Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
There is a set of skills that's needed to objectively classify information that's found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books). Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons.
The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.
What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic. People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so. In actuality, this is nonsense, given how many people manage to at least pass through high school, and how much time adults spend consuming entertainment. In their defense, it takes an inordinate amount of work to sift through the detritus that makes up at least 80% of prose on the internet; most articles simply can't get to the point, but I guess creative writing majors need something to do.
I truly think the best thing for the average person right now is to not take information-for-sale seriously. They are better off knowing less, not more. The idea that information has a linearly distributed benefit is a fallacy. The more information, the more vectors for pathological information.
I would have to just spend all my time learning, and I'd never get shit done
Maybe what these people are trying to say poorly is "Try to learn enough about a topic that you can pick an actual expert out, rather than a bullshit salesman", but after talking to enough of these 'rugged individualist', I think what they are mostly saying (silently) is "Get ready to screw me over because I am massively over confident in my abilities"
Maybe soon later we'll have an AI in place that would be checking whatever you're about to post/share and warn you, show you what you're posting from perspective you're not aware of etc.
Unfortunately the number of facts you’d need to retain to be an expert in hold to maturity securities, vaccines, the military capabilities of Ukraine, the intricacies of section 230, and Delaware corporate law and how it relates to broken acquisitions (just to name five examples of things that most people on this site think they know a lot about) would exhaust the most capable mind’s capacity.
Yep. Once you've tried to train yourself on too much data, your brain begins to hallucinate facts (more) similarly to an LLM. You'll be able to reject (most of?) these hallucinations, but you won't really have all the facts anymore.
I've tried to do this before and it doesn't end up with you being an expert in anything. It just ends up with you either being confused, or being confidently wrong. I hallucinate facts all the time.
Nobody has to learn everything, and 99.9% of information being sold is not actionable for the average person. There's a world of difference between treating experts as priests and considering what experts have to say while not blindingly believing them.
I'm saying that they neither need to know very much nor offload all their reasoning to someone else.
Plenty of experts speak inappropriately on topics outside their realm of expertise. The culture should encourage people to recognize when this happens and choose whether to dismiss the expert. A perfect example is many doctors, in particular M.D.s, who profess often foolish or obsolete views on things like nutrition, something which is not within the expertise of an M.D. The same goes for scientists commenting on politics, or science outside their domain of research. Or 20-something journalists making predictions about fields in which they've never actually practiced in. A significant amount of misinformation would be inoculated against with the recognition of misplaced authority and abuse of power.
It's called not being so gullible, and it doesn't take that much general knowledge that the average human brain can't grasp it. I'm sorry if it comes off as the expectation that individuals be the experts in many fields themselves, because if that's where our imagination keeps taking us, then maybe there really is no hope.
To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy.
The not-trusters seem most likely to fall for your wonderfully stated second idea, which I love,
> People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so.
The most vocal mainstream resistance seems extremely quick to accept & deeply believe alternate portrayals, ones that happen to fit the constructed narratives they want to believe. I think the mainstream actually does a much better job of having skeptical takes, but wow, our tolerance for the dreck demagoguery trash that people adopt has worn real thin.
Many of these "batshit crazy" folks appear to have been correct in hindsight.
Focusing on one area gives you a 'window on reality', but it's going to be limited, i.e. I really don't know what to think about all the culture war news, or general finance that's not specifically related to commodities and manufacturing, or anything in the 'true crime' world, or much in the way of electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. Still, knowing something reliable about how droughts and floods have affected rice production in China and why rice prices are rising makes me feel like I have at least some marginal grasp on what's going on in the real world.
Knowing more is better, but has particular risks...
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28
It has taken me years to become expert level in just the things I do, there is vast range of knowledge I have, and yet because of the knowledge I have, I know that I barely know shit.
>we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic.
This is what happens in the US because of our political system that loves turning everything in to L/R, Us/Them means of thinking.
Sadly, the author of Manufacturing Consent became a great illustration of that point.
[0] It feels a little wrong to say "fascinating" given the gruesome methods by which some choose to hold on to their control of information. It is nonetheless something which often captures my attention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias So many possibilities!
People will pay you - both directly and indirectly - to shift the opinions of others. That can be wildly profitable. People are reluctant to pay for access to informative and genuinely objective news and information, though.
It either gets treated as a public good that is nurtured with public money or strict rules (e.g. fairness doctrine) or the river of information gets filled up with toxic sludge that becomes fertile breeding ground even for flat earth conspiracies.
Make no mistake, there are strong and concerted efforts by very powerful organizations to control what the masses see. And you will see some dissent even within places like the NY Times, but there are real bounds to expressible thought (all the news that's fit to print). Others have covered this ground for decades a lot better than myself.
I don't think all journalists deliberately serve some agenda, but it's very easy to find instances of reputable medias being incorrect or extremely biased. It's not that they should never be trusted, but it's important to remain critical even with reputable new sources.
Nearly $800 million settlement over the lies they pushed about election fraud and nary a peep on their own network about their misdeeds.
I think alot of people watch Fox because its currently the only news channel that provides coverage of poor Democrat behaviour. That doesnt mean they agree with everything that is said.
Not sure why we're even talking about them in the context of OP which is more around "town billboard" news accumulators like social media.
Maybe someone should have gone after the politicians and media and filmmakers that claimed Diebold stole the Ohio election for Bush and this could have been nipped in the bud.
>The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
― Noam Chomsky
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
How about this deluge of conspiracy claims?
Quite the pivot for Sarah McLaughlin :P
For national security reasons, you can't look at the evidence.
If we can't look at the evidence, then it's probably highly distorted. Especially if it's for 'national security' reasons -- the ultimate 'ends justify the means' context. No matter what nation we are talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
If no one is talking about gerrymandering, why have some states implemented independent redistricting?
https://redistricting.lls.edu/national-overview/?colorby=Ins...
It was one political party which proposed and supported the Freedom to Vote Act and the For the People Act which would have made political gerrymandering illegal across the country and increased access to voting and exactly one of our parties who stood against it. I know people like to pretend they are above politics and will "both sides" everything to death. But all you have to do is look at what is being proposed and who is supporting what with their votes to see past that FUD.
They tend to be more fine with this sort of thing if the fix isn't on the cards politically.
E.g. you will see some nuclear attacks on the idea of raising the minimum wage from the media when it is being debated in Congress, while that same media will often fawn over political pipe dreams like basic income.
The Russian bots will pull this trick where they set up, e.g. a facebook page for "proud Texan cowboy dads" and then funnel innocuous stuff they will agree with 99% of the time and then 1% of the time push stuff that really matters to them ("why are we sending yet more money to Ukraine when proud Texans at home are suffering!").
This isn't controversial to state. I think it's clear that they do this - what is controversial to state is that this is exactly what the rest of the "legitimate" media does exactly the same thing on behalf of the oligarchy who own it.
What's important is identifying what is important to you, and understanding all of the factors and facts related primarily to that, and a few of the ones related secondarily to that. Then you can spot check some of these other factors and facts to determine their accuracy and validity.
What we need is some kind of automated process for ensuring that the knowledge that the machine poops out is of the highest possible quality. Something that checks it every step of the way, from observation to cheeseburger.
Your story of zombies, elitism, and government conspiracy is intriguing.
I will also agree that propaganda is a thing.
BUT…
The real culprit is the HUMAN BRAIN.
1. Strong information and media literacy are correlated primarily to psychological well-being.
2. The work of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Zak, and countless experts in behavioral economics, media literacy, and psychology have done studies demonstrating how the brain makes cognition error regardless of a persons education or socioeconomic status when handling various types of input.
3. People’s reasoning abilities are deficient with respect to the laws of logic and probability which obviously impacts their ability to be information or media literate.
4. It’s not a problem that has an obvious financial benefit to the organization or person who solves it by providing training or engineering a pill for it.
SOURCES:
- https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.5846...
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282480/
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096100062211420...
- https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_stories_ch...
> "People’s reasoning abilities are deficient with respect to the laws of logic and probability which obviously impacts their ability to be information or media literate."
My whole point, which most responses have ignored, is that the skills needed to test media claims for veracity are learnable, trainable, understandable, etc. I mean, not a single comment has addressed the notion of internal self-consistency, which in mathematical terms is called, 'contradiction'. A person who claims it's okay for them to steal from their neighbor, but not for their neighbor to steal from them, can safely be laughed out of the room.
The method is simply this: for half a year, every week, go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
Do this solidly 25 times and you will begin to see the outlines of exactly the set of skills that you need to objectively classify information that’s found on the Internet. This is a simple and highly effective training technique that uses the mass variety of news sites on the Internet for an educational purpose. Once you begin to see and compare the narratives underlying most “news”, they will be impossible to un-see
The problem with this is, if the three publishers have been funded by the same pharmaceutical company, NGO, or intelligence agency, they are likely to produce nearly-identical stories on $PARTICULAR_ISSUE.
Not doable, because you require at least an IQ of 110 to see through the lies. Half of the population has a below average IQ, the number is significantly larger if one way to consider an IQ 110 to be the threshold and this means they are always gullible and susceptible to the propaganda of the government.
While I agree with you, I don't think challenging this is wise.
A large number of people lack the fundamental intellect required for critical thinking. Give them a nugget of truth (or even a total falsehood) and they will extrapolate it to the point of an entire ideology (QAnon)...because they're smarter than the rest of us idiots, see. They have critical thinking skills!
Thanks to the internet anybody can appoint themselves a source of truth, which just results in chaos. A mentally-ill loudmouth can turn entire segments of the country against itself (and I'm not even taking potshots at anybody in particular). Fewer sources of information is better domestic policy for the masses.
Let the critical thinkers seek out third-party sources to do their own verification. Let the masses eat from a common trough so they don't cause a stampede.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Right now ELon Musk is applying dangerously dictatorial tactics in turning Twitter from a free service into a paid service.. Years after the entire world has become invested into it as a new and communication tool... Many will say it's his right to do whatever he wants, but those are the same people too short sighted to understand how Nestle controls water in foreign countries... We are all plagued by that short sightedness and greed, while there are far better answers to things like this while still operating in a capitalistic system.
We all give far too much credit to the authoritarian elitist crowd. If you are born into so much money that you can fail multiple times and simply rebuild, you're NOT a genius. We need to stop deluding everyone with this supremacy narrative, because it's just fueling monopolies and inequality and destroying opportunity in our world.
Just being aware about how news is being manipulated, and scanning multiple sources to determine truth isn't enough... We need to place proper expectations on government to reign in companies and tax the wealthy properly, while also reducing lower and middle class tax rates, otherwise, this is all a new version of covert mental control and opportunistic indentured labor. Get rid of "bosses" that ideal is far too outdated for progress, Not even the president is properly respected by congress anyway, so we need to update our business models to a more democratic leadership ecosystem.
Copyright, patents, LLCs, publicly-traded companies, etc., all nominally exist to benefit society at large. They're not supposed to be this game of "I called shotgun so suck it!"
What the poster is proposing about cracking down on large powerful companies isn't even particularly troublesome Constitutionally in the US; but even then, as with any other sort of regulations, Constitutional restrictions on what the legitimate government can and can't do can be taken too far, or can get outdated.
Since I have you, what do you consider communism?
Don't you see that's the way to eliminate the power of the bots, which influence you by legitimizing tweets by the thousands.
It's still free to join, but only paid users get influence.
That's the sales line.
The reality is that "verification" now means nothing more than you have an email and a credit/debit with a limit more than $8, and you can claim to be anyone you want.
Within hours, scores of fake "official" govt accounts are up [0]. If you don't think that is somehow beneficial to scammers and disruptive bots, I'd like to talk to you about some great oceanfront property in Kansas!
There is also the Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum account being unverified while the account of a prominent Nazi propagandist is [1].
The result is that anyone running a bot/troll account can put up any face they want and purchase amplified reach (not merely speech) for $8/month - an astonishing deal
Beyond effectively destroying the value of the Blue Check verification status to convey validation, it has now turned into a badge of shame that no serious person wants. Musk already knows this, and is trying to counteract it by leaving legacy valuable badges on certain celebrities, such as Stephen King, who explicitly denies paying [2]
The Blue Check has become a toxic symbol, and this is reflected in new terms o service [3], where you cannot turn it off, even by cancelling the subscription.
The economic reality is that Twitter's core value proposition was the presence of verified and active govt accounts, news accounts, and celebrity accounts. It was their content that people came to see and interact.
By allowing anyone to pay a small fee to impersonate anyone, Musk has made verification worthless and even toxic.
It literally renders nearly worthless the very thing Musk wants people to pay for.
And, beyond doing nothing to suppress bots, this enables them as never before.
Masterful strategy there... (/s)
[0] https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1649146273121857554
[1] https://twitter.com/EladNehorai/status/1649262025296744450
[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1649181726395052039
[3] https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1649449653098668032
Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban!
Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves.
If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves.
An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service.
Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world.
Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.
I mean, it seems like China does a pretty good (not perfect) job of censoring things. Not too long ago[1] Cisco (IIRC) and other companies were taking heat because they were providing China with tools that could be used for the "Great Firewall." Now we want to make it self-service...
The kick in the teeth about letting other countries censor / require censorship by U.S.-based companies is that we have been told over and over again that free trade and globalism was going to lead to a freer society.
Basically - full steam ahead on capitalism and trading with oppressive regimes, we'll have a good influence on them and wear down censorship, etc.
The opposite has happened. U.S.-based companies have become reliant on trade with those regimes to the point that they'll generally bow to censorship instead of pushing human rights.
(I'm very well aware that "American culture standards" are deeply imperfect, particularly as implemented by Facebook, et al. I'm not in favor of bowing to the most puritanical and hypocritical forces in the U.S., either...)
One of the purposes of government is to oversee the distribution of scarce resources in a way that avoids the tragedy of the commons.
This use case clearly applies to the EM spectrum allocation and clearly doesn't apply to the internet so I think comparing the internet and radio is a flawed analogy.
Not that it's the users' fault—it's that these platforms have structured themselves that way.
As for the concern about disinformation, ignore the content and watch the action. If some guy in the hills of Arkansas wants to think "them dems are lizard people" but doesn't show any signs of taking action, who cares (rhetorical)? If they show signs of action, follow the usual path of legal recourse/escalate to the proper authority.
Or even without AI tools. All this stuff is a complete non-issue on my extended-friend-group WhatsApps and my family text message threads. It was never a problem when I ran a private forum for people I knew, years and years ago. Mixing private communication with people you know with a global broadcast system seems to be what causes the problem to exist in the first place. Ordinary actual-humans-you-know communication channels don't need some 3rd-party censor, and for the most part don't even call for end-user-tunable censorship tools, beyond being able to leave & form groups or maybe set images to click/tap-to-view or something. Nothing sophisticated, certainly.
It turns out even 4channers largely don't want to see some categories of shitty things.
If they allowed so much sexual assault material to continue to be shared on their platform they would inevitably run into trouble.
By what law? Because that law does violate the first amendment, and that can be addressed when it becomes an issue.
Until they attack you with the law. You'll quickly find out that ignoring judges leads to bad outcomes.
Now, whatever they say could be total bullshit, and you could defend yourself and get paid damages, but not defending yourself at all is how you end up in deep debt or prison.
As an aside, I don't know if there's any US law against showing adult nudity on a website. Maybe there's a rule about users being over 18.
Indeed there's no laws in the US that protect violent images whole covering the body, but that is the cultural standard which has been exported around the world.
I get that you're making a point that, why give control abroad to governments when I'm the US companies self censor?
First, what goes into the hands of companies versus the state also various culturally, and the US does have content laws other than the one you highlighted.
I'm not sure about the violent images. There are definitely rules against showing bodily harm on FB, but I have no idea where the line is.
Notice that your comment equates nudity with pornography. Where I'm from it's not normal to do that.
If there's a social media site in some other country that doesn't have those rules, that'd be a good example.
And they know that language because otherwise they wouldn't be in government.
So the US wants Tiktok to change and uses the language that will resonate with Americans to ban it when Tiktok doesn't fold.
China does the same with the companies it wants to change. That they listen is purely a financial decision.
This is true for all government systems, the more you dig into it, they are all just different flavours of a system of control, less Perl vs Python more PHP7.3 vs PHP7.4
Censorship/cancel culture is bad but it’s nowhere near what dictators do
Many doubtlessly think this was good, because a physical disability shouldn't reflect poorly on his leadership abilities. But there is no guarantee that such collective blindness will always be done in the 'good' way, whatever that is.
I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position. Different matter of course if official transcriptions were altered by unauthorised parties
Can't you see how this "officially endorsed position" editing would be a dangerous thing? Transcripts should be an exact representation of what occurred.
Behind language and technical barriers you can create pretty divergent versions of yourselfs.
"How did you spend the Spring Festival this year? Check out the bunnies' suggestions! [Lighting emoji], [music emoji], [microphone emoji] #tesla#新春party开来[call]
#特别亲过年# , New Year’s "rabbit" music [rabbit emoji] Tesla is willing to drive through every happy journey with you, bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, full of electricity for four seasons
[Gift emoji ]Follow @ Tesla also brought the topic word #特别亲过年# forward this post on Weibo to post your "special" New Year moments, and draw 2 fans to send"
Loads fine for me without VPN.
What is worse? Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?
Statements like "free speech must be absolute" are basically zero content because they don't engage with the nuance of the debate, but they sure sound good.
It also means scrutinising things like copyright and questioning whether they are a net value to society. These policies have since forever been driven by corporations to serve their own interests. There's good arguments to be made that their concerns about loss in revenue are largely overblown. You can implement policies that restrict monetisation of copyright content without putting restrictions on what individuals can express.
Of course these are fairly naive ideas, and there are likely many more problems we haven't touched here, but the point is that there are options. It is worth thinking about them because the alternative as we see doesn't seem to be working out. There's a trend around the world where countries are moving more and more towards authoritarianism. At the same time, the wealth gap is ever increasing and I don't think these two are unrelated. I think the common people are getting an overall raw deal on this planet and really need to think through what policies will benefit them most.
Anyone who's had a conversation with someone who was relentlessly bullied should know this is how you increase suicide rates and/or mass shootings.
These are perspectives that you, personally, are comfortable with. I, however, am not. It would be unfair to advocate that myself, and many others, are subjected to what can be considered a living hell.
No, it's why, in a lot of cases, free speech doesn't really work the way you think it works. Private interests have all kinds of ways to influence speech that don't require the threat of violence.
Powerful people can do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability under free speech absolutism. Fox News just paid a large sum because they harmed a company's business with (repeated and knowingly false) speech.
We don't even need absolutism to see zero culpability. I personally believe my representative shares blame in the deaths during the January 6th riot, because he disgustingly egged on the "stop the steal" movement. Despite that, he won't be charged with anything because of freedom of speech. I'm not okay with this specific result, but I do accept it because the alternative is a frightening world (people are convicted for kicking off a chain of dangerous events because "We just know" they understood the consequences).
Everything, including speech, is used by powerful people to benefit themselves at your expense.
Absolutely not.
> What is worse? Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?
Was this meant to be sarcasm?
How about a third option: no space for hate and lies and also no dictators.
Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while. Hollywood, especially Disney, otherwise censors itself to be able to show movies.
This is a very bad mischaracterization of what happened: North Korea blackmailed Sony over The Interview, threatening retaliation. Sony didn't censor themselves to make headway into the North Korean market.
If I provide services to a dictator because the dictator is giving me a boatload of money, that makes me a bad person. If I provide services to a dictator because the dictator says they'll kill my family otherwise, that makes me a victim.
So it's definitely not every platform
Source?
> In June 2014, the North Korean government threatened action against the United States if Sony released the film. As a result, Sony delayed the release from October to December and reportedly re-edited the film to make it more acceptable to North Korea. In November, the computer systems of Sony were hacked by the "Guardians of Peace", a North Korean cybercrime group. The group also threatened terrorist attacks against theaters showing the film. This led to major theater chains opting not to release the film, and Sony instead releasing it for online digital rental and purchase on December 25, 2014, followed by a limited release at selected theaters the next day.
"Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness" was banned in a few Mideast countries because in a brief scene that has a character from a different universe showing how she ended up traveling between universes she is seen with two women and refers to them as her two moms.
"Onward" was banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia because a female cyclops minor character mentions her girlfriend.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/us-charges-russians...
Someone being charged with a crime is a completely different thing to someone "being labeled" and trying to downplay the severity of the former to try and extend it to this hypothetical is telling.
To uphold liberal democratic values is to support the free speech that makes these attacks possible. The old 20th century style of propaganda was mostly ineffectual. The modern tactic of flooding public discourse with bullshit is much more effective. At some point people concede that maybe the shills and useful idiots working for the dictators do raise some valid points, so who knows what to believe.
E.g. Elliekelly's comment had all the classic earmarks of russian disinformation campaigns, said an unnamed expert familiar with the matter.
It's rather hard for the government to make these charges stick, which is why there are so few prosecutions for this. So if someone's formally charged, they done goofed. Presumption of innocence aside, the government isn't going to move on this case unless there's compelling evidence it happened.
(4) Foreign election interference
The term “foreign election interference” means conduct by a foreign person that—
(A)
(i) violates Federal criminal, voting rights, or campaign finance law; or
(ii) is performed by any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of, or in coordination with, a foreign government or criminal enterprise; and
(B) includes any covert, fraudulent, deceptive, or unlawful act or attempted act, or knowing use of information acquired by theft, undertaken with the specific intent to significantly influence voters, undermine public confidence in election processes or institutions, or influence, undermine confidence in, or alter the result or reported result of, a general or primary Federal, State, or local election or caucus, including—
(i) the campaign of a candidate; or
(ii) a ballot measure, including an amendment, a bond issue, an initiative, a recall, a referral, or a referendum.
I think the disconnect is that some orgs that people might think work on behalf of a foreign govt aren't registered as such because they don't receive funding from there, like AIPAC. This has been a contentious topic.
Secondly, the article is saying that tech companies are starting to censor speech in the USA that dictators in China or authoritarian leaders in India don't like.
It is positing a slippery slope where you may one day soon be banned from Twitter globally for posting an image of Winnie the Pooh, which would be done in order for Twitter to gain and maintain access to the Chinese market.
Yes, but the first amendment _does_ bear on whether or not a private company can or can't be compelled by the state to censor speech, which is what OP was referring to.
Doing 3 minutes of research on this topic lead me to the Indian posters page, in which he doesn't even remember the context of his tweet and has reposted the screenshot. He has dozens of tweets discussing censorship, they're all up and available.
Tbh this just sounds like incompetence rather than malevolence, which considering Musk's bungling overhaul of Twitter shouldn't surprise anyone.
Perhaps such incompetence will be corrected. But it is definitely worrying that Twitter has continued to keep the content blocked even after multiple news articles brought it to public attention. To me that takes it from "whoopsy daisy we made a mistake" to "we do not intend to/are not capable of correcting this mistake." One can apply the principle of charity too liberally.
Rival nations with totalitarian governments are now exercising control over US media to cover up terrible human rights abuses and influence US politics...and your only feeling on the subject is "meh not illegal"?
Foreign propaganda is an existential threat to a democracy, we can't look the other way as us media giants cede control to other nations.
I DO think we need legislation stop this censorship from affecting Americans though, because that's a tradeoff not worth making. And companies have a very clear profit motive in these cases to comply.
It is not about the ability of people in China to use their tech that is more important than our ability to to generate satire — it's Holz' ability to make money.
And if he thinks that some people's ability to use it at all is more important than all user's ability to use it freely (without CCP's blessing on every pixel), I'd suggest he needs to rethink freedom vs authoritarianism.
Fork that.
Virtually all of the rights we learn about in grade school are suspended in the workplace. And while employees do have the ability to quit, they a.) still have to find some other dictator to work for and b.) are much more heavily impacted by a loss of income than the employer is the individual loss of skill.
So the dictators we work for day in and day out are aligned with other dictators. You aren't entitled to free speech in your office, so why would you expect to the people running your office to care about your free speech after hours?
edit: I'm still surprised that people are incapable of question the ideology that shapes your worldview. The very concept that "well you're working for someone else so the of course suspension of liberties is okay" is doctrine that you have been lead to believe since birth precisely because it benefits those people in power.
In the west typically 2/3 of your day is free, as are weekends (and I see plenty of people commenting during work hours too).
I am a worker myself, but maybe because I have a past in actual physical labour I realize how much of a brat I have become now, being able to walk around, grab coffee, chat, stare mindlessly out the windows and browse HN while being paid handsomely to create software.
It's very good to remember how lucky most of us are, and how unusual our circumstances are.
And even back then I was lucky.
It makes sense. We evolved to be laboring outside, staying in shape with physical work, keeping our bodies active, constantly moving, sleeping with the sun versus an alarm clock. Even elders in tribes that still practice traditional hunting are remarkably active compared to elders in the west. We didn't evolve to be troglodytes, unmoving in an artificial cave for 95% of the day, but ironically these are the types of work our society disproportionately rewards.
Virtually none of them are suspended in the workplace. When you're at work, though, you are on someone else's private property and so some of your rights are constrained (just as some of the rights of people visiting your home are constrained while they're there). This is because there are competing rights involved, and it's logically impossible for everyone to retain their full sets of rights in those circumstances.
But, as you say, if the restrictions on your freedom are more greater than you can tolerate, you can quit. If no workplace gives you the amount of latitude you need, then you can work for yourself.
But, at the core, we live in a society with other people, and that inherently comes with certain restraints on behavior.
/s
Guess which country is super sensitive about porn? It's not China. It's not anywhere in Europe...
>It's not China.
>Any kind of sexually graphic content has long been illegal in China, whether it’s visual or literary.[0]
[0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3092512/china...
>It's not anywhere in Europe...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/a-uk-wide-internet-porn-ban-...
https://cybernews.com/editorial/anti-porn-laws-in-europe-bri...
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/france-to-fin...
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-business-europe-ger...
If China or Russia would replace America, you will be mining uranium in a gulag / re-education camp, counting days until you'll be dead, comrade.
You choose.
The most you can say is people prioritize truths differently. What you ate this morning matters very little to anyone but yourself.
EDIT: I see you edited your comment about 'universal truth' after I answered it. I love the irony. Hail to the internet.
In case anyone wonders, I believe (heh) the comment read simply "I disagree there is no universal truth."
A list of previous baseball games listing just dates and teams isn’t particularly interesting even if it’s absolute truth. Meanwhile a less accurate list of future games with teams and dates is something people might actually care about.
What does that even mean? What's "true" about that? It's agreed that it's true, therefore it's true.
"The New China syndrome: How Beijing shakes down foreign businesses"
https://archive.harpers.org/2015/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2015...
The article focuses on the idea of indirect lobbying: namely, China pressuring U.S. businesses to lobby in favor of China's interests, or risk losing the privilege of doing business in China. (Length: 6 pages)
Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least.
RT (Russia) and the so-far-left-they-went-hard-right crowd (Taibbi, etc.), PressTV (Iran), etc.
And they label 'government-funded' channels but not 'corporate-funded' channels, even when those corporations are bigger than governments.
Corporations "set the conditions within which the U.S. government operates, and control it to a large extent" -- but are kind of seen as not important actors -- they're made invisible.
https://www.accountancydaily.co/corporations-dominate-worlds...
Global corporations are increasingly wealthier than many countries, with Walmart, Apple and Shell richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden, according to research by the campaigning group Global Justice Now, which found that 69 of the world’s top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015
No they didn't, they stopped actively promoting them. Not the same thing.
Are you online demanding VK and other Russian social media give equal reach to MSNBC and CNN? If you're not, you should.
Regarding VK and Russian social media, I'm a US-American, so i'm mostly concerned with what US companies do -- because they're much more destructive, and I can do a lot more about them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKG8S7K0wM
...The message:
Video unavailable
This video is unavailable with Restricted Mode enabled. To view this video, you will need to disable Restricted Mode.Even editorially independent media is invariably heavily biased one way or another.
Given the way people consume news you can be bias through the use of a subtly misleading but otherwise accurate headline, or a boring headline, or just not have it as a leader or bulletin.
There is so much News these days that you could report on everything absolutely fairly and still have a strong bias just because of what you decide is worth showing people more often.
Left - https://www.allsides.com/news-source/daily-beast-media-bias
Skews Left - https://adfontesmedia.com/daily-beast-bias-reliability/
Very Liberal - https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-daily-beast-bias-rating/
... but the services that we'd expect to be mature enough to support those levels of nuance are starting to fall over on their asses, and that's concerning. Midjourney's a bit of an outlier (and, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but given Hotz's attitude on the topic I think it'd be worth it to follow the money on them). But Twitter, in particular, has seen a massive backslide. I always thought their ultimate goal was untenable (one flat, mass public forum is probably not a viable model for human interaction), but under Musk's dictat it has utterly imploded.
It's delicious when it does. Watch people backpedal! See them do linguistic backflips! Now try to put the tiger back into the cage! It's always the same sad circus when power shifts and suddenly what was okay to do to "those bad guys" is fearsome and troubling when it happens to them.
This is why non-profit entities and decentralization are important.
You can't have it both ways.
One way of getting around this crap epistemology (to a degree) is science, of course. But who has the time for that?
Also, think it's important to note that the CCP is not China. Many Chinese citizens don't like the CCP but are powerless to resist.
- Richard Gere got canceled for speaking out against China's human rights abuses to the Tibetans at the Academy Awards in 1993 [1];
- The Neil Armonstrong biopic "First Man" didn't have a scene of planting the American flag [2];
- These are examples of a long history of Hollywood bowing to Chinese pressure and interests [3]. Modifying a movie for the Chinese market is one thing. Modifying the global release of a movie to keep China happy is something else.
Now look at the mainstream media just this year. Some examples of stories that got zero or significantly delayed coverage include:
- The train derailment and environmental disaster at East Palestine, Ohio. For a good week you wouldn't even know this was happening if you weren't on Tiktok. Consider the irony of that situation;
- The massive French strikes and protests got almost no play in US media;
Now consider the bias in media coverage:
- Western media in general is unforgivably biased when it comes to Israel [4]. A common technique is deliberate use of active vs passive voice [5]. Example: Shireen Abu-Akleh was "killed" [6]. A more accurate headline would've been "Middle Eastern and American citizen journalist assassinated by Israeli sniper while wearing a blue press helmet and vest".
- Media coverage is unbelievably biased towards the police in cases of brutality and death at the hands of police. Guests on TV will often be former or current police. What about civil rights lawyers or victims rights advocates?
Remember this when the media writes stories about the bias in tech companies. While there might be truth to that, never forget that the media too is incredibly biased.
[1]: https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/04/11/how-hollywood-destroyed...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/06/if-anyone-can-m...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-mo...
[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem...
[5]: https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-media-bias-serves-israel...
The modern extent of government power and private influence would be unthinkable even decades ago. Personal rights have failed to keep up, in part because it requires constitutional or legislative action that's basically impossible because of politics or jurisdiction (international).
As a practical result, we can't really absolve ourselves of responsibility by saying that it's legal, or that it's for another country to decide, or that it's necessary to gain access to a market.
No one doubts that IBM/ACM was morally culpable for providing systems they knew would be used for "organizing" undesirables by the Nazi's. It's much less clear whether doing devops at twitter helps or hurts Modi, or if that's a bad thing.
But it helps to have some smell tests. Mine are:
- Everyone worldwide should be treated with the same respect - American or not.
- It's better for speech and commerce to be free, when it's aiming for true understanding and mutual benefit.
- Every technology should be openly assessed for who it benefits or harms, who decides its use, whether it can be safely managed, and whether it corrupts or improves those it affects.
Analytically, the notion of commercial franchise is quite helpful: twitter has the franchise for a current event stream, Modi has a franchise over legislation in India, etc. All tech companies build their own franchise (with moats, etc.), and may coordinate in mutually-reinforcing teams. Franchises are not only bargaining power but also a whole ecosystem self-organizes around them. The stronger and more relevant the franchise, the bigger the payday, and the more enticing it is to take over. That creates very strong incentives to hold your nose (and be used as a tool), or to steer well clear (and be, well, irrelevant).
I salute those who struggle with these difficult questions.
Every time he talks about valuing truth and free speech, he is lying.
This is nothing new.
Tough shit. China will just have to grow up.
> He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”
No, it isn't.
Turns out that they grew up and they don't really care about the same values that we do.
Tough shit, indeed.
The point is that because of economics we keep letting their conservative close minded views dictate what happens in the Western Democratic world. These conservative authoritarian approaches should have no quarter here, go against the values & rights the creators & owners of these sites arose from & should be supporting.
It's a sad development & China should be the one having to eat tough shit.
Economics is all that matters in this world. It feels even silly to have to spell it out when we are on a website funded by the pinnacle of capitalism, where money overrides principles day and night.
China will not have to eat any tough shit while the economics is on their side.
And before you object, I ask you to consider the device you are using to reply to me. I know where mine came from.
I doubt it, the sources of materials and stages of manufacturing for most advanced electronics are spread all over the world. I know my motherboard was made in Taiwan, my processor from Malaysia/Germany, but that's just the start.
The poster did not seem to mean "grow taller".
Edit: now that was an ambiguous use of '«they»'. For <State>, hence "rule", one would have used 'it'. But 'they' suggests at least the possibility of plural, hence "the people". And that the people share the same view of the rule is not a given.
If they had a choice, the party would hang in rank and file from the street laternposts.
That was also a stupid idea.
Why would that be relevant? "Apt for survival" does not imply "with good principles".
Second, this isn't laws of the land. It's the internet, the unplace where different places can meet & connect. Your suggestion proposes that it's the pro-speech folk forcing themselves upon the world. Not so. What's actually happening in this story is the small authoritarian lowest-common-denominators of the world are imposing their views on all interconnectivity, on everyone else. They are constraining everyone else.
And tech bosses keep letting it happen, keep letting ourselves be bullied. And the governments of open societies are not stepping up to illuminate & push these issues as the threats to open society that they are.
Two absurd inconsistencies. Human rights are amazing. The suppression of humanity is dreadful. That's the "tribe" you are defending.
EG Danish cartooons of religious figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...
For that matter, in the era of nearlight communication around the planet, how important even are things like "island" anymore, and how is "tribe" defined?
And made better through centuries of hard work and sacrifice. It's what it takes.
It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. We Westerners have a philosophical concept inherited from our ancestors that describes that attitude: "hubris."
edit: If we're comparing china, i'm not sure you want to use length of time the society was built as a metric demonstrating chinese inferiority lol
a place with 1/3rd of the population has a hard on for one specific theoretical form of expression that they don't even use that much? easy ignore.
Midjourney also retrains from all prompts free or paid, making it easier to get better results from simpler prompts. Access to that population of human nodes is definitely more important than placating some ideological position of a smaller group.
Pretty funny reading the differences between this thread and the one from yesterday where Canada fined Google for not censoring information. In that one, people were all "Tough shit, Google has to follow the laws of countries they serve in! Not everyone is American, stupid Americans!"
Turns out, countries will have laws you disapprove of too!
I think it's past time we decide on an Internet Bill of Rights so that we can fight against any type of unreasonable censorship.
Eliminate all stress from your job: the moment I've decided to leave a job, even if I haven't found the next one yet, I feel any stress dissipate almost immediately. Knowing that something unpleasant can end and that I'm going to take steps to end it is a relief.
Get paid the same. Extend your benefits for longer. Vest more stock. Get your bonus: you can achieve all of these things by simply waiting to give notice. Wait until after you've vested to the amount you want. Wait until after you've received your bonus. And obviously you get paid the same regardless of when you give notice so this is a weird benefit to cite.
Take unused vacation time: I've always taken a bunch of vacation before giving notice. Arguably that's less offensive than telling everyone, "hey my last day is in eight weeks and for a quarter of that time I'll be on vacation."
I'm sure there are companies that will wait several months for a new hire to start because they want a long petering out period with their current gig but I've never worked anywhere that would allow that for anyone other than executive or very, very high level engineer. This also seems risky because what if something happens to that job in the two to three months notice you gave?
If this had been posted three weeks ago I would have thought it was an April Fools joke.