5 ms·

How alarmist rhetoric is informing draconian speech laws in the Global South

pjc50 6y ago
Oh this is good. And it extends beyond the global south: > Instead of exhausting all redressive options before turning to repression, policymakers operated in reverse, treating politics as something one resorts to only after violence fails. Instead of redressing the root causes of political discontent, they mandated the military to prosecute an unwinnable global war on its symptoms — with devastating consequences for life and liberty both abroad and at home. Substitute "police" in there and you have the BLM situation. A hundred days and nights of teargassing the public rather than addressing their political demands, i.e. that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime, and that such crimes should be effectively prosecuted resulting in conviction and imprisonment of the individuals responsible and any co-conspirators. > Political grievances, by contrast, run deep and are easier to build a sustained strategy around. If, for example, Russia ends up exploiting the marginalization of African Americans in order to sow domestic discord, as suggested in Thomas Rid’s New York Times op-ed (Rid, 2020), then the policy response should be twofold. Yes, we should detect and uproot Russian propaganda infrastructure where practicable. But, policymakers should also seek to redress the mistreatment and social injustice that made audiences receptive to such propaganda in the first place. Well, that's not going to happen, is it?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > Well, that's not going to happen, is it? I think that the working-class prosperity the US enjoyed from the 1950s through the 1970s was not just because the US was the only major economy not devastated by war. I think it was also because business owners were afraid of communism, and were therefore treating their employees somewhat better, to head off any ideas they might have of getting a better deal by revolution. Something like that could happen again... if business owners become concerned enough about the possibility of the workers revolting.
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    Also, there was an effective labor movement in the US which could equalize the negotiating positions of management and labor. I saw this just today: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/the-demise-of-labor-unions-has-cost-you-a-bundle/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/the-demise-of...
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    The "working class" in that context doesn't mean the whole working class including those discriminated against. They tend to get ignored when talking about the good old days of the "in group" as usual. They had an artifically deflated labor pool that kept out competitors driving up their wages, effectively a cartel. This bigotry in labor was also the seed of their downfall as those excluded started their own and undid the monopoly on labor bargining. Cartels either hold the world back or are passed by it. The gatekeeping approach has failed recursively with non-union shop prevalence, increased automation paired with professionalization as opposed to trade shifts, and outsourcing. From what little I can tell about many European labor union styles they avoided this shortsighted xenophobic fracturing of their bargining power.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime There's no way of reasoning with people who use hyperbole like that. It's also not what BLM want, but see point one, reason has lost before it's begun. That leaves force.
anm89 6y ago
With him until his first major prescription was forced heavy censoring of online platforms.
- pjc50 6y ago
  My main reading of the text was the opposite - squashing dissent doesn't work in the long term?
  - anm89 6y ago
    >Clear and consistent enforcement of terms of service, increased transparency around campaign spending, and the removal of harmful content, such as online harassment and doxing, are needed. Algorithmic transparency and accountability are also important in surfacing how misinformation or other harmful content is spread and, in some cases, monetized. However, in addition to detection and deletion, we need a complementary redressive approach, seeking to slow and reverse people’s loss of trust in the center while restoring inclusive political institutions and accountable authorities. He wants to censor all online harassment. In our microagreasion world we might as well just turn the internet off.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  His article is more about the problem than the solution, which he says himself he's unsure of. I think we can all agree that we have a social media problem.
  - anm89 6y ago
    People communicating openly and freely over the internet doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. The one thing he does get right IMO is that if you want to make real progress on this stuff you have to dig into root causes. The fact that people are rightfully distrustful of institutions isn't Facebook's fault and. It can't be solved by censoring Facebook.
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
flower1143 6y ago
True. The NetzDG law has inspired censorious laws around the world.
mola 6y ago
This is so important. It's been the zeitgeist for a while now to avoid trust at all cost. symptoms of the zeitgeist in censoring solutions like the article shows; Technologists obsession with decentralization and a zero trust monetary system; economist obsession with game theory and rational quantity optimizing individual agents models. Don't get me wrong, these models are useful, but they are perceived like laws of nature, or even religion where any other, especially, qualitative description of reality is automatically considered wrong and against dogma. These things got accepted is truth because these ideas were developed while the US went in to a huge economical boom post WW2, and by association are perceived to be the causes of this boom. At the same time, Soviet Russia failed model for society and the atrocities committed against its citizens are perceived as proof of the danger in any departure from this dogma. The naturalization of these values; the rise of social media; and information technology. created the perfect storm for a complete erosion of trust in authority. Attention economy ran by people that believe business endavours can only be rational and purely profit driven, made disinformation a standard in media through click optimizing sensationalized content. Even science succumbed to this: when universities started seeing themselves as businesses that need PR to optimize some metric. These PR departments sensationalized science communication, pumping out exaggerated reports about early stage science. Leaving the public confused and distrustful. Science is the core of truth In western secular culture. Now that science got commoditized for PR purposes, we lost this last grasp at truth. This, At the macro level, We lost trust, and we lost truth. The only psychological/societal cohesion inducing element left is power and domination. Distributed media is not necessarily a good thing. I think a local, transparent distributed and heirachial forms of media might be better for humanity.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That gets it backwards - the reason for no trust is because they aren't trustworthy. Rather than try to ensure that they are under the transparency they clammor and cry for gatekeepers and "good old days". It brings to mind the USSR and glasnost - once they are shown to fundamentally be a lie "going back" is delusional and doomed to failure. It is like the joke about the despairing old man who is now forever known as "the guy who shagged a goat" despite decades farming, building docks, and fishing.
text70 6y ago
"Where the rewards for merit are the greatest, that is where you will find the best citizens." --excerpt from The History of the Peloponnesian War I think it boils down to what society rewards as merit. Reward a kid with millions from minecraft videos on youtube, while the Phd in Humanities, struggles to pay the bills is ripe for a culture of mistrust. While this is just a simple example, I think it illustrates how prioritizing and rewarding knowledge and talent, and the good aspects of a person, and a citizen, can lead to more cohesive, and better societies.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That doesn't seem to be an issue of trust so much as demonstrating that uncomfortably assumptions they "think are fair" should don't hold true at all. Skilled weavers may have thought their craft virtuous but they were throughly bested by cloth mills and vast automated of early industrialization. Sure those involved may feel screwed over but they never were betrayed - they just had wrong expectations that the world did not vindicate. It brings to mind a joke about the last Phrenology graduates before the field was disproven having the king of worthless degrees. Fundamentally the question in both cases is "Why should everyone else support them in their endeavors?" The kid has "because ads and views" financially and because people want to watch it. The PhD in Humanities implicitly lacks an audience, let alone a way to monetize it. What is knowledge? What is talent? If they aren't defined they could be trivially gamed. Epistemology ironically plays into it as well - how is the knowledge validated in any way? What separates a schizophrenic crackpot who believes that our brains are being kept in jars on the dark side of the moon from Aristotle's lauguably bad impetus physics of projectiles except history and how persuasive an essay is about them? Both are objextively wrong and don't contribute anything in themselves. If any configuration may be studied or composed regardless of validity and rewarded it encourages a "parasitism" of making up bullshit as the path of least resistance instead of anything remotely productive which is no good for a system which wants to sustain itself. Of course there are also many layered ironies in practical producitivty as a framework as opposed to abstract intellectual theory. Theory which "escapes" and proves useful tends to disrupt and utterly outdo the "productive" of old rendering the former practicioners living historic artifacts.

Oh this is good. And it extends beyond the global south: > Instead of exhausting all redressive options before turning to repression, policymakers operated in reverse, treating politics as something one resorts to only after violence fails. Instead of redressing the root causes of political discontent, they mandated the military to prosecute an unwinnable global war on its symptoms — with devastating consequences for life and liberty both abroad and at home. Substitute "police" in there and you have the BLM situation. A hundred days and nights of teargassing the public rather than addressing their political demands, i.e. that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime, and that such crimes should be effectively prosecuted resulting in conviction and imprisonment of the individuals responsible and any co-conspirators. > Political grievances, by contrast, run deep and are easier to build a sustained strategy around. If, for example, Russia ends up exploiting the marginalization of African Americans in order to sow domestic discord, as suggested in Thomas Rid’s New York Times op-ed (Rid, 2020), then the policy response should be twofold. Yes, we should detect and uproot Russian propaganda infrastructure where practicable. But, policymakers should also seek to redress the mistreatment and social injustice that made audiences receptive to such propaganda in the first place. Well, that's not going to happen, is it?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> Well, that's not going to happen, is it? I think that the working-class prosperity the US enjoyed from the 1950s through the 1970s was not just because the US was the only major economy not devastated by war. I think it was also because business owners were afraid of communism, and were therefore treating their employees somewhat better, to head off any ideas they might have of getting a better deal by revolution. Something like that could happen again... if business owners become concerned enough about the possibility of the workers revolting.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  Also, there was an effective labor movement in the US which could equalize the negotiating positions of management and labor. I saw this just today: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/the-demise-of-labor-unions-has-cost-you-a-bundle/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/the-demise-of...
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The "working class" in that context doesn't mean the whole working class including those discriminated against. They tend to get ignored when talking about the good old days of the "in group" as usual. They had an artifically deflated labor pool that kept out competitors driving up their wages, effectively a cartel. This bigotry in labor was also the seed of their downfall as those excluded started their own and undid the monopoly on labor bargining. Cartels either hold the world back or are passed by it. The gatekeeping approach has failed recursively with non-union shop prevalence, increased automation paired with professionalization as opposed to trade shifts, and outsourcing. From what little I can tell about many European labor union styles they avoided this shortsighted xenophobic fracturing of their bargining power.
aaron695 6y ago
> that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime There's no way of reasoning with people who use hyperbole like that. It's also not what BLM want, but see point one, reason has lost before it's begun. That leaves force.

anm89 6y ago

With him until his first major prescription was forced heavy censoring of online platforms.

pjc50 6y ago
My main reading of the text was the opposite - squashing dissent doesn't work in the long term?
- anm89 6y ago
  >Clear and consistent enforcement of terms of service, increased transparency around campaign spending, and the removal of harmful content, such as online harassment and doxing, are needed. Algorithmic transparency and accountability are also important in surfacing how misinformation or other harmful content is spread and, in some cases, monetized. However, in addition to detection and deletion, we need a complementary redressive approach, seeking to slow and reverse people’s loss of trust in the center while restoring inclusive political institutions and accountable authorities. He wants to censor all online harassment. In our microagreasion world we might as well just turn the internet off.
koheripbal 6y ago
His article is more about the problem than the solution, which he says himself he's unsure of. I think we can all agree that we have a social media problem.
- anm89 6y ago
  People communicating openly and freely over the internet doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. The one thing he does get right IMO is that if you want to make real progress on this stuff you have to dig into root causes. The fact that people are rightfully distrustful of institutions isn't Facebook's fault and. It can't be solved by censoring Facebook.
  - happytoexplain 6y ago

flower1143 6y ago

True. The NetzDG law has inspired censorious laws around the world.

mola 6y ago

This is so important. It's been the zeitgeist for a while now to avoid trust at all cost. symptoms of the zeitgeist in censoring solutions like the article shows; Technologists obsession with decentralization and a zero trust monetary system; economist obsession with game theory and rational quantity optimizing individual agents models. Don't get me wrong, these models are useful, but they are perceived like laws of nature, or even religion where any other, especially, qualitative description of reality is automatically considered wrong and against dogma. These things got accepted is truth because these ideas were developed while the US went in to a huge economical boom post WW2, and by association are perceived to be the causes of this boom. At the same time, Soviet Russia failed model for society and the atrocities committed against its citizens are perceived as proof of the danger in any departure from this dogma. The naturalization of these values; the rise of social media; and information technology. created the perfect storm for a complete erosion of trust in authority. Attention economy ran by people that believe business endavours can only be rational and purely profit driven, made disinformation a standard in media through click optimizing sensationalized content. Even science succumbed to this: when universities started seeing themselves as businesses that need PR to optimize some metric. These PR departments sensationalized science communication, pumping out exaggerated reports about early stage science. Leaving the public confused and distrustful. Science is the core of truth In western secular culture. Now that science got commoditized for PR purposes, we lost this last grasp at truth. This, At the macro level, We lost trust, and we lost truth. The only psychological/societal cohesion inducing element left is power and domination. Distributed media is not necessarily a good thing. I think a local, transparent distributed and heirachial forms of media might be better for humanity.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That gets it backwards - the reason for no trust is because they aren't trustworthy. Rather than try to ensure that they are under the transparency they clammor and cry for gatekeepers and "good old days". It brings to mind the USSR and glasnost - once they are shown to fundamentally be a lie "going back" is delusional and doomed to failure. It is like the joke about the despairing old man who is now forever known as "the guy who shagged a goat" despite decades farming, building docks, and fishing.

text70 6y ago

"Where the rewards for merit are the greatest, that is where you will find the best citizens." --excerpt from The History of the Peloponnesian War I think it boils down to what society rewards as merit. Reward a kid with millions from minecraft videos on youtube, while the Phd in Humanities, struggles to pay the bills is ripe for a culture of mistrust. While this is just a simple example, I think it illustrates how prioritizing and rewarding knowledge and talent, and the good aspects of a person, and a citizen, can lead to more cohesive, and better societies.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That doesn't seem to be an issue of trust so much as demonstrating that uncomfortably assumptions they "think are fair" should don't hold true at all. Skilled weavers may have thought their craft virtuous but they were throughly bested by cloth mills and vast automated of early industrialization. Sure those involved may feel screwed over but they never were betrayed - they just had wrong expectations that the world did not vindicate. It brings to mind a joke about the last Phrenology graduates before the field was disproven having the king of worthless degrees. Fundamentally the question in both cases is "Why should everyone else support them in their endeavors?" The kid has "because ads and views" financially and because people want to watch it. The PhD in Humanities implicitly lacks an audience, let alone a way to monetize it. What is knowledge? What is talent? If they aren't defined they could be trivially gamed. Epistemology ironically plays into it as well - how is the knowledge validated in any way? What separates a schizophrenic crackpot who believes that our brains are being kept in jars on the dark side of the moon from Aristotle's lauguably bad impetus physics of projectiles except history and how persuasive an essay is about them? Both are objextively wrong and don't contribute anything in themselves. If any configuration may be studied or composed regardless of validity and rewarded it encourages a "parasitism" of making up bullshit as the path of least resistance instead of anything remotely productive which is no good for a system which wants to sustain itself. Of course there are also many layered ironies in practical producitivty as a framework as opposed to abstract intellectual theory. Theory which "escapes" and proves useful tends to disrupt and utterly outdo the "productive" of old rendering the former practicioners living historic artifacts.