‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

https://news.umich.edu/extremely-aggressive-internet-censorship-spreads-in-the-worlds-democracies/

by rbanffy • 6 years ago

942 584 6 years ago

news.umich.edu

Interesting article. It doesn't look at corporate/social media censorship, but government and ISP censorship is still dangerous.

I found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances.

Also, ISP censorship on Norway. Corporate overreach, or unofficial cooperation between them and government? They really need some Net Neutrality.

DoctorNick• 6 years ago

I found quite surprising that Japan censored The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal for G20. What would be the reason for that? It's not like they would provoke disturbances.

No, but they would have covered the protests against it.

callinOutLiars• 6 years ago

Interesting article. It doesn't look at corporate/social media censorship, but government and ISP censorship is still dangerous.

Is a company having policies about what users can store on the company owned servers actually censorship?

I find it weird that you used “still dangerous” to describe government/ISP censorship. To me that is the most dangerous form a censorship.

blockmarker2• 6 years ago

Corporate/social media censorship is now the en vogue censorship and the one we are most problems with, at least in the western world. Or maybe it's the one with most publicity. In comparison, government/ISP censorship seems to have died out and be pretty mild. However, something like China's censorship is much worse than social media. I thought we luckily would be free of such, but I do consider Poland western, and Japan a reputable democracy. It is still dangerous because a threat we thought dead or dormant is still active.

fomine33• 6 years ago

Really surprising. AFAIK Japan has strict free to speech by constitution. I never heard such censorship except child porn blocking. Any citations? I can't find any source even in Japanese.

mzsmyk3• 6 years ago

That’s probably a false positive. In this thread you have multiple people denying that this ever happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/jwudsb/u_of_michigan...

markdown• 6 years ago

Just two days ago, The Solomon Islands government decided to ban Facebook, joining Nauru, China, Hong Kong and Iran.

A good thing, but for all the wrong reasons (shutting down criticism of govt by anon accounts).

https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/430811/solo...

sebmellen• 6 years ago

There is a great tool called OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference) that you can use to test your own network and see if commonly censored sites are censored for you.

See https://ooni.org/ and https://ooni.org/install/.

fartcannon• 6 years ago

Comforting to note that this software is F/OSS. Thank you.

bootcampwhere• 6 years ago

Social media like Reddit has stumbled upon the perfect way to censor unprofitable or anti-state content.

Superficially give moderation to users, then continually ban users when other users complain about them.

In this way with just a few dozen accounts anyone can control the narrative in their niche while Reddit claims they have no control.

Recently an independent chinese reporter has been banned from reddit using this technique.(0)

(0) https://www.google.com/search?q=the+china+theu+dont+want+yoi...

jml7c57• 6 years ago

Did you mean to post that link? It doesn't give any information on a reporter being banned from reddit.

grezql2• 6 years ago

Where does the line between blocking illegal content vs censorship go?

In the western world we would probably allow ISPs to block sites that promote traditions that we do not see as normal. For example; in some east asian countries they eat dogs during festival. Websites selling dog meat shipping to western countries would be blocked in my country.

Why can't India censor websites than promote values they dont agree with? Or Russia?

Every country and people are unique and they have different values. We shouldnt try to assimilate those.

cambalache6• 6 years ago

Let the laws and courts determine that. Not Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.

grezql2• 6 years ago

Im totally against Social medias. And believe they have caused mental health damage to large section of the population. but lets talk about general censorship vs freedom without Social medias in the equation.

colechristensen2• 6 years ago

Social media outlets are publishers, I have no problem with them editorializing. I wouldn’t have a problem with a book store not carrying a book or a newspaper not publishing a crank opinion piece, why should I have a problem with twitter banning someone (or whatever else)?

Shivetya• 6 years ago

However some are upset at what one nation's laws and courts block as compared to another. The Zuckerberg's and Dorsey's of the world however are intimidated into doing such censorship on the behalf of politicians who cannot do it themselves.

They accomplish this simply by attacking the organizations on another front. Never underestimate the coercive nature of politicians whose own countries forbid censorship they can get another to do for them.

The simple fact is, our western values are not the world's values.

dragonwriter14• 6 years ago

Let the laws and courts determine that. Not Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.

So, we should rely on state censorship in preference to the free marketplace of ideas competing for private support to relay them?

ilikehurdles• 6 years ago

By wanting to use legal measures to force publishers to carry certain speech, you're not only drastically limiting the organizations' own free speech rights, but very quickly opening up a short path to punishing those who refuse to carry certain messages. Another word for that is (literally) propaganda.

This whole movement of people begging the government to prevent companies from curating their content, under the guise of fucking free speech of all things, is so deep into doublespeak territory that it just leaves me in awe.

ballenf2• 6 years ago

Another way to evaluate would be what would have been allowed in private organization or published in a book or pamphlet?

If the answer is "you can't do anything on the internet that you couldn't do before" then that changes the headline.

Jtsummers• 6 years ago

Would a site selling dog meat be blocked? Or would sales to your country be barred (as they'd, presumably, be illegal)?

djbebs• 6 years ago

There is no line, thats censorship as well and should be rejected.

damnyou• 6 years ago

There are such things as good and bad in the world.

Cultural relativism is brain poison. It is very important to define and fight for universal human rights, such as the right to date and marry someone regardless of gender.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

Politicians look at Xi Jinping, the guy that has complete control over China for life, and say: "man, I want to have as much power as that guy".

disown• 6 years ago

Right on cue, a propagandist tries to turn this into a china-relate issue. What's with you people? Almost every other thread that has nothing to do with china, you people show up?

varispeed2• 6 years ago

Then there is always someone to point out this is not about China... come on.

hnracer• 6 years ago

It's an article about government censorship and China is one of the most strict censorship and surveillance states on the planet. Bringing it up is on point and relevant to the topic.

SpicyLemonZest3• 6 years ago

About a sixth of the global population lives in China, so it only makes sense that they'd come up regularly in discussions of global trends.

coolgod• 6 years ago

Hackernews is a community in which discussion of politics is frowned upon, unless its about China then anything goes.

paxys4• 6 years ago

Fits well with the current wave of authoritarianism/nationalism that has taken root all over the world. A free and open internet represents everything that a government that wishes complete control over its people would be afraid of.

mistermann3• 6 years ago

Fits well with the current wave of authoritarianism/nationalism that has taken root all over the world.

Autoritarianism often goes hand in hand with nationalism, but not always. In recent history, it is the non-nationalists who seem to be most pro-censorship, does it not?

Unfortunately, due to the extremely dynamic and high velocity nature of current times, this article wasn't able to get into the new flavor of micro-censorship - hopefully they address that in the future.

lainga• 6 years ago

Indeed, in 1848 authoritarianism and nationalism were the two major opponents on the European political stage.

war10255• 6 years ago

The interesting thing about this is that nationalism is in general associated with right-leaning politics, and the censorship is far and away being applied more aggressively to those very same right-leaning nationalist groups.

You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.

artursapek2• 6 years ago

Exactly. There's nothing "nationalist" about the type of censorship we're seeing on Twitter. If anything it's the opposite.

r00fus2• 6 years ago

From the article: > "Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites"

Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not. Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?

dragonwriter14• 6 years ago

You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.

No, I wouldn't.

https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-t...

I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.

But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?

mattnewton• 6 years ago

You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.

I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.

* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"

paxys4• 6 years ago

Huh? It's the exact opposite. In the US sites like Facebook & Twitter routinely refuse to censor conservative content even if it is against their policies because they are afraid of pissing off Republicans in Congress.

A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.

And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.

Fauntleroy• 6 years ago

I have no idea how you can keep telling yourself that when the top 10 shared links on Facebook have been nothing but conservative conspiracy theories for over 12 months straight.

logicslave• 6 years ago

"You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online."

You must be joking? Twitter, Google, FB, the blatantly partisan censorship?

slg6• 6 years ago

A free and open internet also allows propaganda and hate to flourish which are two bedrocks of most authoritarian and nationalist regimes. It isn't as simple as ending censorship will allow everyone to be free.

paxys4• 6 years ago

A free and open internet also allows propaganda and hate to flourish

I disagree. Sure there will always be some amount of misinformation on the internet, but a fully state-controlled media and internet (see - China) is far, far more effective at spreading propaganda and controlling the narrative.

newguy12343• 6 years ago

Exactly and this is the dirty little detail that people don't want to realize. People think you can just censor right wing misinformation but guess what happens? The right wing movements simply create their own websites and start blocking anything that is a counter argument. Biggest example is reddit which has focused on blocking right wing groups. /r/thedonald used to be big on reddit but they got banned. So they went on to create their own version of reddit and now that website has exploded in popularity. It is apparently in the top 500 most visited websites in the USA now.

It is very likely that moving forward, many right wing people will shift away platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. In fact, these platforms already exist. Gab is a replacement for facebook and parler is a replacement for twitter.

cortic4• 6 years ago

Propaganda is vulnerable to open discourse, promoters of false information are handicapped by the flaws in their arguments. The only way it can flourish is censored away into manipulative misdirection and secretive groups.

There is also the immunity to bad ideas aspect; Its important that the propaganda is heard openly and argued against in public, as this makes people immune to these arguments. Censor these bad ideas and we make the next generation vulnerable to them.

I don't think we can offset this with education, as with drugs, we never give the kids the very best bad idea - argument when we try to teach the dangers of drugs, this is why so many are vulnerable to the dealers quiet persuasion. I really feel like the more we silence movements like the alt right, the more vulnerable our society becomes to their bad ideas.

RonanTheGrey2• 6 years ago

I'm curious -- what are you hoping that argument will accomplish?

Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.

Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.

AngryData• 6 years ago

That is why we need the education to identify and expose propaganda. Something most governments have either completely ignored or severely neglected in public education because of how useful and successful their own propaganda has been in shaping public ideas and narrative.

elevenoh2• 6 years ago

How about the wave of 'I won't change, I won't work on myself, so I'll change / sensor you under the pretense of virtue" that's taken hold in SV echochambers?

konjin6• 6 years ago

Joe Biden wrote the original Patriot act.

Lets not pretend that liberalism doesn't come with a jackboot on the neck of the people either.

triceratops• 6 years ago

TIL: Joe Biden represents liberalism.

dragonwriter14• 6 years ago

Joe Biden wrote the original Patriot act.

No, he didn't.

USA PATRIOT Act was from Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It incorporated material from 3 earlier bills, one of which was also by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the others by Sen. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Oxley (R-OH).

https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162...

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

Weird is that in the US the liberals want to censor and the conservatives argue for free speech. They are at their throats so much that is probably doesn't really matter anymore.

neximo643• 6 years ago

Emmanuel Macron has been getting newspapers to pull down their articles in the past few weeks (the FT usually never removes articles but they did too). I bet barely anyone notices.

Interesting that politico sent one straight to print today without an online article first.

Symbiote• 6 years ago

I'd prefer the newspaper to highlight the "factual errors" rather than withdraw the article, but they do need to do one of those things to maintain their editorial integrity.

I bet barely anyone notices.

It took a single search to find plenty of articles covering this.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20201105/france-is-not-fighting-isla...

neximo643• 6 years ago

You should look up and see what the "factual errors" were and see if you agree if it was about editorial integrity.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Wasnt that an editorial decision? he did write an opinion about them but how did he get them to pull them down?

neximo643• 6 years ago

He personally called and asked to have it removed. Politico and some other papers too.

vinni23• 6 years ago

ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.

I have no trouble accessing hrw.org and match.com in Norway. I wonder is it specific to some ISPs? I also couldn’t find any law that was passed to block certain pornogrpahic websites in Wikipedia [1] and I don’t know where else to look.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway

na85• 6 years ago

I don’t know where else to look.

Does Norway not publish its corpus of law online? Even in Canada where our government motto is "yesterday's technology today" we have websites where you can look up all legislation and read it.

vinni23• 6 years ago

It probably does but it’s not easily searchable or finding this specific law with the information they provide in the article is very hard. Like the law jargon etc. it’s the job of the article to cite the link.

birktj3• 6 years ago

It does, they even have a selection that is translated to english [1]. However I don't know what kind of terms I would search for. I tried "DNS", but it didn't give me anything. I also tried "internet blocking", no luck there either.

[1] https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk

blacksmith_tb• 6 years ago

Looking in the citations in the article itself, these are the references provided, neither of which seem entirely convincing to me:

https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-g...

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politic...

doktrin5• 6 years ago

That PIA blog post is not exactly high quality.

Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.

There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)

If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).

They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway

babas3• 6 years ago

When I read that, I immediately dismissed the whole article. Both HRW and match.com are available on the 4/5 ISPs I have access to ATM. Home (Telenor), mobile (Telia), server host (domeneshop), my office (Telia, wired) and a customer network (Not sure about the downstream ISP). On the last one match.com is blocked by a firewall not the ISP.

They should really check thier sources. My guess is that they tested on a network that has a filtering firewall.

Now that that is said. Norway is not perfect. The biggest ISPs use a easy to bypass DNS blocklist by the judiciary. The list contains CP-sites, gambling, piracy, terrorism. This is bad enough. Why lie about match.com and hrw.org? Jeez.

systemvoltage• 6 years ago

It could be a mistake, not an intentional lie.

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Piracy sites? That's strange. Why would Norway block sites like: http://t.ly/TdrE ?

I'm sure you got it wrong and what they actually block is Ninja sites.

fomine33• 6 years ago

I agree from a Japanese point of view. I never heard any ISP censorship except child porn. Censoring news sites must be huge news but never heard.

doktrin5• 6 years ago

I checked as well (Globalconnect wired; Telenor mobile). It's a fairly ridiculous claim, one which if true would have attracted instant media attention.

ggggtez2• 6 years ago

I believe they are saying that it happened in 2018, not today.

It's possible that it was a mistake, and corrected, but it should still concern you that it was done to begin with.

Telecoms should not be the arbiters of what content you view.

babas3• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure it never happened. This would have been big news here. The technology press went ape when thepriatebay.org was added to a DNS blocklist. I have searched around and can not find any references to hrw or match being blocked by accident or not.

Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.

jml7c57• 6 years ago

They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020:

"Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"

arp242• 6 years ago

I know that in the Netherlands there is a specific very small ISP which caters to a certain religious crowd and blocks all sorts of "offensive" content (which is its main selling point).

Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?

sdenton4• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the disinformation smear campaign against the Canadian health care system run by US insurance companies since the nineties to prevent single payer health care laws from being passed...

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada

zrth• 6 years ago

They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020: "Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"

Foxboron• 6 years ago

My guess is that they think DNS resolution failures are consorship. There where some insane numbers like 95% unavailability of pcgamer.com and worldofwarcraft.com in the article as well. It makes no sense.

walrus01• 6 years ago

The Indian government is no friend of actual free speech or a free Internet:

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

google "internet kill switch india" for numerous examples.

mancerayder• 6 years ago

Cue conversation about overreach of Facebook and Twitter. Cue defense of freedom of speech in response to the incitement to violence argument. Cue downvotes of said defenses and upvotes of 'more should be done.'

Cue hand wringing about how we elites can deal with the armies of the naive, the prone to conspiracy theories, viral false information needing correction.

Cue dystopia.

jml7c57• 6 years ago

Read the article. This is about government censorship, not Twitter/Facebook independently removing things.

ed_balls2• 6 years ago

Can someone link to sources? Which sites Norway and Poland blocked?

natoliniak• 6 years ago

it is unclear from the article what sites were censored in Poland and by whom (and i couldn't figure it out in the sourced paper). However, if in fact the Polish govt has censored any human rights websites, I feel like that should be bigger news there. AFAIK Poland only blocks access to certain gambling sites, which are publicly listed here: https://hazard.mf.gov.pl/

ed_balls2• 6 years ago

so is it fake news then?

codemac• 6 years ago

A measure of this community will be how successfully we can manage a conversation about this topic.

My bet - we will fail.

I'm completely lost on how we should approach this for various social media like fb or twitter where the platform is ubiquitous.

chrisco2555• 6 years ago

Social media should be regulated and forced to federate to combat their monopoly, for one. People spend years and years building up followings on these platforms, and since users themselves are the creators of the content that Facebook and Twitter are selling, they should have more legal protections of their rights. Like the 20th century labor movements, there needs to be a 21st century user/consumer movement. Users should have certain rights protected by law, including the right to transfer to a compatible and competing service (just as users have the right to retain their cell phone number when transferring carriers) and the right to consume content from compatible services in their social media feed.

As for filtering content, users should have the power there, too, just as they do their spam filter in their email account. They should have the ability to set their own parameters and leave it at that. Unless its blatantly illegal content, it should be protected, period, or the platforms should be classified as publishers and be subject to all the same legal liabilities that publishers are.

Karunamon• 6 years ago

An internet user's bill of rights would be a good first step here. Define the requirements up front and then let the companies adapt to them. I really, really don't want the government dictating technical specs to the broader community.

Look to the requirement for phone number portability as an example. The providers weeped and gnashed their teeth, and then got together and implemented a working system.

marktangotango• 6 years ago

I find I don't think of hackernews as a community anymore, haven't in a long time. To me what I read here is 50-75% of intentional argumentation and spreading of what's essentially FUD by people who are drawn here by the sites popularity, and who are just a likely to be on a payroll or otherwise promoting an agenda.

It's the small percentage of genuine people with reasonable, coherent things to say that keep me coming back. It's a trope, but the quality of discourse has declined markedly in recent years (imo).

varispeed2• 6 years ago

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public. It seems like governments still want to manipulate people, so censorship in their mind is the only way out of this. Unfortunately it is like having an aching tooth and taking pain killers hoping it will pass instead of going to dentist. My only hope that in the end this will make politics more honest and people will learn how they are being exploited. I don't accept that someone should have a power over what I can or cannot read and preventing me from forming my own opinions.

gameswithgo• 6 years ago

I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education. But I hope I am wrong. Is there any evidence it is possible?

base698• 6 years ago

I don't think you can educate an above average person either. Unless you've done in depth study of the techniques, and most educated people haven't either. In addition, some of the techniques work even if you know them.

quasse• 6 years ago

Finland has specific curriculum in schools teaching kids how to critically evaluate information they find online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fict... They study historical propaganda campaigns, how to lie with statistics, and critical thinking.

I can say that having been through a similar curriculum in high school (implemented on the initiative of a very thoughtful literature teacher) it has been one of my most valuable mental tools I possess throughout my adult life. Being able to understand and identify logical fallacies has helped me critically evaluate the information I consume many times over.

Of course, any program like this has the problem that it needs to be implemented by a trusted source, or it will be attacked as "indoctrination" (whether or not that is the truth). I can see that as a major challenge in the US where 50%+ of the population is convinced that the government is out to get them at any one time.

colechristensen2• 6 years ago

It’s like a more complicated version of teaching people to recognize phishing attacks, I think a belief that the median human isn’t capable of learning about their weaknesses seriously underestimates humans.

You just need to frame it correctly.

throwaway2245• 6 years ago

I don't think you can effectively inoculate the average person against this stuff with education.

A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.

Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).

Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.

I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.

wobbegongz• 6 years ago

It has been done studies of education and gullibility. Sadly enough people who has some education, like a masters degree, was more gullible then people who lacked education. It was first at PhD-level that education seemed to help.

The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.

busterarm17• 6 years ago

It's worse than that.

We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.

And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".

lilactown• 6 years ago

That's not the literal definition of fascism but it's also Not Good(tm).

newacct583• 6 years ago

We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.

That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?

tptacek6• 6 years ago

It has never in the history of western civilization been easier for people to inject random claims into the public discourse. Neither Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes nor Otis Chandler at the LA Times would have given an inch of space for QAnon or antivax, but the "giant corporations" you allude to today do so happily, and at a scale no newspaper publisher would have imagined 50 years ago.

VBprogrammer4• 6 years ago

The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies.

The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.

dragonwriter14• 6 years ago

We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.

Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)

jimvdv• 6 years ago

“Literally fascism” is a little overused. I’m not saying governments and corporations teaming up is a good thing, but let’s not use fascism here, that will only make it harder to recognise actual fascism.

If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.

Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

If thats your litteral definition of fascism I suggest you get yourself a dictionary. Please dont make blanket statements to describe complex phenomenons.

ccn0p3• 6 years ago

You can see elements of the slippery slope happening with the rewriting of American history in public government-funded schooling.

“who controls the past controls the future. who controls the present, controls the past”

chrisco2555• 6 years ago

You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor". They've used all sorts of manufactured consensus techniques to get us into unjust wars or to give up our liberties (i.e. mass surveillance, lockdowns, etc) for over-blown threats. We aren't going to get education from the government. Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.

whoisburbansky• 6 years ago

Not disagreeing with most of what you're saying here, just wondering if you mean manufactured consent, like the Herman and Chomsky book, not consensus.

CrazyPyroLinux• 6 years ago

Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.

I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censorship will be helpful.

p1necone• 6 years ago

What benefit do you think the government gets out of lockdowns? (other than the obvious one of stopping the spread of the pandemic).

eikenberry• 6 years ago

I don't think they were trying to make the case that the government wasn't a bad actor. I read it more to mean that they liked it better when they were the only bad actor.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor".

I think a close reading of the OP would show they aren't portraying the state with great friendliness. Some run the show for the benefit of powerful forces and to various extents try to think about long term goals. "Bad Actors" is a decent shorthand for group trying also serving the wealthy and themselves but with a destructively short term agenda.

The key point the GP makes and I think you're missing is that stop manipulation isn't a matter of removing "tyrants" but creating an active, educated population.

square_square• 6 years ago

The reasoning course should start at first grade

AussieWog933• 6 years ago

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques

I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students. And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.

naringas• 6 years ago

just because it's in the curriculum doesn't mean it will be taught well.

consider (for example) k-12 mathematics pretty much anywhere...

paxys4• 6 years ago

Maybe it is part of the curriculum because you ended up with Murdoch. That guy has been running the show since the 60s.

busterarm17• 6 years ago

And Daniel Andrews. My condolences.

dalbasal2• 6 years ago

I think we need to add "nobody ever talks about.." to the list of trope fallacies.

sprayk• 6 years ago

I experienced similar topics in curriculum here in the US in English and history classes in middle/high school as well as the English class I took in college (part of the liberal arts requirement for basically every degree at my school).

quicklime2• 6 years ago

I remember those classes in VCE. Unfortunately a lot of people interpreted it as a class on "how to be persuasive" (as a writer) rather than "how to avoid being persuaded by propagandists" (as a reader).

We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason in a way that avoided those fallacies.

tobr• 6 years ago

Can I ask for some kind of documentation or reference for the causal relationship you are asserting here? Specifically a documented example of a democratic government that has deliberately restricted education on manipulation techniques because it might make their own use of it less effective.

d23• 6 years ago

Did you or the responders read the article? This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation. It's not.

The part about the United States says this:

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.

And you say:

Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.

The first major heading in the article is this:

Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites

Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?

Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.

Der_Einzige5• 6 years ago

HN really needs a way to force people to have at least clicked on the article before posting. Maybe something where the article has to be clicked on, and then a X minute timer is started so that people will be strongly incentivized to read the article before commenting.

kodah• 6 years ago

Yet it also goes on to say this:

“When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.

I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Why would you let the actual content of what you are supposedly responding to get in the way of whatever you are soapboxing about?

noodles_nomore3• 6 years ago

This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation.

I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

The behavior of tech companies in the US was certainly a template for governments around the world to block their own content as corporate censorship wasn't criticized and instead hailed because it censored the right people. Heck, they have validated Chinas censoring attempts or that of any dictatorship really.

Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.

newguy12343• 6 years ago

Agree. Another big problem I've noticed is that there are so many partisan news sources. If you are liberal, you go to CNN which has a liberal spin to it. If you are conservative, fox news. The problem is each one is adding their own biases to it.

I saw this clear as day when I was watching live streams during the Portland federal courthouse protest. I would watch these for several hours per day as a form of entertainment. When I read the news articles written the following day, I was completely shocked at how much bias was present in the mainstream news media.

During these protests it essentially went like this: during the day, the protest was 100% peaceful, hardly any police. Literally a perfect 100% peaceful protest. As night came, the crowd would shift. The peaceful people would leave and then a new group would start showing up, dressed in all black and start doing full blown violence against police. Starting fires, destroying private property and many similar illegal and dangerous stuff.

The following day I read articles on CNN that said there was very little violence and it was almost entirely peaceful. This was false because there was tons of violence at the night. When you read articles in fox news they say the protest was mostly violent. This was also false because the day time protest was 100% peaceful.

This type of news reporting is pushing division politics and social media further fans the flames because people can confirm their narrative and also get false reporting from idiots on twitter/facebook which spreads misinformation.

I could also tell this is heavily influencing people's view on the world because I would debate people on reddit. For liberal people, they would link me CNN and washington post articles to support their arguments. If I argued with conservatives, they would link me fox news and breitbart articles. This is what they're linking to me as their "proof" to support their argument. If I responded by saying that fox news/cnn is biased reporting, they would jump to personal attacks at me, almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

This is hardly new. "60 Minutes" was infamous in the 1960s for the egregious slanting of their segments. It was so bad that the smarter people being interviewed by them would demand that the interview be simultaneously filmed by their own people.

As for riots, my dad remarked to me that the TV media would represent the crowds as large or small simply by where they pointed the camera and the zoom level used. And they would, depending on their agenda.

Mass media has always been heavily agenda based.

mr_toad2• 6 years ago

almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.

And there you have it.

antris2• 6 years ago

It's a real shit situation. The fact that we cannot agree on facts in politics is truly frightening and I cannot see an easy way out of it.

Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.

Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.

bitwize2• 6 years ago

ⓘ Claims about censorship in the United States are disputed. Click here for more info: https://xkcd.com/1357/

easterncalculus• 6 years ago

I will never understand why people feel like reasonable conversation is something to be only techically legal and limited in every capacity possible, instead of something we should try and pursue. I've seen this argument come up all the time as justfication for the destruction of ideas in good faith and rarely ever for actual harassment or intimidation. It's ironcially almost always linked in bad faith, to misrepresent the weight of whatever being replied to.

api• 6 years ago

The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.

That is by FAR the best summary of the issue I have read.

Analogy:

It's as if we've been living behind castle walls and now those walls are gone. We can now be directly attacked by enemy armies, whereas before we could only be practically reached by our own government's police and military. Having been sheltered for so long, we don't know how to hold our own without those walls.

idlewords• 6 years ago

I'm curious—who prevented you from reading the article, which has nothing to do with your comment?

zyxzevn2• 6 years ago

I made a small article about how to investigate the truth about something.

https://saidit.net/s/Solutions/comments/50i5/how_to_investig...

The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.

Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.

And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution

nprz2• 6 years ago

Remember how the usefulness of the internet and social media was championed by media during the Arab Spring movement? Now it's suddenly a threat to our democracy.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/obama-interne...

ketzo2• 6 years ago

I mean, in that article, he makes a pretty coherent point:

Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.

I don't think that's out of place in a conversation about today's internet/media landscape. He's not saying "the internet is bad," or even "social media is bad"; he's saying that the internet clearly has the potential to amplify disinformation to a point that becomes harmful, something I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with.

MeinBlutIstBlau3• 6 years ago

Disinformation assumes the average person is stupid though. Whose to say the inherent undisputable (because you can't prove or deny) conspiracy theory someone believes is true? Why is the onus on media companies to police how we want to live our lives and believe in whatever nonsense we want to? I play videogames and watch tv shows, because it inspires me to think a particular way outside of the norm, should it be banned? This is literally the same argument about banning and burning books.

refurb2• 6 years ago

What an incredibly paternalistic and disappointing quote from Obama. “If we don’t have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from false”.

So clearly we need the gov’t to step in help the rabble who are clearly unable to figure out the “truth” on their own.

Does he realize this is the exact argument authoritarian gov’ts give for censorship? We need to censor to avoid “social disharmony” or stop those “fomenting discord”.

nprz2• 6 years ago

Mainstream press also has the ability to publish and amplify disinformation, and they do[0]. The internet is a hugely important tool that can be used to shed light on actual power structures and their atrocities. This good of exposing evil and corruption far outweighs the potentially bad outcome of a minority of individuals believing incorrect information.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI

int_19h3• 6 years ago

If we don't have the capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false, then nothing works. Putting the government (or any other third party) in charge of censorship for the sake of filtering out what's false just moves the decision elsewhere - but it's still made by some people somewhere. Whether those people are determined directly or indirectly through some democratic process, or self-appointed, the same problem applies recursively.

runesoerensen• 6 years ago

I read that article earlier today, and gotta say I was pretty disappointed that Vox chose the title "Obama: The internet is “the single biggest threat to our democracy”" based on this exchange:

Obama: Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring...I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.
Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.

The second paragraph in the article is more in line with what he actually said:

Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”

There's a big difference between saying that the internet is the single biggest threat to society, and saying that it (and more specifically, social media) has helped some people communicate disinformation and "fake news" - which is what Obama see as the threat to society in this context.

eunos• 6 years ago

My cynical take is that had Cambridge Analytica targeted Putin/Lukashenko/Morales/Maduro instead of Brexit/Trump we would celebrated Cambridge Analytica as a hero of democracy and open society.

cogman103• 6 years ago

I have to wondered how we "fix" our current internet situation.

On the one hand, censorship appears to be appealing to stop the tide of misinformation. Anti-vaxx garbage is a prime example of something that should be censored into oblivion. It is actively harmful to the public.

But, on the other hand, who pulls the levers of censorship is equally terrifying. I don't want a world where a dissenting opinion is censored because it doesn't fall in line with whoevers ideology. For example, Chinese censorship of the Tiananmen square incident.

How on earth can we fix this? Social media has created a world of bubbles. Some of which are FILLED TO THE BRIM with misinformation. Penetrating those bubbles is nearly impossible. They've always sort of existed, yet somehow it feels like they are more extreme now-a-days.

Just musing. I really don't have a solution to this but am certainly interest to hear any proposals.

Perhaps the solution is really as simple as better public education?

nickthemagicman3• 6 years ago

You can't have both censorship of things you don't like (anti-vaxx things) and no censorship of things you do like.

Religion could be classified as mis-information but that helps a lot of people.

Who is the final arbitrator of what is determined as misinformation?

If one religion took control that one religion could classify another religion as mis-information and censor them.

If one political actor took control they could qualify another political groups information as censorship.

SOME censorship doesn't work. It's either all information available and you trust people to be smart or you have a censored internet.

CJefferson• 6 years ago

That sounds like saying we cant have laws which forbid things I don't like, and no laws against things I do like.

We have final arbitrators of truth, they are laws, judges and juries. It isn't a perfect system, and it might not scale, but I see no need to abandon the idea some things are fundamentally incorrect, and get rid of those things.

cogman103• 6 years ago

The problem is that the scales are completely unbalanced when it comes to information vs misinformation.

There is political and financial incentives at play to spread misinformation. It isn't as simple as "the best ideas win" as most social media platforms make it REALLY easy to manipulate the narrative.

For example, if some politician will negatively impact my business, I can hire a BUNCH of people to go out and write nasty comments about that politician. I can create fake media pages to support whatever narrative I want against that candidate. I can do all of this for relatively little money. We see this phenomenon come up time and time again when it comes to review websites. Most people "in the know" don't trust amazon reviews because they know companies astroturf them like crazy.

Climate change is a place where this also happens a LOT. Man made climate change is a nearly undisputed fact in the scientific world, yet roughly half of Americans either don't believe in it or are unsure about it. Why? Because there's big incentives behind the fossil fuel industry to spread FUD and misinformation about climate change. On the flip side, there's just not the money or resources available to climate scientists to correct that narrative.

I can buy that "some censorship doesn't work" however, it appears that a free for all is equally broken.

rbanffy4• 6 years ago

I have to wondered how we "fix" our current internet situation.

Isn't Tor a tool made specifically for this?

cogman103• 6 years ago

Tor fixes access to banned locations on the internet. Tor doesn't fix the spread of misinformation and astro-turfing.

muyuu4• 6 years ago

personally, I don't think there is a fix to the fact that people will be interconnected and seek stuff that fits their worldview one way or another - draconian eavesdropping and censorship will only make those circles tighter and more extreme

I think we have to embrace the fact that there are layers of informational warfare and hope for some degree of stability once hyper-connectivity has seen off a couple generations

people have to be more willing to debate ideas they find crazy and be patient because the opposite strategy is a losing one

of course governments and big tech will suppress information and even prosecute people for saying the "wrong" things, but this has a limited scope and the backlash is more of that stuff happening in closer circles/bubbles

AntiImperialist5• 6 years ago

As great as free press and democracies are, they also come with huge weaknesses. Those make it easy for foreign propaganda to influence the public and hence run the countries from outside.

Thanks to The Great Firewall and the CCP rule, China is mostly immune to foreign propaganda. At the same time, China is using a lot of effort to affect countries with democracy and free speech, like India and the U.S.

China is obviously not alone in using propaganda to influence the politics of other countries. All big countries and corporations use it in their countries of interest all the time... in fact, they have been doing it for much longer. Everything from bribes to politicians to "human rights organizations", "foreign aid organizations" to social causes in universities... everything is used to undermine national interests and put pawns for outside powers in governments.

Citizens of many democratic nations have been feeling this for a very long time... which explains nationalist sentiments rising in many countries... but that's another story.

China is in a unique position in that it limits or prohibits foreign press, foreign media, foreign internet services, foreign aid organizations, human rights organizations... i.e. anything and everything that it can to stop foreign influence... but it uses a lot of those against its rivals.

The only defense against it is following China's footsteps. India has recently banned several Chinese apps and websites. It has also kicked out Amnesty International. Other countries will have to do the same if they want to protect their national interests.

tehjoker2• 6 years ago

Seeing free speech as an impediment to nationalist competition is rich. Nationalist competition appears to corrode every civil liberty and thing that makes life worth living that we have. What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match? I guess certain business people would not make as much money.

jml7c57• 6 years ago

What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match? I guess certain business people would not make as much money.

Cooperation is hard because of the prisoner's dilemma etc. You don't need "certain business people" to malevolently prevent international cooperation.

andrekandre• 6 years ago

What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?

competition is at the heart of our economies at a deep level, both within and without... i suspect this wont change until internally our economies are more cooperative than competitive (im not holding my breath)

AntiImperialist5• 6 years ago

Nationalist competition

What do you mean by nationalist competition? Nations competing against each other?

What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?

Cooperation for what? Different people value different things. Different cultures even more so. You cannot have cooperation unless everyone is on the same side of every issue in the same degree.

If we had that level of agreement, we would not survive, not for long anyway. Let me explain:

Almost all of politics (or religious sects for that matter) is about how we use the resources we have. If there are multiple ways of using the resources, there have to be people who disagree and want different ways of using the resource. That slows us down, which helps us understand the cost/benefits of different ways of doing things. That also keeps options open... so if we find problems with the prevalent way, we won't have to start over. Other groups will already have understood the alternative ways and made some progress that others can join... once they sacrifice the leader who led them the "wrong way", of course.

Nations are just another level of doing this thing on a global scale. Nations should do things differently, so that the world as a whole is more robust.

I guess certain business people would not make as much money.

Ironically, it's certain business interests which have tried to make the world homogenous. That helps them scale their business in the most efficient way. They value efficiency more than robustness. George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, is an example of a person who religiously believes in removing all inefficiencies due to nation states... and has been using his billions of dollars for that cause. I think that is dangerous. It's not different from finding "superior people", inbreeding them and killing everyone else for being inferior. That wouldn't make them superior. That would make them fragile. It's the same for nations.

jsnk• 6 years ago

Those make it easy for foreign propaganda to influence the public and hence run the countries from outside.

Foreign propaganda is a problem. But it's tiny compared to propaganda by domestic actors. There's huge amount of disinfo, gas lighting, demoralizing perpetuated by mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia.

If you are concerned about propaganda, you have to mention the elephant in the room. Or else, you yourself are propagating and amplifying the dangers of foreign propaganda and minimizing the huge blame mainstream media, big tech, and intelligentsia should get.

AntiImperialist5• 6 years ago

But it's tiny compared to propaganda by domestic actors.

All foreign propaganda is peddled by domestic actors. Otherwise, it wouldn't be effective.

peacefulhat• 6 years ago

Other countries will have to do the same if they want to protect their national interests.

2030: EU bans Google

MrBuddyCasino2• 6 years ago

The only defense against it it following China's footsteps.

Is that the point you were trying to make?

yeetman21• 6 years ago

The US runs propaganda on its citizens and the citizens of other countries as well. China's propaganda arm prays every night to be as competent as the US' one day since most people dont even recognize it as propaganda while even Chinese citizens can tell their propaganda from a mile away.

scottlocklin• 6 years ago

Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.

"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States. It very obviously got us into WW-1 (the British -a largely untold but very obvious info ops campaign for something that served no US national interest), it got us into the middle east (nothing the US does there happens but for foreign interference from Saudis, Emirates and Israelis, who overtly bribe our think tanks and politicians), and it fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people (thanks, China).

None of the above happened because of dipshits saying things on twitter or facebook or sharing Russia Today articles. None of the above will go away if the CIA, the political center and the tech oligarchs censor the internet to protect us from meaningless internet bugaboos.

It's a naked power grab, and anyone who supports it because of "muh democracy" is a collaborator with tyranny.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people

Fake News. The U.S. used to have a huge stockpile of surgical and N95 masks as part of their pandemic preparedness plans. The stockpile was gradually depleted and not replenished adequately. It was pure complacency on the part of government; please let's not blame trade openness for this.

AntiImperialist5• 6 years ago

"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States

Agree. Not as effective as today. But yes.

Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.

Agree. I think Democracy has failed because the tools of propaganda have become very effective.

Democracy died in the U.S. a long time ago... the Deep State was formed and it had a monopoly on propaganda, not only for keeping the citizens in line but also using it to control many other countries. The major competitor was Soviet Union, which wasn't very successful for long. Fast forward to today, there are many countries which are powerful enough and have competitive tools for propaganda.

While many countries are well equipped for offence, only China has very good defense against it. If other countries don't take actions to strengthen their defense, it's going to be very difficult for them.

tsimionescu5• 6 years ago

This doesn't take away too much from your general point, which I agree with, but I think this is important to mention in itself:

["foreign interference"] fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities [...] (thanks, China).

'free trade' is definitely not a product of outside interference, it is a product of American company owners' interests - the easier it is to own manufacturing plants in other countries without giving up your IP (the key items of most 'free trade' agreements), the easier it becomes for corporations to manufacture everything where labor is cheapest.

MrBuddyCasino2• 6 years ago

Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.

David Atkins, Regional Director, CA Dems / Elected DNC Member:

"No seriously...how do you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?

We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/DavidOAtkins/status/1328898661569363969

ballenf2• 6 years ago

Ben Thompson of Stratechery has some insightful analysis of the internet and free speech, in my opinion:

https://stratechery.com/2019/the-internet-and-the-third-esta...

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

I,ve watched this happen on reddit, with new moderators removing anything against the mainstream views on Corona. Then they complained about me to reddit and had me removed as mod of community I had started.

mlillie• 6 years ago

Ensafi’s team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world’s freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights.

Freedom House is a non-profit that is almost entirely funded by the US government. The only ones who would find it "unexpected" that US allies rank high on the "freedom index" but practically have problems with freedom of speech would probably buy a bridge in Brooklyn.

justicezyx• 6 years ago

This is more of a direct response to Internet as a political weapon, which matured in the weaponized social media in Arab Spring [1] as the regime-changing tool used by Hilary Clinton, who eventually becomes the victim in the 2016 presidential election.

Thanks to its long-standing "controlled by CCP in order to do business" practices, China enjoys a very strong position to be less vulnerable to potential external Internet propaganda.

CCP learned this, and start to use various online forum to spread its own world view and alternative reporting on various Chinese domestic and international affairs. So far it looks like it actually helps to supply diverse views on issues like eliminating poverty, development strategy for poor country, etc. I still not see much hard evidences of proactive propaganda campaign from CCP towards foreign nations.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/10/09/655824435/the-weaponization-o...

throwsofaraway2• 6 years ago

Have you recently used Google to search for something slightly out of accepted-by-mainstream compared to search engines like Yandex? I'm not saying Russian propaganda is not real, but it's a helpful guide to compare and contrast the results specially relevant results that is being omitted by Google[0]. Of course this is mainly because we have hate speech societal norms, hate speech laws and such, but how do we know the countries on this map with low "Freedom Score" don't have their own reasons for removing content? Are we to judge their actions but our standards? If so why don't we just declare the world must obey our rule of law or else! Since there cannot in principle be any justifiable deviation from it. Unless we want to only give the _perception_ of tolerance for others' points of view, but not a real one.

[0] I'm not going to provide an example, shouldn't be too hard to come up with a slightly controversial example yourself.

martin1975• 6 years ago

I've noticed the discrepancies too. Even Bing and DuckDuckGo (vs Google) will return drastically different results, particularly that aren't in line with 'mainstream' thinking.

I know Google did not start out like this - 'don't be evil' - but this is how they ended up... Curating truth. It's really sad.

I don't believe in unlimited free speech, but the bar should be set as low as what is permitted by the 1A, at least in the United States which grants maximum freedom under the law.

root_axis4• 6 years ago

I tried "us election fraud" on both sites in private mode. The results are certainly very different but I don't see any indication of google omitting anything. You're already using a throwaway so you might as well provide some specifics.

throwsofaraway2• 6 years ago

You know throwaway accounts can get banned and their comments "dead" too, right?

Try the founder of Vice, let's say you want to listen to his Podcast by just searching for his name, good luck doing that on Google, on Yandex it's the 5th result down.

wildrhythms• 6 years ago

Why won't you provide an example?

cirno• 6 years ago

I've found the opposite. Google promotes stalking sites[0] to the very top of results for their targets in a way that no other search engine does. Not Bing, no Yandex, not any of the little indie engines. You have to go dozens of pages into results to find them, but they're always on the very first page with Google despite being tiny sites compared to the results they displace.

[0] also not going to name them and give them promotion

ttt06• 6 years ago

The most offensive thing is not even the censorship, but how awful and almost completely useless search engines have become. Years ago I used to be able to find almost anything, no matter how obscure it was, if I tried hard enough. Today I most often just give up, because it sometimes seems like you can't find the answers to even really basic questions. I don't know what they did, but every search engine is now a complete garbage. They're now basically just shortcuts to the actual search features on websites that everyone already knows, when you're too lazy to type in the URL or click on a bookmark to the actual website.

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

Abandon this thread, all ye who enter.

tboyd472• 6 years ago

It is not surprising that this would happen in a democratic state. Democracy is not necessarily friendly to individual rights and freedoms. If the majority of citizens want to take your freedom away, you have no recourse in a democratic society. What we recognize as freedoms and human rights are more appropriately associated with limited government, separation of powers, and republics.

We often associate democracies with republics to the point of making them equivalent, but the two ideas are not related to each other. They both have very complicated and separated histories that happened to coincide in one very influential country (the U.S.A.).

MeinBlutIstBlau3• 6 years ago

Do you have a source of what specific stuff you're referring to? I want to read more and learn about some of that cause with sounds interesting to look at the US in that light.

tboyd472• 6 years ago

You could try browsing content from Mises Institute or Cato Institute.

gruez3• 6 years ago

What we recognize as freedoms and human rights are more appropriately associated with limited government, separation of powers, and republics.

There's a term for this, "liberal democracy".

l33tbro2• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm naive, but I'm done with trying to create startups that integrate within current online ecosystem. Startup culture bullshits on so much about "pain points" to solve in the world, but surely one of our biggest societal pain points right now is the Orwellian panopticon being assembled before us.

Online culture desperately needs rewilding, and I'm at the point now where I believe it is my moral obligation to only work on projects that work toward decentralizing the internet.

shadowgovt2• 6 years ago

Is this extremely aggressive relative to other forms of communication or extremely aggressive relative to the previous, near total laissez-faire communication regulation that encompassed the bulk of the internet traditionally?

lxeiqr• 6 years ago

Poland blocked human rights sites

I'm Polish and although some gambling sites are blocked here (hazard.mf.gov.pl), I haven't heard of a single case of a human rights site being censored.

muyuu4• 6 years ago

so maybe it worked flawlessly?

mzsmyk3• 6 years ago

Or it didn’t happen at all

rllearneratwork• 6 years ago

losing freedom of speech is much easier than re-gaining it.

shripadk• 6 years ago

This is fine to analyze (and I am sure there are thousands of research papers on internet censorship) but what about big tech censorship? Will that ever be included in all these research papers? What about big tech violating their own policies vis-à-vis content moderation, shadow banning and banning accounts without a proper reason? I feel censorship is more layered that it doesn't make sense to only hold Governments responsible. Hold everyone accountable. Not just the Government.

I find it funny that we crib about Government or ISP censorship while completely ignoring big tech censorship. When it comes to big tech, we give them a shield of "oh they are private companies and can do what they want". The nature of the organization has nothing to do with censorship (which is more a moral issue than a legal issue).

john_moscow• 6 years ago

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.

Am I the only one that finds this hypocritical? So, a handful of individual companies controlling what most of the people in the U.S. will see online is no problem. These companies being funded by a small group of SV investors and not serving the interest of its users (since users don't pay for Google, Facebook or Twitter) is OK. These companies having a very strong incentive to help a certain political party, due to its lenience in antitrust and bailout matters is OK. These companies filtering ideas and conversations that could reduce the popularity of that party, where the country is already very divided, is also OK.

But India blocking a site relevant to a small fraction of its population is major threat to the Democracy.

Well, maybe that's because had the authors published any other outcome, they would never find another job in Academia anymore, due to pressure from numerous activists. But the problem is Poland, of course.

elevenoh2• 6 years ago

How about the online discourse manipulation (arguable another form of censoring ideas)? It's a cat & mouse game that can't be won.

jml7c57• 6 years ago

Direct link to the study: https://censoredplanet.org/assets/censoredplanet.pdf

lettergram2• 6 years ago

Of my past 10 posts on HN 6 have been flagged and removed by users. Of those, many made it to the front page with 10+ votes.

I contacted Dang and he was clear it was users censoring it, further that some users were also "vouching" for my posts. It's to the point, people don't want to know.

I feel I'm fairly even handed in my discussion. Here's a couple of my posts (who knows if I'll get flagged):

- Public Safety Announcement: The 2020 Election is Not Over (https://austingwalters.com/public-safety-announcement-the-20...)

- Firearms by the Numbers (https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/)

- Update: The Dead Vote In Michigan – Voter Database Being Modified (https://austingwalters.com/update-the-dead-vote-in-michigan/)

NOTE: I make no real claims in there, simply state the counter argument to the main media narrative. I have a blog post itself there.

I'm SERIOUSLY concerned about the fact both sides of the political spectrum have no idea what the other is claiming. I'm desperately trying to get my social circle to understand.

ericsoderstrom• 6 years ago

From the HN guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I think these examples you cited are pretty clearly off topic

snazz• 6 years ago

Politics is generally off-topic here other than in a few specific posts that are explicitly allowed because they're so newsworthy, like the death of RBG and the media calling the election.

cryptica3• 6 years ago

I think the fact that politics can't be discussed here is itself a form of censorship.

Because people are not able to freely exchange ideas about politics, you end up with silos.

The main reason why the subject of politics causes flame wars is because people are thinking about it emotionally because they have very little actual information to work with.

The less sharing of information there is on the subject, the more divided people are going to be.

tolbish• 6 years ago

You are getting flagged for posting off topic, not because of any kind of political censorship. There are subreddits for the kind of posts you're submitting.

rbanffy4• 6 years ago

both sides of the political spectrum have no idea what the other is claiming.

I'm not sure that's true. As your post about Michigan voter database points out, one side is making up facts they themselves don't believe in order to push the perception the results are invalid. The objective is not to reverse the results, which it's very unlikely they'll be able to do, but to use the perception to justify moves you allude to on the first post.

All in all, this is dangerous territory here in HN, as most of the debates around these end up in shouting matches.

Presenting multiple sides of an argument is only productive if all sides are engaging the debate honestly.

lawnchair_larry8• 6 years ago

This is incorrect and illustrates the parent’s point. There is a sincerely held belief that a subset of the people who had the means, motive, and opportunity to influence the results in key districts may have succumbed to the temptation. This is actually the more rational position as far as I can tell. So, a lot of people are looking at anything that may prove or disprove this. This is in no way unlike what the democrats do. It’s still a common belief that the 2000 election was stolen, and academics were analyzing it even years after. Also, Trump lost by fewer votes than Abrams did, and that’s still a conspiracy theory in the left. It seems odd to me that so many folks on the left don’t realize how similar they are.

Are you engaging honestly? Or are you just assuming bad faith?

The dangerous territory is acting as though legitimate questions and inquiry is dangerous territory. Many of us in tech have had election security concerns for like a decade. We set up voting machines for kids to hack at defcon.

Of course, there are loud Q anon types on twitter throwing out all kinds of crap. Most of them are actually sincere as well, even though we know better and it seems silly. But those voices aren’t representative of the legitimate concerns.

I asked my wife, who hates Trump, if she was tasked with reporting a vote total in a crucial district, and she had the opportunity to plausibly fudge the numbers such that it would change the outcome, would she “do the right thing” and save us from another 4 years of Trump?

She said yes without hesitation. Somehow, I don’t think she is the only person who thinks that way. That doesn’t mean that someone cheated, but only a fool would take their word for it. With so much on the line, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get more certainty. We already know that voter fraud happens routinely, and even enough to swing elections. Especially in Philadelphia. We also know that humans make mistakes. In most elections, mistakes are a rounding error that is below the noise floor. In a tight race, a few mistakes can change the outcome.

You’re better off letting them look and find nothing than shout them down and say “nothing to see here!”. As part of this process, a lot of irregularities are going to be found that appear suspicious, and most are going to have benign explanations after they are investigated. That doesn’t make it bad faith.

They have already found several errors and thousands of ballots on memory cards that they “forgot” to upload. Ensuring that these were isolated incidents only makes sense.

forest_dweller• 6 years ago

People seem to conflate understanding an opponents argument with accepting the opponents argument.

gruez3• 6 years ago

NOTE: I make no real claims in there, simply state the counter argument to the main media narrative

You claim that, and you might be acting in good faith, but enough bad faith actors have used the "I'm just asking questions" excuse that any fringe/conspiratorial material is assumed to be bad faith, and therefore flagged.

bluntfang2• 6 years ago

Why isn't this post removed for meta discussion?

blackrock• 6 years ago

It’s all fun and games to coup whoever you want.

Until the chickens come home to roost. And you find your own people rioting, and your society begins to melt down from all its inequality.

twotimeonly• 6 years ago

If the rest of the content in this article is as misleading as the part about Norway it is useless. The allegations about Norwegian ISPs blocking human rights websites and match.com are demonstrably false.

As part of a wider European effort there is an DNS-based block (The Child Sexual Abuse Anti-Distribution Filter (CSAADF) is part of the COSPOL Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project (CIRCAMP))run by the ISPs to censor access to child pornography.

rbanffy4• 6 years ago

A while back it was not possible to get to the Pirate Bay from Ireland. Not sure how it is now.

superkuh• 6 years ago

And what do you think these nation states are going to do once your corporate browser won't let you visit HTTP sites? They're going to use the centralization of HTTPS cert authorities to completely control of public speech. Sure, you can self sign, or leave HTTP on, but no one will be able to access it.

holidayacct• 6 years ago

The internet is completely controlled server side and has been for over a decade. There isn't a single site or platform that isn't compromised in one form or another.

muyuu4• 6 years ago

the Internet golden age of freedom won't be back for the mainstream, it was an artefact of its rapid explosion and the inability of large State players to react in time. We've seen the window between the period when it was below the radar and the period when its threat was recognised but counter-measures were not developed - but that is pretty much over

of course there will always be spaces of freedom but they won't be so easily accessible for the average person - or else there will be draconian measures to "correct" that situation

the big revelation is that the majority of the people in the "free world" (also euphemistically called "the West") are clamouring for these freedoms to be ended, which is a societal phenomenon one wouldn't have expected 10, 20 years ago... but these changes were coming regardless

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

Annoying when the subject of the article is a paper but the article does not link to the paper.

Here is the link

https://censoredplanet.org/assets/censoredplanet.pdf

https://censoredplanet.org/assets/censoredplanet-slides.pdf

Yesterday there was a discussion on the HN frontpage about Firefox "HTTPS-Only Mode" and the thread's 2nd to top comment was a user saying they wanted only one source of DNS data: their ISP. (No other alternatives or backups.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25122260

Perhaps some users really do not care if their ISP now or in the future censors their access to resources on the internet. Perhaps some users will only start to care about the potential for censorship when a site being censored is one they want to access.

Generally, anyone using third party DNS is potentially subject to censorship via an easy, popular method.

SNI is another easy method. Browsers by default send plaintext SNI to every HTTPS site. However not all HTTPS sites require SNI (check for presence of SNI or check SNI against Host header). Additionally, all Cloudflare sites support encrypted SNI.

dalbasal2• 6 years ago

The cat is out of the bag. Countries know they can apply censorship now and they will. I think this article has it's pen in the right place. This is a trend within the world's freest democracies.

Direct censorship has been pretty limited so far, but a permanent structure for internet censorship has been put in place.

rudolfwinestock• 6 years ago

The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as weakness or wickedness, and attacks it.

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Well, Google and Facebook engage in effective censorship already - which, while not massive-scale, is still aggressive (depending on where you're standing I guess). And and that kind of covers the world's democracies.

swiley• 6 years ago

If you live in a developed European country that is considering this, look at Turkey and Thailand to see where this sort of thing gets you.

lurker619• 6 years ago

I don't think there is any specific solution, just like there isn't any "solution" to the various wars going on around the world. Social media is going to be a geopolitical quagmire with governments and corporations constantly fighting for control in an ongoing game of whack-a-mole. The tech part has been commoditized. It's time to exit this arena and let the black-suited government guys take over. There should be more interesting technologies on the horizon soon.

kovac• 6 years ago

"We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and it’s supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders,".

It is. That doesn't mean that a democratically elected govt has to allow sites considered "good" by a private group (like the authors of this article) especially when even the authors themselves seem to be okay with blocking child pornography sites. It's tricky to argue against articles like this as it can quickly be twisted into an argument against human rights or same-sex marriages.

As far as I can see, all parties involved are behaving exactly like one would expect in a free society. People deciding who they want ruling them, democratically elected govts deciding what's good for their societies, ISPs following the laws and those who want to access the blocked sites firing up vpns and accessing them anyway while a group of people whining about this whole situation for profit pretending like they are the watchmen of a free society. This is virtue signalling. A private group passing judgment on what other sovereign nations may consider right and wrong (at that time) for their peoples.

Pils3• 6 years ago

especially when even the authors themselves seem to be okay with blocking child pornography sites.

...are you not? Like, I get your "moral relativism" argument, but I don't think anyone besides "extra-principled" libertarians would think there is some hypocrisy between advocating against the censorship of news/political ideas and literal child abuse.

joshuamcginnis• 6 years ago

If we are going to have an honest conversation about censorship in the United States, we must call out the political left as the principal perpetuator. Whether it's college campuses violently protesting conservative speakers (e.g. Ben Shapiro), tech platforms banning and labeling speech they disagree with (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Reddit), or corporate America demonizing those whose speak the truth and/or hold differing views from politically left ideologies (e.g. James Damore), postmodern leftist ideology, as articulated so poignantly by Dr. Jordan Peterson, is not only attacking our free speech, but drawing under question the very ideas that form the foundation of our country. I think I speak for many rational liberally-minded small-government constitutional conservatives when I say that it has become increasingly dangerous for us to even have our ideas, let alone express them. This notion that because you feel your ideas you give the moral high-ground you can justify doing horrible things to your fellow citizen with whom you disagree with must be stopped.

gnarbarian• 6 years ago

The only way to do this is to embrace decentralized and unmoderated platforms. We've lost the freedom of the distributed internet by exchanging it for the convenience of centralized platforms like google and facebook. Even hacker news, and reddit are centralized dictatorships with a bit of democratic groupthink tossed in (effectively minimizing provocative content).

I think we'll start to see stuff built on IPFS and libp2p that will break that trend at least for some of us. Maybe it'll be like the internet used to be, for the technically inclined who aren't afraid of being offended or offensive.

jesuscyborg• 6 years ago

Have you read James Damore's essay? If you look at only the abstract theory, there wasn't a whole lot of 'think differently' or rebellious points of view in there. Totally identical mindset to the status quo establishment. He just decided to be rude while presenting his arguments using non-technical language, and pointing out things about people that they're powerless to change. That's what makes it scary. For example, no one would have thought the worst of him if he wrote a treatise talking about behavioral correlations between samples having or not having the sry gene and called out publishers for suppressing such statistics. Instead he called women neurotic. Not a great way to speak truth to power.

9726ag• 6 years ago

Not defending the rest of damore but the neurotic thing is a reference to well known research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism. The fault in that case lies with whoever named a technical research concept using a word that already had negative popular associations.

lgleason• 6 years ago

In a US context as a US citizen I'm a big free speech advocate and am against people censoring that in the name of things such as "hate speech" etc..

Outside of the US though I have mixed emotions. The reason for that has to do with the effect that the Internet has had on cultures throughout the world since the smartphone and social media really caught on.

Before social media and and the smartphone revolution I remembered seeing more of a difference of world views, culture etc. when I traveled to Europe, Africa, Asia etc.. Today, due in large part to the Internet, things are much more homogenized and that diversity seems to have been traded for ideas that tend to favor the Anglo/American world view.

While we may moralize and say that some countries are better for adopting ideas etc. that we think are better, people in these countries might understandably disagree with all of that being positive. Thus censorship is viewed as a way to try to limit this outside influence. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I can understand the why...

birktj3• 6 years ago

This is pretty bad. As have been pointed out by multiple commenters in this thread a lot of the examples in this article and the underlying paper are simply incorrect. I'm Norwegian and I can say with extremely high confidence that three domains given as an example in the paper [1] (page 10): hrw.org, match.com and 163.com has never been blocked by any major ISP in Norway. However I do know that some piracy and gambling sites are. I tried to download the data for myself [2] to take a closer look, however as I do not study in the US and thus do not have a .edu email address access is blocked.

[1] https://censoredplanet.org/assets/censoredplanet.pdf

[2] https://censoredplanet.org/data/raw

tootie4• 6 years ago

If you call your tool Censored Planet it certainly implies you have a conclusion in mind before you start collecting data.

Guereric• 6 years ago

It's succinct and relevant. What do you suggest is better?

washadjeffmad• 6 years ago

obviously bad, like child pornography or pirated content

No one who would equate the potential loss of revenue from copyright infringement and the systematic sexual exploitation of children is doing so in the children's interest.

It's too far to say that this is how the US can pass and renew DMCA but can't find it in their hearts to arrest anyone on Epstein's frequent flyer list, though, isn't it?

drummer• 6 years ago

Censorship is now also called "fact checking" on social media platforms.

harry8• 6 years ago

Whatever your views on the particular case being blogged about below, it is widely regarded as being hugely important for the freedom of journalists and journalism. In fact I haven't heard the argument that it isn't, if there is one at all. I've also seen nothing to suggest that the below is some kind of bold fabrication. If you're not worried by it, you probably should be. Whenever you hear "They can't be trusted to analyse and come to the correct conclusion." Means _you_ can't and won't get the chance. Make up your own mind is difficult advice to follow when you're not allowed the information on which to do so.

Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40% from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook. That is a fall from 90% to 12%. In the February hearings Facebook and Twitter were between them sending me over 200,000 readers a day. Now they are between them sending me 3,000 readers a day. To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister – people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline. My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

zests2• 6 years ago

Unbelievable. This is a tragedy.

gitgud• 6 years ago

Surprising that there's no data on Australia here. The Australian government has implemented a ton of [1] regulation/censorship on the internet.

There's also been an [2] anti-encryption law recently passed to give the government unprecedented access to social media accounts and website in the name of national security...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...

[2] https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...

emergie• 6 years ago

News, human rights and government sites saw a censorship spike in Poland after protests in July 2019

I'm not aware of any site blocking other than unregistered online gambling sites. If something like that would occur it would be a big news.

Polish politicians are not able to censor polish Internet without causing a big stir - the infrastructure is not controlled by state entities.

Only facebook/twitter are able to do so, because they are in complete control of their microcosm. Recently fb banned account of a polish politician with 780k followers. He is a bizzare person that sometimes likes to express edgy opinions or make political attention-grabbing mini happenings. Nevertheless a major politician was silenced by decision of some employee of polish division of american corporation.

noodlesUK• 6 years ago

What’s funny is that this article doesn’t even load on my T-Mobile connection here in the US without a VPN. I’m not accusing anyone of impropriety, but it’s certainly a funny coincidence.

FreeTrade• 6 years ago

Only P2P platforms like Bittorrent and Bitcoin have shown effective censorship resistance from government.

For effective censorship resistant speech, the only effective solution is P2P speech platforms like scuttlebutt and member.cash

Moving from one private platform to another is just rearranging deckchairs.

zyxzevn2• 6 years ago

This is the tip of the iceberg.

We already knew that governments censor Human rights and leaks proving war-crimes and false flags. Even the UK puts journalists in prison.

But today it has grown to the censorship of Doctors and Scientists, because they have better insight in what is really happening than the governments. That is because the governments are guided by lobbyists.

nstj• 6 years ago

Surprised it didn’t call out more western/OECD nations. From my perspective the internet in the west is a shadow of its former progressive self.

hliyan2• 6 years ago

I'm coming to the realization that misinformation has to be combatted at the ear and not the mouth. I feel the world needs to go through a learning period where everyone realizes that whatever they read on the Internet is default false and they need to verify before they believe anything. In the least they need to verify credibility of sources, if not individual articles or tweets. I suppose what we're experiencing now is the pain of that learning period.

old-gregg• 6 years ago

I feel the world needs to go through a learning period where everyone realizes that whatever they read on the Internet is default false

The world had 50+ years to learn this about the TV, but didn't. Don't hold your breath.

toolz• 6 years ago

It might be counter productive to think it'll get better if people can just assume social media sites will ban/flag misinformation correctly. Maybe only lower profile stuff will slip through, but the volume of misinformation will barely change I suspect and users that haven't learned how to train their own filter might be more likely to believe "unflagged" content.

frankbreetz• 6 years ago

There is more gate keeping for TV, therefore less false information. Anyone can post on Twitter or Facebook.

wizardforhire• 6 years ago

Not only this and the parent comment is also correct but this is the lesson that civilization will continually have to deal with every generation ad nauseam. This is our time and our struggle and how we handle this and all the issues afoot will set the course for humanity.

We as a species and our societies by proxy are self actualizing kicking and screaming.

bori5• 6 years ago

The Parade https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...

taneq2• 6 years ago

Trusting sources and verifying information is actually an incredibly hard game. Being too credulous leaves you open to misinformation, but on the other hand, being uncritically skeptical leads to the current "fake news" environment where (to those involved) no source is credible and we might as well all just believe whatever meets our preconceptions and dismiss the rest.

colordrops2• 6 years ago

Do you have a suggestion or thesis? It's not so hard that it couldn't be taught to average humans. Even if it was extremely hard, it should still be taught, considering its importance.

somesortofsystm2• 6 years ago

One should only trust named, identified sources. The age of anonymous sources in mainstream media needs to end, because an anonymous source is not a source.

Yes, sources should be protected. But there should be mechanisms in place to protect sources who identify themselves that do not require the gullible public to just believe what they were told, because an authority said it was okay to believe something an anonymous person said about something.

Maybe this is something that the crypto/cert folks should address - a means of verifying that a source has been properly and adequately identified, without revealing the details required to target that individual for harassment/assassination/etc.

A media clearing house for sources, or a blockchain ...

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

This was the perspective that set the course for current actions, but the situation got worse.

cannedslime• 6 years ago

I feel like if media didnt seem conglomerated and opinionated, none of this would ever have been an issue. The problem is that globally, media has become aligned in its objectives, languages etc. to the point where anyone with just a shred of critical thinking would at least be skeptical about the quality of truth from mass media.

This is partly because american NGOs have orchestrated a huge indoctrination effort among journalists on a global scale. I have worked for national media for a little under a decade and every place I worked, there was journalists participating in stuff from "open societies foundation".

The quality of journalism has reached such a low that when tourists are group raped for hours and then are finally decapitated by religious fanatics (Any other description would not be allowed in media anymore, but you know who) who film and put it on the internet. they use terms like "Found with injuries on their neck". And then our police and media do everything they can to stop the real horrific truth from surfacing. No wonder people stop believing a word and become overly skeptical.

Honestly I think its a sign of health that people become skeptical regarding mass media. It would be even healthier if the general populace started to dismantle the power structures that dictates our dystopian future.

chroem-• 6 years ago

How should we handle misinformation from official sources? It wasn't that long ago the New York Times told the world they had evidence of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, setting off a chain of events that literally killed hundreds of thousands of people. In today's political climate, the misinformation that led to the Iraq War could never have been exposed.

Edit: surely I'm not the only one who remembers how the NYT almost singlehandedly started a war based on false reporting?

chordalkeyboard8• 6 years ago

Is there even a way to vet information from official sources?

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

This is not well-understood by most people, even at the time.

Saddam Hussein did have a "weapon of mass destruction", poison gas, and used it on Kurds. You can find photos of bodies with white foam from their mouths from that time.

He did not have much, if any, nuclear technology, despite the "aluminum tubes" news clips which led to the concern over weapons of mass destruction. (There are specialized alloys used in nuclear processing, but not aluminum.)

Aside from that, the main information source was an exiled Iraqi politician that the administration said was credible to construct their narrative.

So Saddam Hussein went from a US ally, to a war criminal.

One major US newspaper tried to push back, but the rest, including the NYT, just repeated everything the White House said.

ohthehugemanate• 6 years ago

Keep remembering and reminding people, please. Also the political backers, including the new president-elect and many of the talking heads currently employed by the "left" side of the media spectrum. I know they're considered good guys now, but they did much worse than the current crop of bad guys ever managed.

David Frum, Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, and General Michael Hayden are now MSNBC and #resist heroes. James Clapper and John Brennan are on CNN payroll as talking heads. At least the orange guy and his particular complicit press never passed a Patriot Act, didn't start any warrantless kidnapping/detainment/torture/execution programs, or mass surveillance programs against their own people, and didn't start any wars. More than I can say for NYT, CNN, et al.

The "official" outlets are populated by former CIA/NSA/FBI, and similar people with a documented history of lying (even to Congress) to protect abuses of constitutional and even human rights. In that context it's very hard to trust ANY information source, especially algorithmically. I don't know how to write a program that recognizes these people who were liars yesterday are now the good guys.

So yes, please keep remembering and remind people. Large parts of the current problem rest on a bed of forgetfulness.

throw20111907403• 6 years ago

Well, even more recently there have been revelations that one of their sources about the Syrian war has been just some guy who made up all of his story. https://globalnews.ca/news/7350363/rcmp-arrests-abu-huzayfah...

With their recent breaking story of Donald Trump $750 tax, I've been reading through their published article, but have not found any solid evidence for this proposed figure, only just a bunch of links to their previous articles in past years. If anyone can find some actual evidence for the $750 tax bill from the NYT report, I would very much like to see it https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html

nullsense• 6 years ago

If I apply that logic to your comment then everything on the internet should be assumed to be true.

didibus• 6 years ago

I'd like to distinguish what this article is talking about, which is the government blocking actual websites, against moderation on private social media websites and platforms.

I don't mean that the latter is not necessarily a problem or not, but we definitely should not be mixing up our thoughts and impression of one with the other, they are very very different in nature.

mxcrossb• 6 years ago

I think the problem is that humans by default assume what they’re reading is true for social cohesion. Especially if you think of social media (or comment sections), I mean why would I ever bother interacting with others if I assume everything I’m being told is false?

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

We had that around 2010 basically before the threat of fake news was conjured up. Still angry at those panicking...

electrondood• 6 years ago

I think a two-pronged approach is needed, though it's hard to educate the "ear" when it only wants to hear information confirming it's existing position.

grillvogel• 6 years ago

probably things are different now, but in the "old days" school assignments didnt consider internet sources to be "real" sources and you had to use books etc for your reports

IanSanders• 6 years ago

We just need to put more value in human integrity. It's too easy to do "the wrong thing" with 0 consequences

throwaway69123• 6 years ago

Is there any research that proves that internet miss information is any worse than the typical propaganda that people have been subjected too for the majority of our recent history?

zaptheimpaler2• 6 years ago

The big problem in todays age is we can no longer assume the government is accountable to us, or even get straight answers from the right people there.

Why can't I ask someone at the government directly exactly what their policy is on blocking websites, which sites are blocked, and what the legal basis for blocking is? And get a real, detailed, authoritative answer? And contest that answer if it does not meet legal standards?

The current standard is far, far removed from that. They can block a site or surveil you without any realistic accountability. The legal system is technically a recourse, but that works only in horribly egregious cases like NSA spying revealed by Snowden, and after years of delay after the case has faded from public consciousness. Even that didn't change anything about how the government acts today. And we would not have known about it if it hadn't been for "illegal" whistleblowing.

When the average person can't even get straight answers from the government about how they govern, let alone influence that policy, that is a failure of democracy. We are trying to solve problems in the democratic functioning of government using technology, but that will only ever be a cat and mouse game. These f decided on their own that mass surveillance & censorship is okay, and we are left trying to use technology to hide when we should be able to demand a national conversation about what kinds of surveillance is okay.

dbsmith83• 6 years ago

Completely agree with your sentiment. I think the only recourse is to aggressively use the legal system for any case of arbitrary censorship. If you are blocked, you must sue your ISP and/or the government. Articles like this make me happy that we at least have a few organizations to help with this (EFF). Hopefully, with a new administration net neutrality can be restored as well.

tootie4• 6 years ago

Snowden had nothing to do with censorship. I haven't seen a credible accusation of internet censorship against the government in recent memory. Private companies can refuse to serve certain customers. And obviously there's copyright law and government secrecy laws. But no personal expression is banned.

petre• 6 years ago

US ”censorship” happens through AI flagging and demoting content, screaming louder than the next guy, distorting the narrative, DMCA takedowns. And it's quite effective. A high percent if people won't ever see the content. One can probably still see it if they take extra steps.

unishark2• 6 years ago

I think Snowden was just a general reference to needing whistle-blowers to bring accountability because the rest of us are in the dark.

But I think the point doesn't apply as well here. People measuring censorship thought of that already and aren't simply relying on govt to share info on the censorship it does. They also test access to sites. Obviously non-transparent regimes everywhere will often censor discretly (e.g. a story exposing their corruption).

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

Mass surveillance induces censorship and has a chilling effect on speech, so it is arguably true that security agencies violated the constitution they are sworn to protect.

chordalkeyboard8• 6 years ago

The big problem in todays age is we can no longer assume the government is accountable to us, or even get straight answers from the right people there.

Consider the notion that government has always been this way however its easier to tell this now because we are all so interconnected and informed.

igorkraw• 6 years ago

That's a cynical take, a slightly less cynical take is that the rich and (privately) powerful have always tried to cement their power in form of organising a feudal-ish state and that the rest of us had to actively support democratising forces to counteracting them.

What this means is having everything which lends itself to monopoly to democratic control, not private control, and to work together to make democratic control as efficient, localized and legitimate as possible. A well oiled, properly constrained bureaucracy is a wonderful thing, as anyone who has experienced e.g. German and post-soviet bureaucracy can attest to. And yet the Germans (rightfully) still think their bureaucracy needs improvement, because of course it does, but it's still necessary and better than privatising the essential services that are provided.

"Starve the beast" is a warcry of rich and powerful who will benefit from the vacuum after they pervert and hollow out working institutions like the US post office (if you think it's not profitable and relying on tax payers money, do your research please).

Technology and interconnection is kinda neutral here, it has helped to raise awareness of the problems but has also helped to spread misinformation and lies by the likes of Prager U And their ilk

zaptheimpaler2• 6 years ago

Even so, the technological tools for surveillance and censorship are far more effective and widespread today than before. Surveillance might have meant tapping your phone, reading your mail or following you and all the manual labor and cost that entails a few decades ago. Today its conceivable to run a search across every email, call, message, photo, bank transaction, location signal etc a person has quickly and cheaply. The stakes are much higher when they are capable of so much more.

dheera2• 6 years ago

In this age among democracies it also isn't just governments that are blocking content -- it's companies that play gatekeeper in communications between people. People have stopped reading traditional forms of interpersonal communication, so my only way to get messages out to friends is through platforms like Facebook.

Unfortunately, Facebook themselves like to play gatekeeper on what my friends see and don't see, which I personally think is unethical. For example, if I post something about the election, its visibility may be restricted among my friends, so I need to do all kinds of Unicode upside-down tricks to prevent Facebook from even knowing my post is about the election. If I post a Youtube link instead of a Facebook video, Facebook downranks it because Youtube is a competitor, and downranks it to the point that friends don't actually see it. Sometimes they downrank text only posts to the point that I need to include e.g. a cat picture to get Facebook to give it the proper visibility.

I once posted to my feed something about donating to a particular disaster relief NGO, only to be censored out by Facebook because they mostly censor external links (only a small fraction of friends actually see them). No friends saw it in the first hour in their feed. I asked several and they didn't see it in their feed. Fishy, eh? I delete the post and re-post the same thing saying "Google for XYZ to find the donation website" instead of an actual link and BAM 40+ likes in the first hour and several friends donated.

Personally I think this corporate censorship is unethical. It's okay for Facebook to play the ranking game with business-sponsored media but definitely NOT okay with them doing that between friends who have mutually agreed to follow each other. I'm okay with a "popular posts" section on top of everything else, but the "everything else" really must include every single post of all of the people I have chosen to be friends with unless I specifically tell them to mute a particular person's content.

Ironically, WeChat doesn't engage in this type of censorship. They obey government censorship, but besides that, I can guarantee on WeChat that a post that I make that passes the government test will be seen by every single contact if they happen to be looking at the feed. I much prefer that model, rather than Facebook's sporadic random non-transparent censoring.

unishark2• 6 years ago

Is this because you haven't confirmed your identity? I presume that is for stopping the alleged bot campaigns trying to affect elections.

Or is there a setting somewhere to block political-looking posts? Because this would be awesome. I heard something about 3rd party software claiming such a feature but I wouldn't trust them.

StreamBright3• 6 years ago

In this age among democracies it also isn't just governments that are blocking content -- it's companies that play gatekeeper in communications between people.

Sure but the government could do something about it, but they do not, partially because it supports their agenda. The recent congressional hearings made it quite obvious that the 3 big tech companies having the majority of internet traffic going through them are in sync when it comes to "moderation" enforcement.

anticodon6• 6 years ago

I don't get what any government has to do with it. Almost all information now is consumed via Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. These are private companies that has their own censorship rules and push their own agenda aggressively. Government has no control over this, even USA government as was seen recently when Facebook blocked links to NYT articles and Twitter was censoring Trump twits.

All other countries (except for China that just blocks Google entirely) have to live with the fact that all information consumed by their citizens is controlled by private companies from USA.

E.g. when I just started using YouTube, most of my recommendations in Russia were "opposition" channels (mostly by notorious A. Navalny - a daft populist). When I ignored one channel from YouTube recommendations, it offered me another channel with the same content. I had to explicitly ignore these channels for months before it stopped offering them to me. It still continue to offer me channels with more subtle and clever anti-Russian propaganda. Pro-Russian channels on YouTube are blocked regularly. Pro-Russian videos are blocked even more often or they are hidden from search results (e.g. when someone does a video about rampant rusophobia in a movie or a game).

I've canceled my Facebook account because of this. My FB feed was always full of rusophobic articles and all accounts that are even mildly pro-Russian (I'm talking about accounts of Russian people living in Russia) are regularly blocked temporarily or permanently.

passerby1• 6 years ago

Interesting, your post is downvoted without any comments. Maybe it wouldn't harm to say what's wrong?

fps_doug2• 6 years ago

Don't get the downvotes either. This is a somewhat valid point. I feel like many people, even here on HN really like to paint the world black and white in this regard.

Everything bad we hear about Russia & China must undoubtedly be true, because it's reported by our press, and we have freedom of press, which means that our press never lies or has an agenda. At least when it comes to foreign affairs. So your Facebook feed must've undoubtedly told the unbiased truth about your country.

cryptica3• 6 years ago

The government does have control over this. They could easily introduce a law which forbids platforms from censoring any legal content. They choose not to do this.

StreamBright3• 6 years ago

Essentially the US replicated what the USSR had as state censorship but with private corporations and it is impacting international communication not only US. The best part is that some people think it is for the greater good. When you would like to talk about it you are getting downvoted.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

planetree• 6 years ago

Perhaps this gives a clue as to why: https://about.fb.com/news/2018/05/announcing-new-election-pa...

Facebook uses an Atlanticist thinktank as an honest broker to censor information.

ordu2• 6 years ago

I do not know why Google blocks pro-russian sources, but I know why I'd blocked them, if I could. They are not "pro-russian", they are all "pro-Putin". Any "pro-russian" source that is not "pro-Putin" will become "anti-russian" in a short time, because of activity of other "pro-russian" sources. They just forcibly stick "anti-russian" label on such a source, and here we are. Putin do all he could, to draw an equality sign between "Russia" and "Putin". And it works. Now no media needs to do nothing, "anti-russian" label sicks to any "anti-Putin" media all by itself. I know this, because I'm russian, I'm anti-Putin, and I tried to find a "pro-russian" and "anti-putin" source. I tried and failed. There is not such thing.

When a media use any material to promote it's propaganda ideas, doesn't bother with truth, use any dirty trick to mock opponents, it should be blocked.

But if Google blocked such dirty media, then what is to remain? Only "anti-Putin" media, which is all marked as "anti-russian".

I repeat: I do not know, why Google blocked "pro-putin" media, maybe due to reasons I described above, maybe because of order from a masonic lodge or from USA government. But the result is the same: all that is not blocked is "anti-russian".

3633737446• 6 years ago

As others have pointed out to varying degrees, everything you highlighted happens at the discretion of the government. Doing nothing does not imply a lack of engagement it simply means that the government sees no reason to act.

duckmysick• 6 years ago

Which NYT articles were blocked on Facebook?

herbst• 6 years ago

This sounds like a problem that 'real democracy' or 'direct democracy' pretty much diesnt have.

raxxorrax17• 6 years ago

I agree with you, but...

but that works only in horribly egregious cases like NSA spying revealed by Snowden

Did it really work though?

If government just would have people have a crazy talk on the internet and subject them to paranoia that has been validated, it could have been a nicer situation than what we are currently dealing with.

C19is20• 6 years ago

It's not a 'failure of democracy' - that's just how democracy works. You're just not in the majority....of people behind the scenes using voters to scam each other by pretending there's actual change. The only thing worse than a politician is someone who votes for them, and believes that's all there is to it. The real power is at the water kooler.

lukasm• 6 years ago

Before getting outraged, can we first confirm the story? It seems European countries have blocked gambling ads. There is no source for other claims e.g. human rights website.

woodpanel2• 6 years ago

They are litterally mentioning Norwegian ISPs blocking "Human Rights Watch" right in the next sentence after talking about blocking gambling ads.

Am I missing something or how is the one sentence a source and the next one isn't?

GoblinSlayer• 6 years ago

Websites can also block address ranges on their side.

nzmsv• 6 years ago

So Russia's censor meets your stated requirements, I think. There is an official publicly visible blocklist that includes a justification for each blocked site: http://blocklist.rkn.gov.ru/

There is a procedure for challenging a decision to block. All the content on that list is blocked in accordance with some law, it's just that the laws themselves are questionable...

Thorrez2• 6 years ago

“When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,”

I don't really see how this is true. Net neutrality made it possible for companies to implement the ability to block stuff (but not actually block stuff)? Wasn't it always technically and legally possible for companies to block stuff, sometimes even required? The very next paragraph mentions child pornography or pirated content.

kebman• 6 years ago

What is the "Freedom Score" based upon? I find it strange that the USA has such a low score (in the 80's), though I do note that the censorship in the USA isn't really as much state-driven, as it is corporate. I also noted that Iceland has a lower score than Norway, which seems odd to me, as it's for instance known to fervently support the integrity of servers stationed there.

I've noticed that part of the reason Norway has less censorship than other countries, is because it's outside the EU (despite being a de-facto member). In several instances of using a VPN, things that were censored in the EU (I remember checking several EU countries) weren't cencored in either Norway or the USA.

CrLf• 6 years ago

Maybe I missed something, but what is that 3D model supposed to represent?

notjes2• 6 years ago

Gov. outsourced its censorship to corporations. That is why HN censors all alternatives to the mainstream.

notjes2• 6 years ago

HN is the perfect example why censorship is getting more and more extreme.

known• 6 years ago

TRUTH is suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/compliance/privacy/conspiracy/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/intellectual property https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014

‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

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