An illustrated guide to post-Orwellian censorship (2021)
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”[2]
> Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
[…]
> The experimental psychology literature tells us that first impressions are very resilient: An individual is more likely to accept the first information received on a topic and then favor this information when faced with conflicting messages.[13] Furthermore, repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance:
More generally, I think the Internet is unusually useful for this kind of attack. The netheads that built it had a very specific political view - namely, that censorship is network interference with a political motive. "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it", and all that. Ergo, all we have to do to have free speech is build better networks.
Censorship by free speech - i.e. flooding / sporgery / etc - is the "GPL judo move" of dictators. You want unimpeded network traffic? Heheh, sure. Fine. We can have 'free speech'. Free speech for me and my twenty billion alts all saying the same thing, too!
Doesn't matter, though. This isn't an attack that can be solved with moderators, because the attack is not the content of the message. It's who's sending it. Our Russian dictators assume thousands if not millions of identities in order to spam the world - you as a moderator only see a randomly-generated humanoid and an unusually common sentiment. Yes, you could just ban the sentiment, but now you're accidentally censoring legitimate speech by unrelated parties.
Ironic?
Worse, when the GP comment eventually gets upvoted (as happened above), replies like this one become dangling references to a situation that no longer exists. HN threads have no GC!
Russia now has fewer external channels than it did in 2016 (your link) and 2021 (posted link). It's more coercive internally and a more coercive (but reasonably rational) regime needs more consistent internal messaging so that people know where the line of trouble is - defining the limits of public behaviour and expression becomes a more important part of the propaganda. There's still 'flooding' but it isn't sufficient.
https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMcBethProgramming talks about this on a number of his videos.
I remember an informative presentation about Russian history and culture which seems to go along with this, in particular the bit about "two words for the truth and three for the lie".
https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=2257 (time-stamped at the relevant portion but the whole talk is good)
EDIT. I watched the video a bit more and I could not take it seriously after seeing the part about "technological backwardness" that apparently always was there. That's just charged propaganda and there is nothing to discuss.
What exactly are you implying?
Knowing when to quit—it’s a lesson for everyone, of course. Knowing that when you take a gamble you could lose it all.
It's funny to see a russian sockpuppet under an article about propaganda.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PS: https://twitter.com/CatSmarterThanU/status/16631726141167616...
Can’t say I know any Poles irl but that certainly matches the impression one gets on-line.
- that's right/true/сorrect
- that's wrong/false/incorrect
Does this imply anything? The synonyms he talks about are very similar e.g. a noun from "right" and a noun from "true".
If that's the case, I see where you're coming from. I was interpreting the meaning as similar to differences between "lie" and "bullshit" and "gaslight" in English. They all mean roughly "an untrue statement" but they still have their own nuances; "bullshitting" and "gaslighting" are just specific ways of "speaking untruths".
> Does this imply anything?
This does not imply to me that people who understand these words are bad or evil or anything like that. It suggests, instead, that they're used to being lied to in subtle ways such that they've developed tools for discussing these lies amongst each other in their native language. Similar to how citizens of English-speaking nations use words like "bullshit" and "gaslight".
[1]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Animal farm is a critic of any kind of totalitarian government AND a critic of capitalism itself. The book literally ends with:
>Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
E.g., the user posts a trivially true thing and the LLM starts to reply with falsehoods, half-truths, concern trolling, etc. If the user can keep the truth above some percentage of the posts (or get the truth to bubble up to top comment) then they win that level.
Maybe even different levels like Space Invaders so the LLM speeds up with each level, perhaps even adding more sock puppets each level.
Would definitely be instructive. If done right it should also have an effect on the way the user consequently reads and assesses content on HN, Reddit, etc. :)
The government is prohibited by the First Amendment from censoring.
However, due to the centralization of the Internet, most communication passes through just a few gatekeepers.
Congress holds hearing decrying content that they do not have the right to officially censor, but nevertheless use this to make their wishes crystal clear. Present for those hearings are the leadership of these gatekeepers, who are also made aware of all the other levers that Congress has that could make their lives miserable - anti-trust, section 230, copyright, not to mention government contracts.
Of course like Henry II who never actually ordered Becket's death, Congress doesn't actually order censorship, just makes it clear that censoring those things would make them very happy.
And if there's one thing we know for an absolute fact it's that the government never does anything forbidden by the constitution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39121693
HN is ridiculous sometimes.
Those people are somewhere between naive and shockingly ignorant: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28316443 2021, 150ish comments
[1]: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
> "Horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies."
Orwell was equally 'horrified' by the British Empire's imperialist practices, which he documented in then-Burma. See "Shooting an Elephant" for example:
George Orwell: "I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing.... I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant
Now, if you want to experience censorship in the 'Western liberal democracies' today, just replace "the Burmese" in that quote with "the Palestinians."
"‘The Palestine exception’: why pro-Palestinian voices are suppressed in the US" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/01/palestine-us-a...
"House Passes Resolution Declaring Anti-Zionism A Form Of Antisemitism—Some Democrats Are Critical" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/12/05/house-p...
being coerced into silence for fear of professional retaliation is a form of censorship.
...no. It was inspired by his observations during the Spanish Civil War:
“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
A year before World War II even started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
> In his 1946 essay "Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism".[3][89] Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945), while Coming Up for Air (1939) celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
> In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have "first thought of [the book] in 1943", while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943's Tehran Conference as inspiration: "What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism".[13] Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.[14][15]
> In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel.
Keep on reading that wikipedia page, which explains in detail all the characters, agencies, events, etc in the book that are in many cases directly taken from elements of Stalinism.
> I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.
[…]
But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was.
[…]
On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.