The UN Risks Normalizing Internet Censorship | Hacker News Reader

The UN Risks Normalizing Internet Censorship

wired.com

94 pointspantalaimon45 comments

"The United Nations’ main internet governance body will host its next international forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 2025, the UN may take its discussions on the future of an open internet to Russia."

The opening line reads like an Onion article.

Right? The same Saudi Arabia where they jail people for Twitter posts?

The same Saudi Arabia that beheads journalists.

Judging Saudi Arabia is not that simple. I highly recommend this long-form part-article, part-interview of MBS, from the Atlantic.

https://archive.ph/s6i5m

No, judging SA for dismembering a journalist is pretty fucking simple actually.

And how does the article discredit any criticism of Saudi Arabia's oppressiveness? Not only does it plainly state how badly free expression is crushed in the country, it also adds wonderful PR-friendly zingers like this about the country's de facto leader MBS:

"He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”

Yeah, sounds positively anarchic in its protections of free speech.

Then again the UN has a long history of tacitly and sometimes openly kowtowing to the "social needs" of its more repressive members, who routinely bribe and browbeat their way through the organization towards more anti-liberal influence than many of them have any right to claim on the world stage.

Just holding a conference like the one in this HN post in a country like the Kingdom is a grotesque joke

You can criticize MBS all you want. What I disagree with is criticism that fails to admit that the regime would very likely be even worse overall without MBS.

How do you weigh MBS's substantial social reforms against his retaliation for personal criticism? This isn't a simple trade either, since a more socially repressive regime would still retaliate against critics, just maybe not Khashoggi, or not in the same discoverable way.

I don't see MBS or his underlings assassinating Atlantic staff over that article. Do you?

Are you aware that India just assassinated an Indian national in Canada? It's causing a diplomatic spat, but I don't see mass outrage over Murmu akin to outrage over MBS.

Nothing has to ever make sense any more. Just last week at a major protest, people with “The LGBTQ community supports Palestine!” signs.

Too bad Palestine doesn't support the LGBTQ community...

Gay couples can't married in Israel either.

LOL comment of the week.

Yeah, while that is technically true [0], the difference of being gay in Israel vs gay in Palestine seem to be more about, you know, a life and death situation [1]:

> Gay Palestinians frequently seek refuge in Israel fearing for their lives, especially fearing death from members of their own families.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_State_of_Pa...

The thing they have in common is believing politicians that say that if said politicians can be given unlimited power, and can have every one of their crimes ignored, and are allowed to eliminate their political adversaries then they will solve all problems of LGBTQ, Palestinian, Jews, Israelis, and any other non white male minority you can think of through their exercise of that power. They are murky on the details except that they need more power. It's kind of a repeat of the 20th century if you ask me.

I think whether or not a population in general supports gay marriage has no bearing on the morality of ethnically cleansing them. Civilians being cut off from food, water, fuel, and electricity is not defensible. And trying to turn it into this transactional gotcha is really gross, coming from a queer person.

Various countries in Europe are doing the same thing [1,2,3]. Just recently, Britain has been threatening to jail people if they show support for the wrong organizations. Free speech is dead in the vast majority of the world. Casting shade on the "non-west" like Saudi Arabia as though they are alone in this guilt is ignorant at best.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42164853

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefar...

[3] https://jacobin.com/2022/09/queen-death-monarchy-censorship-...

[4] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign/uk-threate...

How about whatabouting while addressing the dismemberment of a journalist?

Sure. The United States commits extra judicial killings all the time, including of it's own citizens. They have tortured countless innocent people at various dark sites. There is absolutely nothing about the west which is morally superior. The fact that they try to hide these acts or justify them through sophistry makes the west even worse.

Remember a few years back when cops kept roughing up journalists at anti-brutality protests? There was that one guy who lost an eye to a rubber bullet.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences.

It's crucial to understand when to voice one's views both in a public and private setting.

Cool. If I was in the 1940s:

Me: “You shouldn’t kill Jews.”

Nazi: “Get on this train. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, you know.”

Yes, it does! Freedom of speech is specifically to prevent the government from retaliating against speech it doesn't like. The consequence of being thrown in jail for saying something the government doesn't like is not just.

you’re referring to tact or social acceptance

gp is referring to government policing of speech and legally punitive consequences

Between blatant authoritarian regimes wanting full access and control, the US data hoovering which is definitely greater than a decade old, and the EU trying to push through a measure to get around encryption for the purpose of finding CSAM, there will be no bastions of privacy or anonymity within the decade.

I understand the concern, but why we act like this sort of stuff isn't just at the worst case a strongly worded letter just everyone knows an UN General Assembly resolution is? What can the IGF or the ITO actually do?

> between censorship-minded countries and those who support an open internet

The problem is that there really aren’t countries who are pro speech and support an open internet. The countries are all just pro-speech that they support.

The irony is that speech restrictions are most likely to harm the common people that are advocating for them, over the long term.

If they are advocating for them because and while they are vulnerable, then it stands to reason that less vulnerable people will eventually dictate how the laws are applied.

The same officials who think that "whataboutism", aka the call to ignore unequal application of the law, is a positive argument are the same officials that want censorship. That isn't a coincidence, and the same resultant risk to the population is shared between the two strategies.

Is it bad that after reading the sub-title I thought they were talking about Canada?

Wired journalists also probably thought that homophobia was going to bring about the end of the world when Qatar hosted last year's World Cup.

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