12 ms·

Ironically I found this conversation on censorship with 19 upvotes flagged and dead here on HN. Vouched for it to bring it back. It is 30 minutes long, but the

by aleyan 6y ago

Ironically I found this conversation on censorship with 19 upvotes flagged and dead here on HN. Vouched for it to bring it back. It is 30 minutes long, but the fact that there was an attempt at censoring it, made it much more likely that I will listen to the entire thing.

troughway 6y ago
Why do you think it was flagged/dead?
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Poor title. It's a broader discussion around censorship with Greenwald.
  - gnarbarian 6y ago
    That's literally the title of the video... Many places will remove your submission if you change it.
  - cutitout 6y ago
    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.
- censorthis 6y ago
  Censorship has become a partisan issue. Liberals of several years ago were pro free speech, anti censorship, and pro privacy. Now liberals view censorship as a good thing, because it’s used predominantly against conservatives. They are forgetting that these censorship tools can also be leveraged against them in the wrong hands. Censorship should not be a partisan issue, all sides should be against censorship.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    > Now liberals view censorship as a good thing, because it’s used predominantly against conservatives. This is such a misleading statement that it needs a disclaimer.
    - censorthis 6y ago
      This is widely known: https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearings-to-demand-more-censorship/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearing... https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-americans-think-social-media-sites-censor-political-viewpoints/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-america...
      - BrianOnHN 6y ago
        What is widely known?
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        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.
    - newen 6y ago
      It’s what I see everywhere on the internet now. It doesn’t seem misleading at all.
    - censorthis 6y ago
      Oh the irony, you have flagged a post you do not agree with on a thread about censorship.
      - carapace 6y ago
        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.
- sneak 6y ago
  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.
  - grep_name 6y ago
    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.
    - sneak 6y ago
      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.
eiji 6y ago
The HN community is using political speech guidelines to clamp down in critique against MSM (Main Stream Media) and Silicon Valley conduct. At the same time I find political topics all the time on the front page that are deemed fine as long as they stay away from the above topics or are leaning "liberal" or "progressive". It's been three weeks and I still can't use Instagram. They are still blocking #hashtag-recent-lists with a banner: "Recent posts from all hashtags are temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election." The hashtag I used to check is #handtoolwookworking. Very political indeed.
- nineplay 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204954 This is on my front page now and is almost entirely a critique against the MSM.
  - nickpp 6y ago
    At the same time that article is also accusing the USA of helping mass murder of communists, two very dear "progressive" themes, so they let it pass.
    - exstudent2 6y ago
      I think you'll find people with actual left wing philosophies are very anti-censorship. Ask any Bernie Sanders fan how fairly they were treated on Twitter, MSM... The problem is that neo-liberals have co-opted the "progressive" moniker and are the driving force behind censorship and corporate control. It's become a core tenant of neo-liberalism, while those on the left and the right have their voices removed via centralization.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      These aren't accusations, even the US now admits their role in the massacres.
      - 6y ago
dgrin91 6y ago
Its really hard to call what HN does any serious form of censorship. You can still see flagged/dead links on HN. Also the content isn't removed or modified on their source site. Not every decision to remove some content is censorship.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  > Its really hard to call what HN does any serious form of censorship. That's fair. I'd attribute it more to some group-think phenomena.
sxp 6y ago
This is one of the reasons why I switched to alternative HN viewers like http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ which are less affected by flagging of controversial posts.
- cambalache 6y ago
  I didnt know about the site, thank you. The same way reddit it is only usable if you do it through http://www.removeddit.com/ http://www.removeddit.com/.
cfmcdonald 6y ago
Hmm, I saw a different irony, that this conversation about the dangers of Silicon Valley censorship is being hosted free of charge on YouTube.
davidf18 6y ago
"It is 30 minutes long," Download it with the re-established "YouTube-dl" and then play it at 1.5x or 2x speed. You can save a lot of time that way. Also listen to most podcasts at increased rates and if I need to I slow it down again to 1x.
dang 6y ago
Users flagged it. It seems weird to me to call that censorship but the word has become diluted enough that people use it for whatever they dislike, so have at it I guess. Some users flag these things for political reasons while others flag them because they lead to crap threads, like the current thread, and because these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible.
- michael_j_ward 6y ago
  > these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible Given your experience moderating this site, do you have any thoughts / insights on how to build a platform that brings the best out of discourse while preventing the downfalls you see here?
  - DangFlame7 6y ago
    Mutual Downvote Destruction. Downvoting without commenting costs karma. Flagging without a second flag also cost karma.

by aleyan 6y ago

troughway 6y ago

Why do you think it was flagged/dead?

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Poor title. It's a broader discussion around censorship with Greenwald.
- gnarbarian 6y ago
  That's literally the title of the video... Many places will remove your submission if you change it.
- cutitout 6y ago
  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.
censorthis 6y ago
Censorship has become a partisan issue. Liberals of several years ago were pro free speech, anti censorship, and pro privacy. Now liberals view censorship as a good thing, because it’s used predominantly against conservatives. They are forgetting that these censorship tools can also be leveraged against them in the wrong hands. Censorship should not be a partisan issue, all sides should be against censorship.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  > Now liberals view censorship as a good thing, because it’s used predominantly against conservatives. This is such a misleading statement that it needs a disclaimer.
  - censorthis 6y ago
    This is widely known: https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearings-to-demand-more-censorship/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearing... https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-americans-think-social-media-sites-censor-political-viewpoints/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-america...
    - BrianOnHN 6y ago
      What is widely known?
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      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.
  - newen 6y ago
    It’s what I see everywhere on the internet now. It doesn’t seem misleading at all.
  - censorthis 6y ago
    Oh the irony, you have flagged a post you do not agree with on a thread about censorship.
    - carapace 6y ago
      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.
sneak 6y ago
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.
- grep_name 6y ago
  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.
  - sneak 6y ago
    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.

eiji 6y ago

The HN community is using political speech guidelines to clamp down in critique against MSM (Main Stream Media) and Silicon Valley conduct. At the same time I find political topics all the time on the front page that are deemed fine as long as they stay away from the above topics or are leaning "liberal" or "progressive". It's been three weeks and I still can't use Instagram. They are still blocking #hashtag-recent-lists with a banner: "Recent posts from all hashtags are temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election." The hashtag I used to check is #handtoolwookworking. Very political indeed.

nineplay 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25204954 This is on my front page now and is almost entirely a critique against the MSM.
- nickpp 6y ago
  At the same time that article is also accusing the USA of helping mass murder of communists, two very dear "progressive" themes, so they let it pass.
  - exstudent2 6y ago
    I think you'll find people with actual left wing philosophies are very anti-censorship. Ask any Bernie Sanders fan how fairly they were treated on Twitter, MSM... The problem is that neo-liberals have co-opted the "progressive" moniker and are the driving force behind censorship and corporate control. It's become a core tenant of neo-liberalism, while those on the left and the right have their voices removed via centralization.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    These aren't accusations, even the US now admits their role in the massacres.
    - 6y ago

dgrin91 6y ago

Its really hard to call what HN does any serious form of censorship. You can still see flagged/dead links on HN. Also the content isn't removed or modified on their source site. Not every decision to remove some content is censorship.

BrianOnHN 6y ago
> Its really hard to call what HN does any serious form of censorship. That's fair. I'd attribute it more to some group-think phenomena.

sxp 6y ago

This is one of the reasons why I switched to alternative HN viewers like http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ which are less affected by flagging of controversial posts.

cambalache 6y ago
I didnt know about the site, thank you. The same way reddit it is only usable if you do it through http://www.removeddit.com/ http://www.removeddit.com/.

cfmcdonald 6y ago

Hmm, I saw a different irony, that this conversation about the dangers of Silicon Valley censorship is being hosted free of charge on YouTube.

davidf18 6y ago

"It is 30 minutes long," Download it with the re-established "YouTube-dl" and then play it at 1.5x or 2x speed. You can save a lot of time that way. Also listen to most podcasts at increased rates and if I need to I slow it down again to 1x.

dang 6y ago

Users flagged it. It seems weird to me to call that censorship but the word has become diluted enough that people use it for whatever they dislike, so have at it I guess. Some users flag these things for political reasons while others flag them because they lead to crap threads, like the current thread, and because these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible.

michael_j_ward 6y ago
> these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible Given your experience moderating this site, do you have any thoughts / insights on how to build a platform that brings the best out of discourse while preventing the downfalls you see here?
- DangFlame7 6y ago
  Mutual Downvote Destruction. Downvoting without commenting costs karma. Flagging without a second flag also cost karma.