6 ms·

Bottom line, if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. Instead of censorship, demand robust

Bottom line, if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and what they don't.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dilap 6y ago
You still need an at least mildly tolerant political environment, or else they'll just make censorship-resistant software illegal. I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Good point. So providers must also be immune from legal pressure.
sneak 6y ago
I’ll go one further: tell your friends, family, and people that you see donating free content to censorship platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that they are harming society by doing so. It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  Therein lies the issue. To be blunt, human nature is tribalism, it's desire for food and sex, and, unfortunately, it's waiting until something is a matter of life and death to respond. Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents. That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today. My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom. Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow. I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Most people won't care until it's their ox that's being gored. So the plan is having non-centralized alternatives ready to spread. Dark marketplaces are an excellent example. Sure, many have been taken down, but the demand is still there.
    - rhaksw 6y ago
      You're right, and social media users' oxes are being gored, they just don't know about it.
  - watwut 6y ago
    The only real solution would be economy that is not winner takes all. The way it is now, there is always one company with too much power.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- machinehermit 6y ago
  While I agree with you 100%, the average person in general is just clueless. I was talking with my mother last week and she had never heard of bitcoin. She is on facebook literally all day but had not even heard the word bitcoin before. She is just clueless. She wouldn't even begin to be able to understand this debate.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Why did you pick Bitcoin as an example? Even so, that's a totally LMGTFY thing, no? But it's really not a difficult concept. Just ask someone their position on some contentious issue. And then ask them how they'd react to being blocked from posting about that on Facebook or whatever.
- IanSanders 6y ago
  All this will achieve is making average Developer Joe look like a crazy conspiracist to his friends and family, isolating him and reducing his impact on society.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Your friends and family think that little of you? Maybe you should encourage them to be less rash in their judgements. Or maybe you're being too rash in judging their propensity to judge you.
    - IanSanders 6y ago
      While you're at it, ask your friends and family to also stop eating meat
      - mirimir 6y ago
        I presume that you neglected the "/s". But yes, cutting greenhouse gas emissions would also be prudent.
mennis16 6y ago
Too much local filtering can end up really polarizing people though. You can slowly (soft) censor the news yourself just based on what you click on, and not necessarily realize that you are getting increasingly biased information. Perhaps there is some good way to balance showing opposing news sources with the personalization.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Sure, you can't protect people from filter bubbles. But at least you can have media that don't enforce filter bubbles.
  - mennis16 6y ago
    You can't totally protect people of course, but there is also a difference between allowing people to watch only Fox News or only MSNBC, and having a content aggregator/search engine that silently shifts towards showing you only certain viewpoints, based on your existing views. Especially because such personalization can be done on an issue-level, whereas the biased news sources generally stick to a specific agenda set, which you may not neatly fall into. Not saying it isn't possible to do something like this right but I think it would need to be done very carefully, because IMO it could also make things worse than just having an aggregator that is up front biased in a particular way.
JPKab 6y ago
The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. I remember voting for John Kerry, then Obama, and thinking how the liberals were the party that valued individual liberties over maintaining order via social control. I never thought in my wildest dreams that Trump winning in 2016 would trigger a movement of mass censorship from the party who I thought was on the side of the people. It's soul crushing. All over a theory that people actually changed their votes over troll posted news articles, with no evidence that voters actually did this after seeing said articles.
- mirimir 6y ago
  > The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. Sure, but that's only possible with systems where censorship is possible. Consider Freenet. It's ancient code, but it's arguably impossible to censor. Even to censor what's being stored on your local machine. But unfortunately, there's no anonymity, and users are readily discovered and arrested.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  A few people writing articles is not a movement for mass censorship. But we do need to deal with the fact that the ability to motivate the masses, to control them, via sending them information that convinces them of falsehoods is dangerous to democracy. The source of this worry is that we could lose our democracy to what Neil Stephenson calls the Miasma.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Huh? Google, Facebook and Twitter are engaging in mass censorship!
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      They have an interest in stopping scammers, and hate speech, racism, etc. In a pandemic they have an interest in stopping extremely misleading and destructive information. Should you be able to ask other people to hurt someone, to find out where there house is, to encourage people to hurt others? I think not. The challenge is always what is the line between complaining that xyz is a terrible person, or lying or a politician, how to separate people my clearly irrational or misleading statements. I really think Neil Stephenson captured this brilliantly year ahead of time in his idea of the Miasma.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. That's the thing: there have been systems like that in place for decades (Freenet, I2P, Tor). Nobody uses them. Why? Because most people are actually depressingly pro-censorship. Even YouTube's censorship could be trivially broken if a plurality of people opposed it: if everybody just flagged every video on YouTube, they'd have to give up on policing them. You can't oppress people without overwhelming consent, and it's clear that the majority of us do consent.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  I'm against censorship pretty strongly, but I'm wrestling with the tremendous potential damage today's world has to share compelling but completely wrong information with people who can't tell the difference. That's how we got the damaging leadership we have. My dad has fallen into the sway of fox news and the people who peddle conspiracies via forwarded email chains (obama did this or that terrible thing, chloroquine will save me from covid-19). He used be a leader of 1000 people in a company, he was an electrical engineer. He's old but its terribly sad to see him there. He'd be better off if he didn't get exposed to all these things. In his case he has heart problems and when I forwarded him an article from a doctor about the interaction of chloroquine with people with issues like this he said it was a lie from a democrat who wanted covid-19 to destroy the president. He stopped trusting the newspaper in his town because it doesn't talk about these conspiracies he hears about. It does matter that real journalists have the ability to talk about things that are uncomfortable to powerful people, have the freedom and capability to do things. And there have always been people pushing the conspiracy stories to explain things away. The new thing is how much damage the big lie can get today.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Before Snowden's leaks, mass surveillance by the NSA was considered to be conspiracy theory. Or the CIA's MKUltra project.
    - belltaco 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dilap 6y ago

You still need an at least mildly tolerant political environment, or else they'll just make censorship-resistant software illegal. I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.

mirimir 6y ago
Good point. So providers must also be immune from legal pressure.

sneak 6y ago

I’ll go one further: tell your friends, family, and people that you see donating free content to censorship platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that they are harming society by doing so. It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

bilbo0s 6y ago
Therein lies the issue. To be blunt, human nature is tribalism, it's desire for food and sex, and, unfortunately, it's waiting until something is a matter of life and death to respond. Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents. That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today. My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom. Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow. I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?
- mirimir 6y ago
  Most people won't care until it's their ox that's being gored. So the plan is having non-centralized alternatives ready to spread. Dark marketplaces are an excellent example. Sure, many have been taken down, but the demand is still there.
  - rhaksw 6y ago
    You're right, and social media users' oxes are being gored, they just don't know about it.
- watwut 6y ago
  The only real solution would be economy that is not winner takes all. The way it is now, there is always one company with too much power.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
machinehermit 6y ago
While I agree with you 100%, the average person in general is just clueless. I was talking with my mother last week and she had never heard of bitcoin. She is on facebook literally all day but had not even heard the word bitcoin before. She is just clueless. She wouldn't even begin to be able to understand this debate.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Why did you pick Bitcoin as an example? Even so, that's a totally LMGTFY thing, no? But it's really not a difficult concept. Just ask someone their position on some contentious issue. And then ask them how they'd react to being blocked from posting about that on Facebook or whatever.
IanSanders 6y ago
All this will achieve is making average Developer Joe look like a crazy conspiracist to his friends and family, isolating him and reducing his impact on society.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Your friends and family think that little of you? Maybe you should encourage them to be less rash in their judgements. Or maybe you're being too rash in judging their propensity to judge you.
  - IanSanders 6y ago
    While you're at it, ask your friends and family to also stop eating meat
    - mirimir 6y ago
      I presume that you neglected the "/s". But yes, cutting greenhouse gas emissions would also be prudent.

mennis16 6y ago

Too much local filtering can end up really polarizing people though. You can slowly (soft) censor the news yourself just based on what you click on, and not necessarily realize that you are getting increasingly biased information. Perhaps there is some good way to balance showing opposing news sources with the personalization.

mirimir 6y ago
Sure, you can't protect people from filter bubbles. But at least you can have media that don't enforce filter bubbles.
- mennis16 6y ago
  You can't totally protect people of course, but there is also a difference between allowing people to watch only Fox News or only MSNBC, and having a content aggregator/search engine that silently shifts towards showing you only certain viewpoints, based on your existing views. Especially because such personalization can be done on an issue-level, whereas the biased news sources generally stick to a specific agenda set, which you may not neatly fall into. Not saying it isn't possible to do something like this right but I think it would need to be done very carefully, because IMO it could also make things worse than just having an aggregator that is up front biased in a particular way.

JPKab 6y ago

The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. I remember voting for John Kerry, then Obama, and thinking how the liberals were the party that valued individual liberties over maintaining order via social control. I never thought in my wildest dreams that Trump winning in 2016 would trigger a movement of mass censorship from the party who I thought was on the side of the people. It's soul crushing. All over a theory that people actually changed their votes over troll posted news articles, with no evidence that voters actually did this after seeing said articles.

mirimir 6y ago
> The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. Sure, but that's only possible with systems where censorship is possible. Consider Freenet. It's ancient code, but it's arguably impossible to censor. Even to censor what's being stored on your local machine. But unfortunately, there's no anonymity, and users are readily discovered and arrested.
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
A few people writing articles is not a movement for mass censorship. But we do need to deal with the fact that the ability to motivate the masses, to control them, via sending them information that convinces them of falsehoods is dangerous to democracy. The source of this worry is that we could lose our democracy to what Neil Stephenson calls the Miasma.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Huh? Google, Facebook and Twitter are engaging in mass censorship!
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    They have an interest in stopping scammers, and hate speech, racism, etc. In a pandemic they have an interest in stopping extremely misleading and destructive information. Should you be able to ask other people to hurt someone, to find out where there house is, to encourage people to hurt others? I think not. The challenge is always what is the line between complaining that xyz is a terrible person, or lying or a politician, how to separate people my clearly irrational or misleading statements. I really think Neil Stephenson captured this brilliantly year ahead of time in his idea of the Miasma.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. That's the thing: there have been systems like that in place for decades (Freenet, I2P, Tor). Nobody uses them. Why? Because most people are actually depressingly pro-censorship. Even YouTube's censorship could be trivially broken if a plurality of people opposed it: if everybody just flagged every video on YouTube, they'd have to give up on policing them. You can't oppress people without overwhelming consent, and it's clear that the majority of us do consent.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
I'm against censorship pretty strongly, but I'm wrestling with the tremendous potential damage today's world has to share compelling but completely wrong information with people who can't tell the difference. That's how we got the damaging leadership we have. My dad has fallen into the sway of fox news and the people who peddle conspiracies via forwarded email chains (obama did this or that terrible thing, chloroquine will save me from covid-19). He used be a leader of 1000 people in a company, he was an electrical engineer. He's old but its terribly sad to see him there. He'd be better off if he didn't get exposed to all these things. In his case he has heart problems and when I forwarded him an article from a doctor about the interaction of chloroquine with people with issues like this he said it was a lie from a democrat who wanted covid-19 to destroy the president. He stopped trusting the newspaper in his town because it doesn't talk about these conspiracies he hears about. It does matter that real journalists have the ability to talk about things that are uncomfortable to powerful people, have the freedom and capability to do things. And there have always been people pushing the conspiracy stories to explain things away. The new thing is how much damage the big lie can get today.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Before Snowden's leaks, mass surveillance by the NSA was considered to be conspiracy theory. Or the CIA's MKUltra project.
  - belltaco 6y ago