I think that there are a lot of people on HN and similar communities who either didn't live through the crypto wars of the 90s or are burned out on the critical privacy and societal implications of networked software and services.
It's nicer to just "shut up and hack", but the last time we did that, we ended up with hollywood indirectly dictating what we can do with our own devices. This time the stakes are much higher, as it's not just the "hollywood-only" devices like disc players and TVs they're getting ready to totally ruin.
It's disheartening to me to see the trend of people in technology, at least in certain circles, wishing only to enjoy the benefits of giant corporation resources (eg golang, TLS1.3, HTTP2/3, v8/node, Chrome, Android, iOS) without contemplating the implications of the downsides of giant corporation resources (surveillance, censorship, AMP, javascript hard dependencies, browser monoculture, et c). A system needs to be evaluated on the whole.
I think about this semi-constantly, and have a lot of trouble getting most of my friends to factor these kinds of issues into their world view or consider their importance. I'm too young to remember the crypto wars of the 90's (I was a kid back then), but I'm well aware of them and bring them up fairly often when talking to peers about the background pushes against encryption that constantly happen. I also make a lot of personal effort to rid my life of resources owned by large corporations, but I often wonder if there is something more I could be doing to resist these things.
It ultimately has nothing to do with whether or not we outliers use these services or not; the world needs to be changed so that these services are either modified to preserve privacy, or the services need to be shut down, or the user base needs to abandon them.
I'm not a big fan of forcing people to do things they don't want to do, so I think the best way forward is 3, via education. Already it's uncool to use Facebook. The next step is Instagram and WhatsApp, and perhaps even the facebook spyware SDK.
While i didnt vote for red this year (independent) I totally agree and the sudden labeling of certain tweets is egregious towards free speech.
There is so much fake stuff on the Internet and tech companies suddenly labeling tweets of the president, but not others is disgusting and goes against free speech. No labeling is needed.. speech that doesn't cause physical harm should not be labeled!
Im speaking as a proponent of free speech only as I could not vote for that person and do not believe much of any political mumbo jumbo (to me it's two billionaires using their resources to do whatever and make up whatever to win).
Yes, but if your labeling one viewpoint and not another then your stifling free speech/free thought ... you no longer are a neutral platform. Idiotic for them to go down such road as labeling only further riles up that persons base.
For many of the kinds of things that get labeled, I'm having some trouble figuring out how you would label both viewpoints.
If X says that the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines are made using aborted fetal tissue and Y says that they are not, and I want to label X as false, what label should I put on Y to label the other viewpoint?
Isnt it opinion like any other then? Just from someone with better platform. You dont need to be general arbiter of truth ro be like "wait, election law is actually different".
You’re misrepresenting what’s being labeled. Trump doesn’t get labeled for stating his opinions or policies, he gets labeled for lying. If Biden starts flagrantly tweeting malicious lies he’ll get labeled, too. The difference is that the modern Republican Party is a couple decades into using their own propaganda supply it's easy to feel like their side is being singled out because the distribution of lying and threats of violence is so heavily skewed.
Who are the two billionaires? I had thought you were talking about the recent Presidential election in the US, but Biden is nowhere near a billionaire.
Almost all of his wealth came from his salary as a Senator (1973 until he became VP) and then his salary for 8 years as VP, plus Social Security starting in 2009 and also pensions. His net worth at the end of that was under half a million.
He's boosted that to somewhere in the $10-20 million range since leaving office, mostly from book deals for him and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee is $100k, but it has ranged from $8k to $190k), and a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement ($540k).
Is the democratic and republican parties not two billionaire or more machines? So, pardon I should have been more clear.
If you choose to believe what your side tells is truth that's fine. I just have a different view and if i have money and want power i am going to use it either solo(ly) or collectively to get what I want. Look at what Peter Thiel did with his money cause of the axe he had to grind with Gawker. He paid for Hulk Hogan's legal defense to annihilate Gawker. I'm sure other money/power bags do similarly and lots in politics. So and for me that is why I believe all politics is mumbo jumbo spun up by billionaires to win; whatever it takes!
Why? Are people with deep technical knowledge, both soft and hard, not allowed to profit from that knowledge? Can you point to some conflict of interest in writing a book, speaking, and being a professor while a private citizen? Are you just against capitalism?
The man spent his entire adult life in service to this country and never profited from it while in the act of that service, which you can't say for many of his colleagues.
This, I think, is such an important point. We hold too many powerful people in our society less accountable then those with less power. We should be striving to achieve the opposite, the more powerful you are, the more accountable you are, the harsher the penalty is for abusing that power.
If I say something inflammatory on HN, it will get flagged, downvoted, potentially result in a temporary or permanent ban, but if the POTUS says something inflammatory on Twitter, we're all just supposed to let it go? It makes no sense, I am, in the grand scheme of things a nobody, and the POTUS, no matter who occupies that position, is one of, if not the, most powerful person(s) in the world. The current occupant is currently screaming "RIGGED ELECTION" on Twitter, and they're not supposed to put some context, note that it is false?
Sock puppet accounts like this are a sybil attack. You can remain anonymous and use an existing HN account to participate in the conversation. Brand new accounts look ambiguous with the propaganda accounts pushed by various nation states.
One of the reason people need to make new accounts when they post anti-censorship thoughts, is that censorship has reached into our industry and a sort of neo-McCarthy blacklisting can occur if you don't espouse neo-liberal talking points. If your pseudonym can be traced to your identity, you risk your career when you fight for individual liberty.
I suspect that this person doesn't understand what neo-liberalism is, who is a neoliberal, or what their talking points are.
Neoliberals are the centrist or right leaning part of the democratic party and the moderate republicans. It is the political position of laissez-faire capitalism, reform, and reduced state influence over the economy.
Reagan and Pelosi are both neoliberal. Maybe this person meant Leftist, Socialist, Anticapitalist, or Progressive talking points?
Yes, Nancy Pelosi. She's part and parcel a corporate democrat, interested in incremental changes that fundamentally support the capital class.
She's against universal healthcare, she's committed to austerity, she supports the surveillance state, she fights against progressive reforms.
It's easy to see the grandstanding that people like Pelosi do as somehow leftist or progressive, but fundamentally she's playing a much more conservative game. She's a democrat who will put on Kente cloth and say black lives matter, while doing nothing to actually improve black lives.
For instance, she mandates pay-go, meaning any new programs must come with new taxes. Seems reasonable, but she's not proposing new programs. She's letting the progressive wing propose them, then letting the right wing attack the progressive wing, and then saying "there was nothing that could be done, maybe we should be taking my compromise, which is predominantly a market driven compromise."
Pelosi is not someone who is out there calling for labor strikes and strong union protections. Compare her to, say, Martin Luther King Jr and his Poor People's Campaign.
I'll leave you with a quote from her:
"I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is."
I'm a little surprised you're being downvoted. I thought you captured the philosophy of neoliberalism well and explained how that mapped onto the US political parties.
I'm not super surprised? I think often centrist dems like to think of themselves as different from moderate republicans. (And vice versa.) More extremist right wing types tend to think Pelosi is some sort of progressive bogeyman and that she's nothing like folks like Reagan or Thatcher. I think all of those groups would disagree with my assessment enough to downvote it. (I suspect a lot of people are upset I called Pelosi a neoliberal.)
That said, my view is only one lens, and there are others. Many don't consider Clinton/Obama/Pelosi and their ilk to be neoliberal. Many do.
Edit: Also, I told someone they were wrong, which is usually a few downvotes. :D
Reddits /r/conservative only allows those who have 'proven they align with conservative views with the mods' to interact with many of their threads.
This is in line with my general experience that those who claim 'conservstices are being censored' are the boy who cried wolf so that they themselves can censor what they don't like. Also called hypocrisy, double standards, the usual.
The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
The fact that places like youtube and Facebook even allow it to exist demonstrates how little 'conservstives' are censored. You can find plenty of conservative channels that advocate for all manner of immoral, factually incorrect and Ill intent to people.
> The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus.
I think it is important to note that there is nothing inherent in conservatism that leads to this. Conservatives are not dumber or more gullible than liberals.
It is just an accident of timing that has resulted in conservatives currently being more likely to fall for such stuff. With just one change 12 years ago, it would be liberals far more than conservatives embracing fact-free conspiracy theories today. In another few years, it may go the other way.
Social media got big enough that a lot of people started getting most of their news that way. More and more people stopped noticing the difference between actual news items in the feed, sponsored items in the feed, opinion pieces in their feed, comments on stories the haven't seen from friends, and satire in their feed.
Two things arose to take advantage of this.
One was governments. They started state sponsored operations that made fake accounts to post material on the social media of countries they were not friendly with.
The other was content farms that generated a bunch of low quality content cheaply, and make money from ads.
Both of these concentrated on content that would be divisive. For the state sponsored material, governments know that just posting a bunch of stuff that extols their government or directly attacks US policies against their government would not help them. That would be caught and called out.
By concentrating on things that would be divisive they hoped to at least distract the US government by making it have to devote more time to dealing with domestic issues.
For the content farms making money from ads, divisive content gets more eyeballs which means for ad revenue.
This started seriously happening during the Obama administration, and so the foreign governments and content farms pushed material aimed at encouraging conservative conspiracy theories because Obama was a liberal.
If McCain had won in 2008, it would have been liberal conspiracy theories that got pushed.
That's a lot of writing to blame a singular event for the rise of disinformation within conservative circles that ignores a whole lot of other reasons that conservatives are prone to this type of disinfo and not (American) liberals.
My recollection is that before around 10 years ago or so, there were these same kind of conspiracy theories and similar nonsense, and I saw them aimed both at conservative and liberals. None of them got much serious traction.
So what do you think changed between then and now to lead to such a dramatic rise in disinformation in conservative circles compared to liberal circles?
Probably 30+ years of priming by conservative politicians, consultants, and their media mouthpieces spouting white aggrievance agitprop combined with the explosion of social media and a black man becoming President and nearly 8 years of pure obstruction by the Republican party to any real national governance.
Liberals on the other hand in general, but specifically those in national political power still read the NYTimes and Washington Post and listen to NPR. And while those institutions are not perfect, they are far more reality based and balanced than FoxNews and the rest of the right wing media ecosystem. Jon Stewart basically made a career of tearing into the hypocrisy and lies of FoxNews every night for over a decade and the left turned in for that.
> The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
How would you recommend handling false information then? I'm talking about false information that has real world impact, like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Telling people a polling location is closed when it's not is a practical example.
It's a difficult problem to crack. My current line of thinking is that we need to improve critical-thinking amongst the population. People with critical thinking will question the things they hear and read, and with an unfiltered source of information (E.g. the Internet) will be able to determin fact from fiction.
I used to think they we should censor bad information (E.g. 5G causes COVID), but that's just not going to work in the modern era.
I don't think it is just lack of critical thinking on the part of general public. I think that there are also some cultural contributors - it is often deemed uncivil or rude to call lie a lie. And if you want to appear impartial, you will need to make things sound middle - softening some stances and making others stronger.
You cant actually distinguish fact from fiction by logic alone. You need specialized knowledge for that, the rest of us you need to decide who to trust.
People who gravitate toward conspiracy theories tend to be intelligent and tend to question things they read. They then proceed to build wild theories, beyond possibilities of dumb people.
You wont, human nature is more or less fixed, cognitive skills are normal distributed, we are not blank slates. You first recognize that the problem is difficult, recognize you cannot social-engineer humans without infringing their rights and you try to come up with some basic rules with the implicit understanding that A) They are not perfect B) They are not immutable, and you start working from there. This is the total opposite to what it is happening now in the way the powerful groups are managing this new global, social landscape.
Yes, that. Simple things like a little stats, a default position of skepticism, an understanging that the message and the messenger are separate, would go a long way.
Not to get overtly political, but one of the two major parties will do literally anything to prevent that. Their ideology interprets critical thought as a direct assault, and they respond accordingly.
From the bottom of the page: A spokesman for the Republican Party of Texas said that the "critical thinking skills" language should not have been included in the document after the words "values clarification," reports Talking Points Memo. The members of the subcommittee "regret" the mistake, he told TPM—however, since the platform was approved, "it cannot be corrected until the next state convention in 2014."
They regret the mistake, it sounds like, so I guess it's all good. Nothing to see here.
* their curriculum explicitly aims to develop "lifelong, critical thinkers"
* they feel "reading, writing, and
critical thinking continue to play central roles in the development of literate individuals"
* students learn to "Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning"
I understand that you're saying beliefs such as creationism don't stand up to any real critical thought, and I agree. But I feel the same way about many beliefs that left-leaning people tend to hold.
Sure. Many people (both commentators and friends of mine) express extreme forms of race and gender essentialism, regularly referring to groups like "white men" or "black women" as though they all have the same thoughts, feelings, and desires.
Yes, but whatever one you are thinking about, rest assured the other would do the same. This idea that half the country is bad and the other is virtuous is as infantile as it is dangerous.
(Shrug) Whatever. It wasn't "the other party" who tried to teach me, at a public junior high school, that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work.
One half of the country is bad. The sooner we pull our heads out of the ground (and other low regions) and face up to that truth, the better off we'll be. A key aspect of critical thought is that there is no inherent virtue in denying reality, and the reality is that BSAB is no longer a viable rationalization.
I am sorry, I really am, that you see the country that way. I humbly suggest that you might be shocked at what you find out if you hang out with some of the people you think are so bad. I think you will find they want the same things you do and have many of the same fears. At any rate, whatever one might think of the other half of the country, it seems we must find a way to live together. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
Hang out with them? I grew up with them. That was enough for me, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual.
66% of Republicans in a recent poll [1] say that Trump should not concede regardless of what happens in the courts. That amounts to advocacy of a coup d'etat. There is no room for negotiation with these people, any more than there was with the Shining Path or the Red Brigades or the Khmer Rouge. They have chosen their side and committed to it.
The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
It's time we started contemplating it. Because the other side is doing just that, and then some.
It was a very tense election. What do you think Democrats would say if Trump had won and you polled them? Do you think they would politely accept four more years of Trump? What do you think would be the odds of violence in the cities? Say in Portland, for example? Or Seattle? Do you see violence from Republicans right now?
You seemed to have had a tough time with conservatives growing up and that is unfortunate, but I think you are being incredibly extreme in your blanket assessment of the motivations of half of your countryman.
Yeah, as a black man who grew up in the mid-west, and then lived in new england… I left the states in 2016 and have no intention of coming back until things resolve. Even during in 2016, I knew things were going to get much worse… and Trump (not necessarily his words/actions, but primal response he could evoke in otherwise "rational" or "academic" people who often see themselves above the fray) was just the latest harbinger of that (maybe the straw that broke the camels back, piled high already with many straws of societal malfeasance)… people want to ignore the slow erosion of social-economic freedoms that have been going on for decades and only decreasing more with the next administration placed in power by those who think that things will change for the better just by placing paper in boxes…
Corporate collusion with government baked in with articles of incorporation, solidified with runaway debt spending for their services against the masses is just a tip of the iceberg of societal decay ongoing here with many thinking they can always keep kicking the bill into the future for someone else to deal with… lol… I have no will to live around such a populous with such delusions of the mind.
I agree with most of your assessment. However I am myself an immigrant and, warts and all, I still think that comparatively the US is still a great place to live and I am grateful for the opportunity I was given to settle here.
If you do not mind me asking, where did you move to? How much better are things there? And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
My dad was an immigrant, and my mothers parents were was well, and I do think some aspects do provide opportunities, but I'm not sure it will negate the long term tail winds faced by many and would rather wait it out while they seem to be ok with engaging in the state of affairs.
> where did you move to?
I moved to Jakarta for now (and a few other places "nearby" for weeks/months here and there pre pandemic) and have been working remotely for the past 5 years for a variety of companies globally.
> How much better are things there?
For me, there is more social economic freedom, cheaper cost of living, more social cohesion (probably related to the fact that the distribution of wealth isn't as skewed towards the wealthy as it has become in the US), and relatively weak government (less downside risk with federal diktats) with nowhere near the amount of %debt to gdp in household/corp/gov sectors. But still faces similar headwinds stagnation in many places and issues unique challenges to being spread out over many islands. Though, I still remain flexible and have my eyes out for others places that could be better in the future.
> And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
Overall I think SEA is pretty good as far as near future. Not really sure about anywhere else (besides nice island enclaves few on earth can enjoy like caymens, seychelles, etc.). There's just a lot of convergence going on between areas globally in all aspects of ones life and I really think that with our current global communications infrastructure being able to enable different forms of organization, there are a lot of existential questions about what things will look like going forward: what most people will accept? what actors will exert sovereignty? how will the most indebted nation/city states (and sub jurisdictions and corporates) deal with declining tax revenues/cash flows in the face of not just mobile capital, but a mobile workforce?
We are talking about media companies exercising discretion and control over content, not about what is constitutionally protected. I think a more relevant legal discussion would be on the tension over safe harbor provisions vs exercising editorial control.
You claimed to write about “false information that has real world impact, like yelling fire in a crowded theater.” That example is from the real world when the government acted against private parties that engaged in what the government characterized as sedition. Do you withdraw your example?
That's a rather tenuous link. Because a famous person said the same quote in a different context doesn't mean it actually has bearing and what we are discussing. If you don't like the first hypothetical, maybe focus on the second hypothetical, as it is extremely relevant for today.
0k, if an entity starts grading the claims of others for truth or falsehood, would it be held responsible for those claims it does not grade or for incorrect grades? Or is the grading “caveat emptor” and the recipient of information has no guarantee of truth or falsehood anyway?
Is a lack of a label on the below an endorsement of Theranos’ technology?
It's not just handling false information. That is just a very small part of how the far left are trying to stop freedom of speech. How many in-person talks at universities have been shut down in the past 4 years? When people disagree, they call whoever it is a Nazi and get it cancelled.
Today if you post something that is pro-gun, or god-forbid, you support one of Trump's foreign policies publicly, your account on Twitter or IG will get attacked and shut down. Most informational gun accounts on youtube won't show up in searches anymore. I'm not even talking about the tacticool losers posting dangerous videos. These are the people trying to educate others on usage and safety. Because a small part of the country abhor guns, but they also happen to control Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, they shadow-ban and move along with their day.
If flagging false information was the primary usage of censorship, there wouldn't be so much uproar around it.
To be fair, the actual 'far left' is Pro-gun. You're confusing leftism with Neoliberalism (you're not alone in this thread). The anti-gun people in this category are firmly rooted in the Auth-Right quadrant of the political compass (just a few hairs to the 'left' of Modern Republicanism).
That being said, it's understandable why these platforms don't want to be involved with promoting 'gun-safety' information, and it's not about censorship, it's about liability. You can't talk about gun-safety without talking about proper operation. This information has implications regardless of a users intentions (good or bad). Imagine the headline: 'Mass Shooter planned attack with help from YouTube videos'... The following uproar would only lead to greater censorship and restriction. Restricting content is not about censorship, but preventing scenarios like this. It's impossible to separate 'safety' from 'tactical training', and I for one, would prefer such information was not readily available to any would-be rogue actors.
If you want to have a gun, that's fine. Take a class. Want tactical training, take a class. Better yet, join the military.
I'm not particularly convinced that owning a gun offers any net-benefit as far as safety is concerned. I'd reckon you're statistically more likely to injure yourself (or a family member) than you are to prevent an attack from an assailant. It's also a really hard argument to make that there is 0 correlation between the high level of gun-ownership in the US and the extremely high homicide rate. Especially when looking at hand-guns (Canada for example has similar levels of 'ownership' and a lower homicide rate, but less hand-gun ownership compared to US).
TLDR; restricting 'gun-safety' info is not about censorship, it's about liability and owning a gun probably doesn't make you 'safer'. (these are, of course, my opinions)
More and more very highly esteemed journalists, not pundits, are starting to voice their concerns about this more and more publicly. At the same rate they are being censored. I wouldn't be surprised if Snowden gets a pardon before inauguration. Imagine that. How the tables turn.
Greenwald, Snowden, Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, Aaron Maté,
Max Blumenthal, Bret Weinstein, ...
None of these can be called right-wing or conservatives. I'm not even mentioning people like Rogan. All of them are aware or actual targets of the censoring.
Maybe hacker news should forcibly insert a modal saying that they don't think it's true, and make you click through that to display the objectionable content, like twitter does.
Can't have people thinking there's censorship out there.
Or they - where "they" is "every social media platform ever" can just not do a goddamned thing, and I'll make up my own fucking mind.
This viewpoint that people need or want shit to be labelled for them is the most disgusting, paternalistic, anti-freedom bullshit to disgrace America in recent memory.
Too many of these fucking people, not just in tech, but also in politics, have this viewpoint of "nudging people into better patterns", etc. My best friend, a smart man, but by no means the smartest of my friends once said something that resonated with me so strongly I doubt I'll ever forget it:
"The problem with freedom is what other people do with it."
Turns out people don't always do what you want, and that's the "true" price of freedom. Tolerating other people's stupidity.
Your first source describes some members of Congress scolding the CEO of Facebook and Twitter, and the second is an opinion poll.
Neither would even be strong sources showing a censorship event happened, they don't even attempt a comparison between conservatives and liberal censorship targets.
Don't do that. If you're gonna come on HN and pontificate at least try to keep the level of discourse up, eh?
- - - -
FWIW I'm left-leaning (by US standards) and I'm concerned about the increasingly censorious actions of left-leaning (again by US standards) mainstream media. E.g. the editorial that Sen. Cotton wrote and the blowback from publishing it seemed really sketchy.
My hope is that we see the moderate Left and moderate Right come together and form a new political party around common ground like free speech and fiscal responsibility.
> My hope is that we see the moderate Left and moderate Right come together and form a new political party around common ground like free speech and fiscal responsibility.
That already exists, it is called the Democratic party. The moderate right won, people like Biden, Pelosi or Warren, the moderate left (AOC, Sanders, etc) played second fiddle. The tension between the 2 groups is clear and if it werent for a common enemy (Trump/GOP) they would split in a second.
> That already exists, it is called the Democratic party.
I don't see a lot of conservatives and right-moderates who want to distance themselves from the Tea Party/Trumpists flocking to the Democrats though.
> moderate right won, people like Biden, Pelosi or Warren
(FWIW, by US standards those are Left politicians.) Yeah but only barely. None of them are wildly popular are they?
> the moderate left (AOC, Sanders, etc)
(FWIW, by US standards those are extreme Left politicians.)
But those folks aren't "second fiddle", they're sops: distractions to keep the Left's equivalent of the Tea Party from becoming a real political force.
America is run by the rich, for the rich, and they do pretty well for themselves. I'm not even talking about gathering real political power (right OR left), just having less sturm und drang and more stability. We've got serious problems on the stove (climate, disease, etc.) that are going to take some concerted effort to tackle, eh?
There is a direct intellectual line of descent from classical liberals to 1960s liberals to the woke vocal elitists dominating tech culture, academia, and corporate media today. But liberal is no longer a good noun to represent them.
Anecdotally I see this in work online chats, with the younger liberals totally supporting censorship and firing people for tweets. Where the "older" liberals are saying no, that's not right.
10 minutes in and it's still mostly about Silicon Valley and private companies, as announced as the main subject by Greenwald in the beginning of the video.
