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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 ca

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 6y 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.
tootie 6y 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 6y 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.
  - tootie 6y ago
    But none of that is government.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- unishark 6y 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).
- raxxorrax 6y 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.
  - tootie 6y ago
    Strong disagree. The potential damage done by mass surveillance would be against private communication, not public. Intelligence agencies can and do gather a lot of intelligence by just observing publicly-shared information. And considering the surveillance excesses observed since the war on terror has unfolded, there has been no discernible decrease in speech freedom nor has anyone ever been provably prosecuted or persecuted due to data wrongly collected in one of these programs.
chordalkeyboard 6y 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 6y 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
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Even if the post office was not profitable and paid for by the tax payer, that is absolutely fine; it's an essential service, it made America great (I feel dirty saying that), it created the need and provided the funding to set up the core infrastructure of the US - post wagons, trains, airlines. The US mail is part of the infrastructure and should be protected, funded, and kept alive at all costs.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > 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. How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us? How do you feel about the notion that the rich and powerful are well acquainted with the techniques used to manipulate democratic systems (such as the double bind)? > 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 I agree that technology is value-neutral. my perspective is that just as its easier to spread misinformation, its also easier to compare different accounts of the truth and attempt to check them for consistency. If there had been social media in the 20s its likely that the Illinois Radium Girls may have heard about the legal proceedings in New Jersey, or possible that they would have heard about the dangers of radium (which were known in medical and scientific circles at the time).
dheera 6y 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.
- unishark 6y 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.
anticodon 6y 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 6y ago
  Interesting, your post is downvoted without any comments. Maybe it wouldn't harm to say what's wrong?
  - anticodon 6y ago
    Well, my comment is against the against the grain (rusophobia is trendy in the contemporary world even among Russians). Also, it's a bit muddy. I said that government has nothing to do with censorship, but I contradict myself. Although censorship in the US is some kind of internal struggle between parties that is hard to understand for an outsider like me, but promotion of rusophobia in social networks and YouTube is probably endorsed by US government. I doubt that ordinary engineers and managers at Facebook really care so much about Russia to boost rusophobic articles in the feed.
herbst 6y ago
This sounds like a problem that 'real democracy' or 'direct democracy' pretty much diesnt have.
raxxorrax 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- woodpanel 6y 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?
  - doktrin 6y ago
    If you look further down in this comment thread, that claim has been repeatedly debunked, likewise for Match.com. These sites have never been on any widely adopted DNS blacklist in Norway. It appears censoredplanet analyzed data from a corporate-only ISP.
    - woodpanel 6y ago
      "looking down this comment thread" is now more science than the findings of acutal scientists? Huh...
      - doktrin 6y ago
        I don't know why you view scientists as automagically infallible. Mistakes are quite possible, as are misinterpretations. For what it's worth I live in Norway. Neither of those domains are DNS blacklisted, nor have they ever been - with the possible exception of on one specific corporate ISP (CATCHCOM). If you disagree, feel free to show some evidence to the contrary.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Websites can also block address ranges on their side.
nzmsv 6y 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/ 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...

dbsmith83 6y 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.

tootie 6y 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 6y 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.
- tootie 6y ago
  But none of that is government.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
unishark 6y 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).
raxxorrax 6y 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.
- tootie 6y ago
  Strong disagree. The potential damage done by mass surveillance would be against private communication, not public. Intelligence agencies can and do gather a lot of intelligence by just observing publicly-shared information. And considering the surveillance excesses observed since the war on terror has unfolded, there has been no discernible decrease in speech freedom nor has anyone ever been provably prosecuted or persecuted due to data wrongly collected in one of these programs.

chordalkeyboard 6y 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 6y 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
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Even if the post office was not profitable and paid for by the tax payer, that is absolutely fine; it's an essential service, it made America great (I feel dirty saying that), it created the need and provided the funding to set up the core infrastructure of the US - post wagons, trains, airlines. The US mail is part of the infrastructure and should be protected, funded, and kept alive at all costs.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > 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. How do you feel about the perspective that democracies allow the majority (or plurality) to force their values on the rest of us? How do you feel about the notion that the rich and powerful are well acquainted with the techniques used to manipulate democratic systems (such as the double bind)? > 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 I agree that technology is value-neutral. my perspective is that just as its easier to spread misinformation, its also easier to compare different accounts of the truth and attempt to check them for consistency. If there had been social media in the 20s its likely that the Illinois Radium Girls may have heard about the legal proceedings in New Jersey, or possible that they would have heard about the dangers of radium (which were known in medical and scientific circles at the time).

dheera 6y 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.

unishark 6y 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.

anticodon 6y 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 6y ago
Interesting, your post is downvoted without any comments. Maybe it wouldn't harm to say what's wrong?
- anticodon 6y ago
  Well, my comment is against the against the grain (rusophobia is trendy in the contemporary world even among Russians). Also, it's a bit muddy. I said that government has nothing to do with censorship, but I contradict myself. Although censorship in the US is some kind of internal struggle between parties that is hard to understand for an outsider like me, but promotion of rusophobia in social networks and YouTube is probably endorsed by US government. I doubt that ordinary engineers and managers at Facebook really care so much about Russia to boost rusophobic articles in the feed.

herbst 6y ago

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

raxxorrax 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

woodpanel 6y 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?
- doktrin 6y ago
  If you look further down in this comment thread, that claim has been repeatedly debunked, likewise for Match.com. These sites have never been on any widely adopted DNS blacklist in Norway. It appears censoredplanet analyzed data from a corporate-only ISP.
  - woodpanel 6y ago
    "looking down this comment thread" is now more science than the findings of acutal scientists? Huh...
    - doktrin 6y ago
      I don't know why you view scientists as automagically infallible. Mistakes are quite possible, as are misinterpretations. For what it's worth I live in Norway. Neither of those domains are DNS blacklisted, nor have they ever been - with the possible exception of on one specific corporate ISP (CATCHCOM). If you disagree, feel free to show some evidence to the contrary.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Websites can also block address ranges on their side.

nzmsv 6y 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/ 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...