI (rather than CIA).

They are in charge of the disinformation/moderation teams

An example: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondberman/

They are in most social media companies

So they can decide what to ban that could hinder their national social order

Something Turkey can't do with Twitter, hence a ban, just like the US with TikTok and the pseudo "algorithm"

With the amount of misinformation that spreads in Twitter, it is the right thing to do

It was similar with Iran, and that coincides with Musk purchasing Twitter and dismantling the moderation team making it unable to function at all

https://news.yahoo.com/twitters-content-moderation-team-repo...

> it is the right thing to do

You had me nodding until this part. Yes, twitter is filled with misinformation. But government censorship is more dangerous than misinformation. Governments have killed more people than anything else short of heart attacks and cancer. Governments murdered hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century; giving governments the power to censor whatever the government deems to be misinformation is insanely dangerous. The most dangerous kind of misinformation is that which is promulgated by the government itself.

Any government, to emphasize. Who gets to decide what constitutes misinformation?

It's one of the mission of the CIA, spread propaganda, use influence to manipulate the press and journalists all over the world etc, back during the cold war

Using social media to achieve this mission is the natural evolution, as peoples usage to get information changes over time

It's very well documented, so seeing them at key roles isn't a surprise, and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone

They can't do it with TikTok, the app of choice of the youth and people all over the world

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/John_R._Stockwell

https://twitter.com/MichaelNo2War/status/1589793529823645696

Good god - the FBI recently got outed (Twitter files - Elon Musk - hello?) paying more than $30M to Twitter to do their bidding. Are you really this ignorant of current events?

It's pretty clear we all these days live in different bubbles, of what is "widely known current events".

Googling, it looks like it was $3 million, not $30 million, for data requested with court order for such, rather than for suppressing speech or other control? It was still the FBI, not the CIA? This one?

https://reason.com/2022/12/19/the-fbi-paid-twitter-3-4-milli...

Yes, I legitimately didn't know what the GP I was replying to was suggesting that the CIA controlled, what "them" meant. Now that they replied, I understand what they are suggesting, and think they are... living in a different bubble than me.

> wich btw gives flashbacks of the failed coup by the mossad

Turkey has not even accused Mossad of being involved in the failed coup d'etat.

The wiki mentions the CIA, but their investigations found links to groups helped by both the mossad and the CIA, i'll try to find the link for the investigation, i'll edit the post once i find it

Your source links don't match up with what you're saying. For example, with [1#] you claim the US "controls" social media with CIA agents, but [1#] simply shows a social media company that merely hired former CIA agents. That's like saying Facebook hired a bunch of ex-Microsoft people, therefore Microsoft controls Facebook. Doesn't make sense.

Erdogan and his ilk single-handedly made me hesitant about donating, that regardless who I donate to, they’ll find a way to line their pockets. I ended up donating, do the same, but Erdogan is a bastard man.

You can donate here: https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey

It's an NGO that currently is crowdsourcing donations for the relief.

And there is what, precisely, to prevent Erdogan and his cronies from just seizing the funds and arresting the principals? These bank accounts are in Turkey.

I would honestly be more comfortable using the likes of PayPal, as it’s less likely to be stolen by the government.

Well, if we go by the logic you stated, a meteorite may fall down to my head now while I am exiting my work place.

Anyway, I think there are enough alternatives to donate. Where I live, a local relief organization is collecting donations for Turkey and Syria. Then there are UN agencies who do that etc.

Erdogan doing Erdogan things is a lot more likely than a meteorite falling on you, but it's your money so you do you.

They are very quick in spending the money and don't do long term project, built a solid reputation over the years and it's founder is a Turkish Rocks star who is politically not very pronounced.

That’s a good strategy, and good to know, thank you. I worked with an orphanage in Kyrgyzstan who had a policy of ensuring their bank account was empty at the end of every day, and it worked for them.

I’ve made a donation - I hope it ends up helping someone who needs it.

thanks a lot!

+1 for Ahbap. It is a grassroots organization with not much religious and political agenda.

I thought Dennis was the bastard man?

So is little Recep

Another angry old guy...

I've read report that Turkey bombarded part of Kurdish syria that suffered from the earthquake yesterday

I don't know about that but maybe you can donate to Syria, they were heavily affected by the quake too.

I think the Kurdish Red Crescent could be a good option for donations. They have an appeal page here:

https://www.heyvasor.com/en/banga-alikariya-lezgin-ji-bo-mex...

Isn't that against sanctions?

I don't know but probably there are options to donate to organisations outside Syria which provide direct material help.

They also claimed that Turkey apparently used Nukes.

The background behind him seems like two people watching live drone footage.

Yet another example of why inculcating the virtues of free speech and limited government into a culture is so important. It is too easy for those in power to infringe on individual speech rights by labeling something as "disinformation" or "misinformation" as their justification.

I completely agree but we also really need to move past Twattered being the social media of choice for change.

edit: Did I just get downvoted by Elon personally? Win!

Can anybody elaborate why? I understand if it's financial crisis or some other gov fuckup. But this is a natural disaster on an unprecedented scale, government may not have enough resources to handle it. What's the game here?

Let me try.

So Erdogan himself came into power after the 1999 Earthquake devastating the country and wrecking the economy, leading to early elections, leading to his party winning landslide election in 2002.

That earthquake was like nothing seen before, hitting the most industrialised and populous part of the country and they had to introduce new taxes like Luxury consumption tax to fix the damage and prepare so that this never happen again.

This luxury tax is applied pretty much on anything and that's why an iPhone 14 Pro cost 2300$ in Turkey(US price is 1000$). Turks also pay 2x to 5x the price of the price in EU or US on purchasing automobiles, so it's a big deal. They also have lot's of safeguards so people just don't buy from abroad, therefore everyone chips in.

Also, Erdogan's primary achievement is construction business. He made sure that the builders can build and profit hugely, they also destroyed a lot of nature in the process and fine tuned the economy to serve the construction sector through the years. Guess what was the first Covid measures Erdogan announced at the start of the pandemic? He announced credit facilities for purchasing homes, no joke.

Also, the new buildings were supposed to be built according to the new code which is quake resilient and it was one of the prime motivations of this construction based economy.

Fast forward 20 years and we were struck with another huge earthquake.

The initial response is very weak, in contrast to the 1999 quake because in that one the Turkish Army was summoned immediately but this time for some reason Erdogan doesn't request assistance from the army and the protocol allowing local governments requesting assistance was removed by Erdogan in the previous years.

A full day passes without anything to show as a response when people are sending selfies from under the rubble with their address, seeking help. Most places receive no help whatsoever and people go into a winter night under the rubble or on the streets without electricity, food or water.

Videos showing newly build homes collapsed, people find promotional materials claiming quake resistance and the new buildings are collapsing like the old ones

The luxury tax, AKA the earthquake tax collected wasn't used to be ready for the next quake. This was something widely known and criticised but now we have videos of newly built buildings collapsed. It materialised.

Anger builds up, Erdogan is no where to be seen and the ministers are giving ridiculous speeches about how everything is under control and use a language crafted for the upcoming elections.

Then Erdogan appears on the TVs giving the speech you can watch.

So yes, he fucked it up for about 20 years and fucked it up on the disaster night. He used to be huge critic of the way the politician he replaced handled the quake and he ended up doing exactly the same, even worse. If the irony has not set in yet, let me tell you that Turkey is in economical crisis for some years now and Erdogan is in a coalition with the guy who was in a coalition with the guy who he replaced. It's almost poetic.

Holy shit, thank you.

Amazing summary, thank you!

Some additions:

Erdoğan also gained immensely from the economic measures taken after the 1999 earthquake and the following economic depression. He eventually rolled back a significant portion of them, and further wrecked the economy by lowering interests in the face of inflation, and multiple times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkyudz4w5Gc

> the earthquake tax collected wasn't used to be ready for the next quake. This was something widely known and criticized

It was openly admitted by a minister that it was spent on building roads. A lot of those roads have now giant cracks on them, because of the earthquake.

> ministers are giving ridiculous speeches about how everything is under control

One even said that the rescue operations are going slowly to make sure people under the rubble aren't crushed.

Thank you.

It's ironic that you are spreading disinformation about an app that is used to report disinformation. The app was released about 2 weeks ago. Not 24 hours after the earthquake. The feature was also already within the app.

Unfathomable. People were literally live tweeting "save me" from under the rubble with their locations, and other people were tagging the disaster management account.

Insane. Developers are trying to make the best use of Twitter.

* https://huggingface.co/deprem-ml

* https://deprem.io

* https://deprem.basarsoft.com.tr

* https://go.ahb.app/guvenliharita

* https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1QpICWDVpd3eIScSvaj...

* https://depremenkaz.xyz

Almost all the info listed on these websites coming from twitter.

This is a tragedy, and it's great that people are trying to help in any way they can. However, building stuff on Twitter's platform seems like utter folly these days.

Truthfully it was a bad idea when Jack Dorsey owned it too - now that Musk is in charge, it's a no-brainer.

What's the alternative?

You need the database. It must scale and be reliable.

It must have proper UI.

People must be able to use it without prior learning.

Let's say you create a website from the scratch. You need to use some cloud database. You need to build a simple UI which will work with bad network. You have few hours to do that. You need not to go bankrupt because entire country suddenly will use your app.

Twitter is well known to everyone. Twitter has API which basically allows to use it as a simple database. Twitter is web scale and can handle the load. Twitter has solid battle tested website and apps. And everything is completely free.

IMO it's a unique proposition and nothing compares to it.

If you have enough time, you can build better specialized app, that's for sure.

You should realize that Twitter had become a critical source of information about people in collapsed buildings. Their friends, family and relatives were writing detailed address information in order to help rescue efforts and reach these people faster.

All sorts of resource requests were also part of these tweets, so it is also part of understanding priorities for each affected area.

There are already software projects collecting this information, organizing them to a structured form and carrying them over to rescue authorities.

Elections are around the corner, and Erdogan's approval ratings have been dropping even before the earthquake. Just saying...

Things might get even hairier given the elections and the popularity drop due to both politics and the earthquake.

It’s possible that a state of emergency on account of the earthquake will postpone the elections.

In other countries the population will unite after natural disasters, and leadership is usually given credit for the response as long as they continue support for local response efforts set up in the immediate aftermath. Why would popularity of the leader drop so quickly due to an earthquake? It's been what 36 hours. At this point almost all committed resources will still be highly local...

In autocratic regimes, the leaders get all the cred for things going well, but they also are seen as responsible if things crumble.

Potentially because they cut off social media essential to life-saving efforts, and focus on managing optics rather than providing concrete help? Just a stab in the dark, but who knows.

because Erdogan's relatives were heavily involved in construction industry and these flopped buildings are result of Erdogan's family dealings

Thanks. That is an answer which makes sense.

Well, either Erdogan knows he's deeply unpopular, so he/his lackeys has to censor all the bad news and criticism so he/they can look a bit better, or he's afraid he's deeply unpopular, which means a bit of self-awareness of what a raging asshole dictator but useless leader he is... Fun times!

A leader that actually cares but is overwhelmed would probably not be afraid of admitting that, s/he could rally the population together to overcome the tragedy despite their lack of resources. I think Dubya managed to convey this with 9/11, no one really knew how bad decisions by his administration lead to the threat being unnoticed. Meanwhile with Erdogan, he's been the boss for many years, the public probably thinks: The government's not able to rescue people effectively? Well, that's because it's been a kleptocracy for a long time.

Elections are meaningless if you can print millions of untraceable mail-in ballots and do not enforce rigorous ID requirements. Furthermore, elections are even less meaningless if you can imprison the opposition or destroy them in media under false and contrived pretense.

Religion is the Trump card in those countries

Words fail me! This is a serious impediment to search & rescuer efforts as well as coordination for money and other donations. The pretext given for the closure was that Twitter owed money to the Turkish government.

You can see the anger of locals where a mob reacts to Minister of Transportation’s visit: https://youtube.com/shorts/B7t9W7Qgpfs?feature=share

WhatsApp isage is ubiquitous in Turkey but it seems this morning people are seeing problems with that, too.

just incredible... That's one of the very few platforms where people organise help, and share locations of where help is needed.

This is just pure evil. The government so far was pretty much useless; and with this they are now actively preventing people from organizing themselves. A net negative, after years of paying taxes.

And probably the greatest contributor to this tragedy was the lack of oversight for construction codes and safety regulations in the first place.

1- Cause thousands of preventable deaths 2- dont even try to help 3- impede those who are trying to help. This is a new low, even for the president.

In the case of protests etc I'd understand the goal behind it from certain actors involved, but why in this case?

I'm not up to date on how the Turkish government is handling this but I'm willing to bet it has something to do with how they're not doing a great job at proving aid to the affected region, and they're trying to contain that information to save face.

Reading a bit it seems to be potentially that the recommendations after the last big quake haven't been followed up properly. So basically stronger building requirements, with government validation was the plan; in reality not done (properly) and "checked" by paid companies.

My first thought on seeing some of the images was that there must be some criminal negligence involved. There is one area with 20 or so similar looking apartment buildings (about 6 levels each) where every second one has completely pancaked.

I was in Christchurch, New Zealand during the 2011 earthquakes. Only 2 major building completely collapsed. One had been designed by an engineer with insufficient qualifications and the other had design issues that were previously identified but never addressed.

It's worth noting in context that Erodgan is heavily involved in the Turkish real estate industry:

https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/president-erdogan-the-world...

The media is primarily reporting good news instead of actual news. Twitter has been the best source of images, videos, and descriptions of what is happening on the ground. Search #deprem (earthquake in Turkish) to see for yourself.

Despotic regimes hate to be criticized. Or anything that might make them look bad, including how they handle an earthquake.

Including how they handled the years up to the earthquake and how much corruption influenced the country's ability to improve their housing stock with respect to earthquake resilience. I think that's the main source of worry for Erdogan and his cronies. The 'building amnesty' was a clear bone thrown at business interests at the (literal) expense of the rest of the population.

Thousands of buildings collapsed killing lots of people inside them. Once the dead have been buried there will be calls for why nothing was done to improve the housing stock and in a de-facto dictatorship the buck stops with the dictator. Erdogan isn't going to be able to weasel his way out of this one without claiming another fake coup.

And that's before we get into the fact that for obvious reasons Turkey isn't able to handle the aftermath of this alone, and that makes Erdogan look weak. The fact that they are happy to switch off Twitter even though it is saving lives by allowing people to be found under the rubble is telling: even now the lives of the Turks matter less to the regime than their own image.

Paranoid government? It probably fears insturgents can misuse earthquake to spread chaos and overthrow it. I don't believe people would support them (hypothetical insturgents) in such circumstances.

Because the enemy of a wannabe dictatorship is social bonding.

Typical state excuse, "false information". Also there was growing anger, they cannot control it like the mainstream media. Media will only show the actions blessed by the state.

Erdogan allowed (encouraged?) careless construction in many areas with complete disregard of anti-seismic building procedures. I heard someone say: "as an earthquake brought him in power, another earthquake will remove him from power". The Turkish Govt spin doctors are likely struggling to counter the wave of public outcry, hence the bans.

Many hours after the quake hit, he came out of wherever he was, poured out all his hatred, threats, and then went right back in. He has the complete authority over everything in the country yet no accountability in anything ever. And his stares; effing evil!

This is so sad because twitter is still mainly used by people to help each other, e.g. to tell where help is needed or who can help.

With authoritarian regimes, having someone who's not a representative of the regime doing anything to help others is often seen as a threat to the authority of the government.

As a Turkish person, seeing people tweet under rubbles, hardly breathing but found some space to tweet their full address, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE. And THIS IS MURDER.

There are still people who are alive under rubbles with still some charge left on their phone. Twitter proved to be one of the most effective ways to communicate how severe their situation was.

You don't want people talking about who is responsible for bad construction and incompetent services right after a big disaster, do you? People might lose trust in the government </s>

Turkey should not be considered a democracy anymore, that's the sad reality. A country becoming a de factor dictatorship should not stay in NATO.

That's fine. Turks will depose him soon. As for NATO, Turkey leaving NATO only helps Russian sphere of influence and any anti-dictatorship person would be against that.

Tell that to the Armenians that Erdogan's good friend Ilham Aliyev wants to genocide (and that only Putin's Russia will defend)

Turkey already bought russian arms, that's one of the reasons they should leave NATO.

Wow, this is eerily similar to what happened in India during second wave of COVID. Tweets complaining about oxygen shortage or handling of Covid in general were restricted in India.

It’s just weird why some governments do that. Playing down the crisis just delays the recovery efforts.

Source - 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483.amp 2) https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/22410931/india-pande...

democracy is pretty hard in Turkey: just a small example: Bedia Özgökçe Ertan was elected as mayor of Van, then sentenced to 30 years of prison just for what she said.

This is why we need an open source alternative that communities can use to self-organize and recover after disasters: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

The future of decentralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY

Otherwise all we have is outrage at governments and corporations, but they have all the power and all the software too.

Despite a 1999 warning that killed 17-18K, rampant corruption, incompetence and neglect have not improved construction standards, despite the promise to do so. That means that the vast majority of today's deaths were preventable.

Imagine being accountable to that. Better to call it "misinformation".

Just a mini, personal note:

In 1999, collapsed buildings far more than 17k - 18k and nobody knows how many people died. I remember some 800k - 1m estimations.

Today, just few videos shows at least 10k more houses was collapsed but "officials" says just 4k people died.

You'll have to back up that 800K number. It seems pretty ridiculous:

"An official Turkish estimate of 19 October 1999 placed the toll at 17,127 killed and 43,953 injured, but many sources suggest the actual figure may have been closer to 45,000 dead and a similar number injured.[6][7] Reports from September 1999 show that 120,000 poorly engineered houses were damaged beyond repair[15] and approximately 20,000 buildings collapsed, resulting in more than 250,000 people becoming homeless after the earthquake"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...

Never let a good crisis go to waste!

Yes, this was the first sentence came to my mind when I saw the "police research twitter about the earthquake misinformation" news.

I am not here to defend twitter block however considering topic filled with political comments i want to fix some misunderstanding. Twitter is used as alternative channel yet critical for organization of volunteers . They say their operation hit by 70%. However people first ask help from official channel than seek alternatives arriving twitter as first option. Saying that people asking help under rubble from twitter is straight out political comment. Block happened like 65+ hours after earthquake. 95%+ of rescue operation runs over official channel. At this point is not that important anymore but I have never seen single tweet that points out you should shut down your phone in area so people under rubble have better change of reception. Which is insane. Volunteers going there complaining phone/internet not working properly not aware they are potentially blocking people under rubble from access to phone yet complaining about twitter ban. I am not defending block nor underestimating damage to volunteer organization (about distribution of help) just attempting to balance against political comments. By the way twitter block is lifted again.

There is/was an active disinformation campaign on Twitter attempting to link the earthquake to Türkiye denying Nato expansion. The ridiculous conspiracy theory is that the US used a HAARP system to cause the earthquake in retaliation.

Not saying that's the reason for the ban, but twitter is not solely a force for good here.

Maybe the US used mind control to force (over several decades) Turkish contractors to build house-of-cards on top of a major tectonic plate fracture line?

But indeed our comms/social channels are just a mess - that we pay for dearly when real suffering hits us.

We knew that much from the pandemic already.

That's annoying. HAARP is essentially just a steerable RF beam that heats the ionosphere for RF propagation research, or can be used to bounce RF off of the moon. Neither have any effects on fault line stress or slippage that I am aware of.

So herein lies the point of all this.

People who know its bullshit, know its bullshit, and can tell other people (who don't know) that it is bullshit.

It should not be up to any government or company to use force or coercion to meter any idea or speech unless it is, on the rarest of occasion, illegal.

Our civilization is more connected than ever before. We have access to untold volumes of knowledge. Greater than any library in history. If he were alive today, Aristarchus of Samothrace, the 6th head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, would give his left nut for just 10 minutes on the internet.

We built a vast and wonderful civilization that is almost to the star-faring stage, and we did it without government censors or censorship by ideologues. The very notion of some bureaucrat, state actor, or crybully mod deciding what you should think or read insults the collective intelligence and struggle for absolute truth from the last 2500 years of human history.

A secret HAARP-like device that causes directed earthquakes was literally from the movie The Core. It use is what kicked off the plot.

Being able to say that the Earth's core stopped just like what happened in the movie makes the earthquake machine theory more plausible or something.

Well, HAARP directs RF energy skyward using an array of antennas for research and isn't exactly a secret.

The DESTINY project in the movie was a secret and it sucked energy up from the entire grid and somehow shot it to the center of the planet in an attempt to ...trigger earthquakes?

How they were going to aim DESTINY is lost to plot holes.

Probably magnets.

Such a disinformation campaign (blaming America) is probably what Erdogan would rather support, because then he can deflect and say "Don't blame me for the deaths, it's those damn Americans with their alien-tech!".

Not that the quake is his fault anyway, but to expand on that, he could claim "Trust me, my government tried to build quake-proof buildings, but their alien-tech is even more powerful!"

That was not the only conspiracy theory going around. The other one was that Russia had detonated a nuclear bomb underground to cause the Earthquake, in retaliation for Syria/Ukraine support or something!

election are approaching, and anything goes in Turkey

People asked Elon Musk on twitter to deploy Starlink to Turkey and he said he can't because it is not approved.

I wonder why.

Erdogan explicitly declined it when Musk offered.

The main probable cause for it is that Starlink wanted to offer it unfiltered, as they normally do in all other cases of emergency relief coverage; but the Turkish government wanted the regular filtering.

There is a difference between war and executive priviledges.

The former (Russia) unilaterally imposed a decision (war) on another government and its people.

The latter (erdogan) is acting in his capacity as the elected representative of the people.

Starlink cannot override the decision of the elected executive. He needs approval for that.

Approval from whom?

The state. In the case of UA that was Zelensky. In Turkey it's Erdogan.

HNer often seem to have this weird idea that companies can take governments head-on.

Depends on the countries involved. The US has backed SpaceX in enabling Starlink service in Iran.

But Turkey is an ally and a NATO member.

>> elected representative of the people.

Was he?

>>Starlink cannot override the decision of the elected executive. He needs approval for that.

Pretty sure he could given the service is in space and Turkey lacks the ability or even really legitimate authority to enforce rules in Low earth orbit.

Elon chooses not to because he has enough hot water with US Politicians than to open up that mess. I bet is more worried but US government reactions here than Turkey;s government

This is a strange comment; maybe I'm not understanding it.

1) Starlink is available on the internationally recognised territory of Ukraine, with the support of the government of Ukraine. The unlawful presence of Russian troops in Ukrainian territory doesn't change any of this. Turkish authorities, conversely, have not authorised Starlink in Turkey (for obvious reasons - their terror at losing their power to censor).

2) Turkey is not a democracy, and to say Erdogan was elected by the people ignores his misuse of state power to suppress, harass, and imprison members of the opposition, his control of the media, his control of the judiciary, his vast corruption, and his meddling - both de jure and de facto - with Turkey's constitution and electoral law. No free election can happen under such circumstances. The trappings of voting do not make for a democracy.

I never stated that Starlink has any legitimacy over an elected government. My point is that Erdogan doesn't want his people to be able to communicate freely even in the middle of a catastrophe like this.

Whats the difference between Starlink and say all satellite TV networks available anywhere, to anybody with antenna pointing up? What can he do, sue an American company for allowing freedom of speech? Musk can safely ignore that, and Turkey would need his empire more than Musk Turkey (to be clear I can imagine erdogan strongarming US government due to Nato bases but he would be showing off some nasty side of himself)

You can't block Starlink signal, it ain't cable in the ground or in sea you can cut at your will.

Starlink satellites, unlike television satellites, perform active packet switching, not mere beam steering.

> is acting in his capacity as the elected representative

You can be the "elected representative" of anything if you put everyone else in jail

Yet. People voted for that.

Same for Chavez. Same for maduro.

The collective can make wrong decisions that doesnt take away from the fact that the laws and its people are sovereign over its territory.

Erdogan is not simply a populist and nationalist who also uses religion (even though he s a typical opportunist and definitely not a pious person). He also imprisons the opposition, silences media etc. This is typically called a dictator. The 'collective' did not make any of those decisions , he did

Just to elaborate a bit further.

The current mayor of Istanbul is the politician who could win the next presidential election and he's been sentenced to a few years in prison and banned him from politics because he "insulted some elected officials". His crime was actually calling a few people clowns when they recalled for a runoff of the elections he won. He then won the runoff with a wider margin and now has to be taken down somehow.

I don't have a horse in this race, but you do not get to change definitions...to accommodate your worldview.

This "dictator" - from wikipedia:

In the June 2011 elections, Erdoğan's governing party won 327 seats (49.83% of the popular vote) making Erdoğan the only prime minister in Turkey's history to win three consecutive general elections, each time receiving more votes than the previous election. The second party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), received 135 seats (25.94%), the nationalist MHP received 53 seats (13.01%), and the Independents received 35 seats (6.58%).

To be clear, i'm not questioning (nor I have an opinion on) any of your prior Erdogan coloring, except of course the usage of the word "dictator".

At any other time this would have been more proof that Erdogan is blatantly authoritarian. However right now there is a lot of insidious fake news and disinfo on Turkish twitter. Many newly created bot accounts are pushing lies about Ukrainian refugees in Turkey, that they were hoarding aid intended for earthquake victims and stealing from the bodies of the dead. Twitter seems to be the only major social media platform that is not removing and banning these insidious lies and bot accounts.

Many Turkish people are instead using Facebook to organize help and aid efforts and it's more effective than twitter because even small towns already have Facebook Groups and Pages.

TIL that Erdogan cares about refugees.

They shouldn't be in NATO.

Not to defend Erdogan by any means (passionately despise him as much as I despise Putin), but truth be told - handing to and relying on unbiased/factual information dissemination, via Twitter, in the Musk era, is something highly questionable.

>in the Musk era

random tweets have never been a trustworthy information source, Musk taking over has nothing to do with it.

Time for Nostr.

Time for what?

Nostr.

Nostrel

Nostr isn't decentralised. Why do you shill for it? It's not much better than Twitter.

Just like in China with the anti-lockdown protests. The people who are recognisable on social media posts from the protests have all been arrested by now. They waited just long enough to make people forget about it before they picked them up one by one.

That’s sad, and sincerely hope they get at least some form of a life back.

This is why I stopped buying anything that comes form China. No more funding CCP.

How do you even do that? I make an effort when I have a choice but so often it seems like there is no other choice.

For instance i still use 10y old Dell 14r laptop. When it became slow to run windows i switched to u Ubuntu and added SSD (not china made).

I might have purchased less than 10 made in china products in the past 3 years

Something is better than nothing

That Dell was still certainly made in China. And the SSD, while not manufactured in China, likely had components which were.

It's practically impossible to avoid it.

IMO, the best one can practically do is to just buy used.

It's not 0 support, but it's a lot less than buying new.

Used hardware usually has better support in Linux anyway.

I think the point is they haven't purchased a new one in 10 years. Therefore, no more purchase from China.

I mean Xi has been president for the last 10 years, so even that Dell would have supported ol' Winnie.

For someone with such a strong anti-china stance (enough to create a throwaway), I'd expect full devotion to the cause.

I think you're letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Laptop was purchased before XI became president.

Agree we can't avoid completely but still doing something is better than nothing.

I'd be very interested in this, but it seems hard to determine the extent to which a product was manufactured in China. Do you have any resources that help with this?

I agree with funding cuts to the CCP, but there's an argument to be made that de-globalisation is a sure fire way to global conflict..

Mutual interests tend to keep things civilised

Russia has already demonstrated that McDonald's theory doesn't work.

WW1 already demonstrated that "trade keeps peace" can't be counted on, but some people never learn. The argument was made and soundly debunked many years before anybody here was even born.

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

How could "trade keeps peace" prevent Russia paying Serbia to start a war to gro it's empire?

Maybe, but globalization is how China got industrialized so fast in the first place. Help your enemy get rich, and then watch as they push you off your place. Not a smart strategy either.

Yes the difference could be that I am against US hegemony, and all for finally somehow growing up and attempting to avoid a catastrophic, planet annihilating conflict.

That would probably require a different point of view than labelling China as the enemy, or keeping them pre-industrial and poor in order to control them, as the US has done repeatedly in many south American countries.

That argument gets longer in the tooth by the day. It presupposes a certain amount of shared values.

> there's an argument to be made that de-globalisation is a sure fire way to global conflict..

You could make that argument, but that is dependent strongly on everybody being rational actors and there is plenty of evidence that dictatorships are not rational actors.

Is the US orchestrating coup after coup all over the globe a desirable rational actor ?

The reality is that it will take multiple generations for us to get rid politicians who when zoomed out act like teenage boys, and we can argue all we want.

USA - "Hello, my name is the US of A."

Everybody - "Welcome, US of A."

USA - "Today I haven't orchestrated a coup in (checks paper)[0] ... six years?"

*applause*

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

My money is on France for this one, but you never know..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Guinean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

Yup. I’m (trying) to do the same. Every little mindless purchase I used to make to fix some minor inconvenience slowly adds up to real harm for someone else at the hands of the CCP.

Please stop buying from China.

In fact, in recent times Lithuania has been a force for good against China, I’d suggest seeking out their goods if applicable to your needs.

Genuinely curious, what has Lithuania done to stand up against China? And any suggestions on potential things one would buy from them over China? I would like to buy more from countries and people who aren't whipped by the CCP.

They opened a diplomatic representation in Taiwan.

And refused to back down when China did its standard put-them-in-the-doghouse routine.

Stop buying from China means essentially buying nothing with a semiconductor. Unless you mean something else.

Well, there are many things in your life that you buy from China that don't have a semiconductor in it.

For instance, I was shocked to find out that a lot of "Brazilian" honey was actually rebranded corn syrup imported from China and cut with low-grade Chinese honey, this all to get around U.S. import restrictions due to the lack of quality/safety regulation in China.

It's expensive, it's tiring, it's hard. But, in the end I feel it's worth it for the safety of my family and others. Whether it's honey, a sketchily-soldered power supply, or some completely fake lithium ion battery for your vacuum that only has 25% of rated capacity and might burn your house down, it's best to stay away from the Chinese option if you can.

Honey is one of those things where you're best off buying it from a local producer, or not at all.

Totally agree. After spending tons of time trying to find a reputable supplier the answer ended up being either:

1) I need to befriend a local beekeeper 2) I need to pick up beekeeping

You may think, that's too much work but really the honey you're buying at the store stands a really good chance of simply being sugar with only a trace of honey. Not good for you.

The local honey unfortunately shreds my intestines. :(

But I haven't really had honey since then so the point is moot.

Buy locally produced food only. Most importantly never buy Chinese food it's toxic

If you buy Samsung stuff instead of Apple you are significantly reducing the amount of China made stuff.

No need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I want to, but it's tough. How have you been filtering things?

https://old.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/

That subreddit caused a huge Streisand Effect for me.

I saw so many cool, affordable products that didn't have any alternatives (or the alternatives were too expensive) I ended up buying even more things!

Thanks

Why do you write this on a throw away?

Because they take notes, and they may come for the OP one day?

If that's your hill, add Turkey, India and Russia to the list. Brazil we'll know in few days.

What about Brazil? I thought Bolsonaro was out?

The list is actually much longer. Also the should consider to stop buying things made by prison labor.

The list is probably too long to keep up, realistically speaking. But I think any positive change in our spending habits (e.g. cutting off China and Russia) are good

I cannot think of any product that I have purchased in the past 50 years that was made in Turkey or India. I once bought a replacement carburetor for a woodchipper, and it was made in Russia, but that's all I've seen from there. These are not exactly manufacturing and exporting powerhouses, it's pretty trivial to avoid them if you want to, compared to China.

Turkey has a substantial textile industry. Something like the 5th or 6th largest textile exporter globally, and 3rd largest in the European market. My last set of bath towels were manufactured in Turkey, although my present set are from Pakistan.

If you bought anything pharmaceutical in the last ten years, chances are quite high it was manufactured in India using raw materials from China, and then either the formulation was done in the USA or the packaging was done in the USA to avoid having to label the source:

> (2021) "Here we use previously non-publicly available data to describe levels and trends in the manufacturing locations of the most commonly used prescription pharmaceuticals, off-patent generic drugs, intended to be consumed by Americans. We find that the base ingredients required for the manufacturing of these prescription drugs are overwhelmingly and increasingly manufactured in non-domestic locations, specifically India and China."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8109232/

In turn, the raw materials going into the India pharmaceutical pipeline tend to come from China more than anywhere else:

> "Even as the nation clamoured for banning products and cancelling contracts emanating from China, it’s apparent that, at least in pharma, it may not quite work out as imports from China account for 80% of total raw materials for making medicines, also called APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients)."

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

However, this doesn't get a lot of corporate media coverage, given that pharma is among the top advertisers.

Where was the device and it’s components you typed this comment out on made?

>"This is why I stopped buying anything that comes form China"

This is plain lie. At the very best you could stop buying end consumer products made and shipped from China. Assuming that things mad in the West are free from Chinese components / materials is a delusion

While individual consumers do such choices to feel better about themselves/feel like they’re doing something, big capital is pumping money nonstop to China.

It’s the same with Russia. It has been overflowed with money from EU before and during the war, and stop buying Russian goods will only affect individuals not buying it (and perhaps local sellers, too).

Same with all of the russian protests.

Not to defend China, as the scale and the penalties are not comparable, however, some western governments also took a relatively hard stance against some anti-lockdown protests and we're learning government was involved in muting dissenting opinions on social media which in some western countries crosses the line into censorship.

The government had embeds in social media orgs. Just imagine if during the Johnson or Nixon admins the gov/FBI/etc had actual "embeds" in the WashPo/NYT, etc. It's one thing for say Bezos to sympathize with Biden, or Elon sympathize with Rand, but it's another for the gov to had employees embedded and offering their take on things in the guise of "protecting the public from misinformation"

"crosses the line into censorship."

Is not compared to being arrested and possibly jailed

It depends on whether we believe in upholding the constitution or not.[1] In addition we did have people arrested for violating lockdown rules/orders.

[1] and given the volatility of this comment it seems people take issue with the bill of rights.

Excerpt From Allow Me to Retort - A Black Man’s Guide to the Constitution:

“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.

And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”

Elie Mystal

https://books.apple.com/us/book/allow-me-to-retort/id1549926...

Framing it as designed to ensure the dominance of one sex and one "race" is not doing the argument any favors. If that is what they set out to do, they did a poor job at it (even the Swiss and Kuwaitis suppressed their women "better") in addition, today, there exists slavery to this day in Chad and DRC, despite it being technically illegal. That argument is further eroded by claiming it's imperfect in enabling a promise. The constitution itself is what gave us the the necessary rights (including freedom of speech itself) to right previous wrongs.

Moreover, you can have a perfectly nice constitution guaranteeing all kinds of rights and freedoms like the USSR did (and I suspect the CCP does) and not enjoy the important aspects enshrined in such document)

But that's a misdirection in any case. It's utterly authoritarian to have a government decide what is truth and what isn't. That's one of the first things authoritarians go after. We should be very weary of anyone espousing the view government should have that right.

Look, I'm not trying to get into a whole culture war thing, but you do realize that the constitution literally had to be amended to give non-whites and women the right to vote? It seems like the constitution did a perfectly good job at doing that.

No disagreement there. What I disagree with is the insinuation that the right to free speech is tainted and thus somehow unjust because the constitution had to be amended. It's a devilish argument.

Fair enough. I didn't read the poster as to mean that so much as to say that flatly stating "support the constitution" is kinda painfully vague in its meaning and not without the problems the poster pointed out in the quote. For sure the constitution is widely misinterpreted, even apparently by members of the supreme court that are now under the belief that it and the bill of rights are an enumerated list of rights, to which otherwise none remain, when it is in fact the opposite. An enumerated list of limited powers granted to the gov't, to which the bill of rights are merely examples of such limitations as applied to individuals, but were never intended to be exhaustive or imply that no other rights existed.

So, imo, and apologies for the controversial political example, but when people ask "where is the right to abortion in the constitution?" they completely miss the point that the actual question must be "where is the right for the government to regulate abortions in the constitution?"

Like Julian Assange?

If you are correct, with embedded political officers and official statements I would say that this crosses from censorship to propaganda.

> Just imagine if during the Johnson or Nixon admins the gov/FBI/etc had actual "embeds" in the WaShPo/NYT, etc.

That’s pretty much what journalist Carl Bernstein claimed in 1977, followed much later by historian Hugh Wilford in 2008.

My understanding is that in those days the press and gov were on the same "page" but it was more like when airlines hike prices or lower prices in response to a competitor rather than having actual embeds offering their opinion on what was received facts and what was "misinformation". If Johnson or Nixon has had that level of access and influence, I doubt the VN war protests or Watergate complex scandal would have been as large as they were.

I’m inclined to mostly agree with you, but I think when it came to politically charged subjects there might have been some influence or attempts, particularly around left-wing issues, communism, labor unions, and civil rights topics.

Nixon had his famous Enemies List which was filled with journalists, and Nancy Reagan was in frequent communication with Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler about the criticism of her husband (then California governor) in the paper, as only two examples.

Sadly, many Western governments got “inspired” by the CCP, I agree. Though what happened in China was on a completely different level.

But I hope that in the coming years, western societies will investigate government actions during the Covid craze. That’s the advantage of Democratic societies, there is at least a chance that sh*t gets cleaned up.

i heard China called America a big dummy

> The people who are recognisable on social media posts from the protests have all been arrested by now. They waited just long enough to make people forget about it before they picked them up one by one.

Same deal as with that Bundy/Overpass standoff between militia types and the Feds a few years ago. The Feds showed up, saw the number of men with rifles, turned around and went home. Mission accomplished right? The militia guys all pat each other on the back and congratulate themselves on scaring off the feds. Except they then get quietly arrested one by one over the next few months. Those arrests never become big headline stories like the initial standoff, so you still have fools today who think those standoff tactics are viable.

I'm not into US politics so just a glance at Wikipedia. You compare anti-lock down protests with someone stealing land? Or was is it just comparing the way the police worked in general? I can't follow your argument.

> Or was is it just comparing the way the police worked in general?

This one. When the local odds aren't in their favor, they go home and arrest people later at their leisure.

Assuming that these armed people actually broke the law, that’s the better move then. Otherwise there would be a huge outbreak of violence. But that’s not really comparable to lawful protests.

I am comparing the law enforcement tactics, not the reasons for the protests. The protests themselves being incomparable is irrelevant.

I'd say it's the best, least violent and risky way of dealing with this.

The tool is good. Ensuring it's used for good reasons it's a separate problem.

But charges against Bundy were dropped, weren’t they?

And those arrests didn’t really amount to anything, did they?

So yes, I’d say mission accomplished.

Didn’t he even run for governor in his state?

I haven't followed the Bundy affair closely and it does seem Clive Bundy himself ultimately got off, but I'm mostly talking about all the other guys who were on the overpass that day pointing rifles at federal agents. From what I've read and heard, they were all IDed and arrested afterwards. Wikipedia says that besides Clive, 18 others were indicted for federal felonies allegedly perpetrated that day.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708693.

This is playbook of scumbag tyrants, doesn't matter if Putin, Erdogan or similar. I for sure hope EU politicians are taking a note too, there are 2 existential threats to democratic free Europe long term - Russia and Turkey. Both have same ambitions, are on completely opposite side of all crucial values free world holds dear.

Luckily their competence severely lags behind their ambitions, to think Turkey was for some time considered to join EU... I think Ataturk would be heavily depressed if he witnessed present day Turkey and its leaders.

You are underestimating the threat that CCP China is, not just to Europe but to the entire world.

China's exit, as happened 70-80 years ago, would cause us to have to work more. That might not be such a bad thing, though I doubt it will happen to the same degree. It's still fresh in everyone's mind.

No, you are just susceptible to "threat inflation". It's a very profitable industry in Washington.

One country misplaces a few weather balloons, another has hundreds of overseas military bases and bombs pipelines. Yet it's the former that is a "global threat", because the latter says so. Eye roll.

The former is also claiming that many territories it doesn’t hold are actually theirs and countries around the former are asking the latter to come help them defend in case of former’s attack.

Maybe if EU hadn't been so reluctant to let them in that would've put them on another path than the one they are going now.

Erdogan was in no rush either, his support was token at best until he could fly his true colors.

> This is playbook of scumbag tyrants, doesn't matter if Putin, Erdogan or similar.

I think you are being generous. The use of force is certainly a more extreme manifestation of the problem, but framing speech that you disagree with as "disinformation", "misinformation", "harmful", "hateful", "dangerous", "offensive", and so on is a technique used by petty tyrants and scumbag tyrants alike.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708693.

Reading the comments, I fully support return of Caliphate and saying hello to Europeans like old time. This will eventually looking more and more feasible.

Mastodon instances: Allow us to introduce ourselves...

technologies like mastodon have nothing to do with this, you idiot. please make your shitty suggestions in other posts.

I think the point is that if anyone of any significance was using Mastodon in this context like they are Twitter, they would just block that too.

So it's not as if Mastodon offers anything different/better in this case.

I think it's harder to block Mastodon because there are many instances. You can block the main ones, but people can still use smaller ones to access content from all Mastodon instances.

Twitter has one domain and probably a known IP range. Mastodon has (at least) hundreds of domains and IPs.

What about "tooting"? Can they "toot" still?

They could block big instances but have no chance of blocking smaller ones due the distributed nature. But the same goes for blogs, e-mails and other forms of information exchange. The problem is none of those have global audience like Twitter does, love it or hate it.

Are we avoiding "Turkiye" as an expression of anti-Erdogan politics? Is it ok to call Kinshasa the capital of Rhodesia?

You mean "Harare" ?

I meant Kinshasa, godamit.

I also cited the wrong capital, so I was wrong. But I meant what I said!!

I think the media is slow to catch up on this stuff, yeah.

The AP's article[1] on the Türkiye rename was datelined from "ANKARA, Turkey (AP)" :)

I don't know whether the delay is necessarily a matter of political preference or just general slowness in English-language media. The press does a good job of changing the names of sports arenas whenever the advertiser sponsorship causes a rename. This kind of inside-baseball use-of-names media stuff is something I used to see on Jim Romenesko's blog 20 years ago and it doesn't really have a good home now.

It can't be all politics; although the US government still prefers "Rangoon" and "Burma", most of the press writes "Yangon" and "Myanmar".

Think of it the same as the facebook --> meta situation.

There should be friction to rebranding.

Off-topic, but threads like this make me lose hope in the West. The vast bulk of upvoted comments are deranged InfoWars-style conspiracy theories about multiple foreign countries that are deemed acceptable to spew hatred about. On a supposedly intellectual forum. If HN rules were uniformly applied, this thread would be nuked from orbit, because it is full of uncurious bile. But, because it is popular, there isn't really anything HN will do about it.

Can't we have a mature conversation about the nuances of censorship during severe crises without resorting to blatant xenophobia?

Understandable. Turkey ruling elites protecting country from possible chaos and hysteria amplified by social media. Twitter is still US based company and if asked would not turn back on US national security interests. As history shows, US tactic is to destabilize countries and make them weak, there is no better tool than social media platform like Twitter. To use Twitter right now and to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster and try to destabilize the country, is probably the easiest and best intelligence serviceman from Washington can do. This is just theory.

I didn't realize that HN was included in Erdogan's bot army targets

I dare you to say something constructive instead of this 'bot' calling. Here is video to prove my theory [0]

[0] Prank with Former United States National Security Advisor John Bolton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Y5G5E6g8

people using social media is not 'chaos and hysteria'. there are rescue teams on the ground , reporters etc many of whom are using twitter and certainly blockign a communication medium , any medium , in an destroyed area with devastated infrastructure under severe cold is an evil that Allah won't forgive.

I dare you to go to Turkey and help people or go fight with US or you're just another Erdogan-lover-bot. This government came this point with "US style libertarian economical and social movement" rubbish discourse and people only got "some Islamic totalitarian pressure and meaningless developments about building industry" from them which why so many people lying under the rubble this cold February night.

I'm certain people dying under rubble feel so proud spreading the USIan propaganda, yeah. The traitors.

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