19 ms·

Local rules instead of global censorship

• systemvoltage 6y ago
  Decentralization and deinstitutionalization is dangerous to Democracy. Uncheck conspiracy theories, QAnon bullshit, Parler boys, 4chan anonymity are all dangerous to public, intellectual discourse. Convince me. Your body has cancer, swift removal of it before it “decentralizes” is the only option. I would be in favor of actual decentralization: Being able to broadcast 50km radius on the internet and improving communities, thriving local newspapers and localization of concerns. If you want to broadcast to state level, you must have education, journalism rigor, and standup to scrutiny, have to explain inconsistencies or your role is revoked. “Decentralization”, the widely used term is a congregation of ill which cannot survive the scrutiny of public IMO. Before you go touting for decentralization, ask yourself when was the last time you checked city news and county affairs? What happens at the National level has little effect on you locally. What Ted Cruz and AOC exchanged on Twitter has no bearing to your county. Internet gave everybody a centralized platform in the first place. Some good aspects (Wikipedia) and some horrifying consequences.
  • non-cotton 6y ago
    I thought the article made a reasonably convincing case that decentralized networks provide better tools for good actors to control the spread of disinformation. What does it mean to "remove the cancer before it decentralizes" in this context?
    • systemvoltage 6y ago
      Twitter, FB, Google all benefited from QAnon and bunch of violence that thrives on it. Election misinformation should have been removed. We have proper channels for this - ie courts.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • non-cotton 6y ago
        Sure, but that wouldn't have prevented the "cancer" from moving to decentralized networks. If anything it'd probably accelerate the process. I think the important point is that most operators of nodes on a federated network are not in a position to benefit from this kind of garbage content, and have every reason (and the tools they need) to keep it away from their portion of the network.
        • throwaway894345 6y ago
          The Internet used to be decentralized and only after communication centralized via social media companies did the likes of QAnon become particularly problematic. There was always a fringe, but we had the norms and tools to keep it marginalized. Something has changed and arguments that we can fix the problem by doubling down on changing our norms/ideals (e.g., free speech, equality, tolerance, etc) don’t seem likely at all to pan out. We made a bad turn, but rather than continue to jeopardize our social fabric for pride or dunk costs, we should figure out how we can get back on course. Of course, that requires good faith, honesty, integrity, courage, etc., which are in short supply these days.
    • jay_kyburz 6y ago
      I'm not sure it's a great idea to just let "the angry mob" decide either.
  • jay_kyburz 6y ago
    It's a very unpopular sentiment here on HN, but I agree with the gist of what you are saying. I have a slight different idea that is also very unpopular. I don't think you should be able to "broadcast" anonymously. When you say things that are illegal, like death threats and hate speech, you should be held responsible. I think privacy is important, and I think you should be able to consume content anonymously, but I don't think you should be able to "post" anonymously.
    • freebuju 6y ago
      Thousands of people everyday post "anonymously" via pseudo accounts/names, more so on the heavily surveiled big social sites. Does this mean that the contents of their posts are unwanted? No. The algorithms are designed to give prominence to the most relevant posts, whether you as an individual agree with them or not. It is up to how many likes/shares these posts get. I think we should stop running away from the fact that we are human. And we all have some quirky deep-rooted tendencies & desires that may not be socially viewed as moral. Most of the times, these pseudo accounts provide amplification to that whispering inner voice harboring inside. Am certain we've all had experience with a peculiar post and go - "If it weren't for my boss following me back on my feeds I would have shared controversial view X, but hey am glad someone else said it." Then proceed to share the screenshot of said view in a more private setting such as group channels/chats etc.
  • eitland 6y ago
    I have told people they must remember whatever they put in place will be available to the next government/president/administration. Allow politicians to censor? Well it will be available for for both Joe Biden as well as the next Republican president. This is why one needs to be careful.
    • throwaway_6142 6y ago
      From the looks of it, their plan seem to be to institute enough political repression that they won't have to worry about any next government/president/administration.
  • __MatrixMan__ 6y ago
    I think your cancer metaphor is backwards. The way that a single genome is processed by myriad cells throughout the body is a miracle of decentralization. Each node is free to deviate and improvise and yet for the most part they work together for the greater good of the overall network. Cancer is what happens when a small group of cells deviates from the protocol and starts consuming resources to the exclusion of their neighbor. What is a tumor if not a centralized drive towards growth at any cost? Sounds like many modern tech companies to me. You also seem to think that decentralization would lead to less emphasis on local happenings. Why? If we moved away from a handful of services for the whole planet, wouldn't the logical next phase be a service or two per city? A decentralized web means knowing the guy who runs the server you're connecting to. A decentralizalized internet means configuring your router to peer with routers in the houses that you can see from your house. Relocalization seems like an obvious consequence of decentralizalization to me.
  • throwaway_6142 6y ago
    > If you want to broadcast to state level, you must have education, journalism rigor, and standup to scrutiny, have to explain inconsistencies or your role is revoked. And make no mistake, what they mean in reality by the above is always the same, namely that "free speech" will mean you are freely allowed to repeat the talking points of the Party.
• michaelgiba 6y ago
  I also don’t agree with this and might even argue the opposite. Nevertheless, I think in general de/centralization is orthogonal to censoring inflammatory actors. That always comes back to who are the moderators and what are their stances on censorship.
  • mmmeff 6y ago
    Can you please elaborate on what you mean by “inflammatory actors” a bit? Thanks.
    • jay_kyburz 6y ago
      Seems to me he means Trump and Qanon.
    • refurb 6y ago
      Maybe I can help out. Basically anyone who “foments discord” or “sows disharmony”. You know, people who say things that cause us to stray from The One True Path(tm). Clear now?
      • coldtea 6y ago
        So, basically anybody opposed to the TINA.
        • refurb 6y ago
          Clearly not. It's anyone opposed to the woke culture and neo-liberalism camouflaged in a social democratic platform.
      • kgwxd 6y ago
        No, it's just racism, sexism, and threats of violence. It's really not that hard. No one is getting shut down for proposing alternative social/economic strategies, unless those strategies are racist, sexist and/or violent.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  >Now, alt-right trolls and white supremacists are all but limited to a corner of the Fediverse almost nobody else talks to. While it does not prevent a dedicated group from talking hatefully among themselves on their own instance (like Gab), it does isolate them, makes radicalising new users harder, and protects others from potential abuse. I don't follow this logic at all. This is effectively how QAnon spread, as a niche group on fringe websites, before it grew to millions of users. A federated network gives better moderation tools to communities who actually want to moderate, but it leaves the radicalised communities free to grow, even freer than on a centralised network. Another example I heard of were so called "free birth" groups with tens of thousands of women shunning medical help for births, even bullying women who wanted to seek professional help. As a result, quite a few children and women died during labour[1] Private/semi private anti-vax groups are of course another huge issue right now. They often have hundreds of thousands of members. On a designated fediverse instance there is no possibility to shut this down. I see no evidence or reason at all how the decentralised internet stops radicalisation or misinformation. It honestly to me seems like it would make it worse. [1]https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-wanted-a-freebirth-at-home-when-the-baby-died-the-attacks-began https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-wanted-a-freebirth-at-home...
  • devmunchies 6y ago
    Think about extremists as any other organization wanting to advertise. Is it easier on a centralized platform or across thousands of federated instances, each with their own moderator? You can also think of it like a terrorist wanting to bomb people, would you have more success in a dense area or if everyone is spread out? With more small sites, instead of a few large sites it spreads out communities and insulates them. With centralized networks, it create a "mother vein" where it's easier to plug into a large stream of users with little effort. No doubt capitalist extremists want centralized services too because they can convert everyone to their ideology, consumerism.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      Recruiting in backyard mosques and on fringe internet sites where isolated vulnerable people hang out is exactly how terrorists recruit. Extremists don't advertise like normal people, extremists advertise in echo chambers. If a terrorist tries to create converts in Walmart it takes 10 minutes until the police shows up. When extremists plan attacks they go to the central spots, when extremists recruit and build up followers they go to the places that aren't under surveillance. The latter is relevant for social media. A decentralised internet would be a dream for extremist recruitment. It's equivalent to having an ungovernable community of millions sitting in your country.
• breck 6y ago
  > "Centralization is a Danger to Democracy" Ugh, I figured here we go again, some dumb startup taking advantage of the current political climate to pitch some new social network. But then I looked, and turns out this is really, really cool. I love it when my expectations are greatly exceeded. Definitely going to spend some time kicking around this thing more. Cool stuff!
  • simplecto 6y ago
    I had the same process -- I mis-clicked and saw that it has been appeared on HN a number of times since ~2013. I am glad to see the community continually re-discover this site now and again.
    • phoe-krk 6y ago
      > I mis-clicked and saw that it has been appeared on HN a number of times since ~2013. Maybe the website itself. This article is fresh from 2021.
  • Semaphor 6y ago
    Similar here. I expected this to be yet another "decentralized networks are the best join now"-article which pops up on HN all the time, but this one had actually well-thought-out points.
• hyko 6y ago
  Centralisation is completely compatible with Democracy. There is no plausible mechanism by which federation would prevent the kinds of issues we’ve seen when giving everyone in the world the ability to publish whatever they like at no cost. There are many reasons to want a diffusion of power, but defending democracy is not one of them.
  • non-cotton 6y ago
    Isn't diffusion of power more-or-less the point of democracy?
    • hyko 6y ago
      Absolutely not. Western liberal democracy relies on centralised power; it’s not clear that it could function without it. As an extension of that, getting “power to the people” is usually the rallying cry of someone who wants to weaken the government enough to overpower it in some way.
      • mkolodny 6y ago
        While most democratic governments currently involve some form of centralization, a pure democracy is one where every person has equal power. I believe that it's possible, and preferable for everyone to have the same amount of power. A democracy where every citizen has equal power would try to do what's best for as many people as possible.
        • Pfhreak 6y ago
          In that system, how do you care for folks who experience rare but serious difficulties. The tyranny of the majority gets real complex when dealing with massive populations.
          • username90 6y ago
            Empathy works as long as you don't create a us vs them situation. > The tyranny of the majority Has that ever happened or is that just an argument to let politicians keep their power?
• hungryhobo 6y ago
  Hmm feels like a great tool to create echo chambers
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Maybe, but centralized services seem to have that problem too in practice.
    • craftit 6y ago
      The upside of that maybe there is more awareness of what is going on. If there is no centralization, could we end up in a world there no consensus on what is acceptable or right?
      • tortasaur 6y ago
        Isn't that where we currently are with centralization?
  • Dirlewanger 6y ago
    Yup. Instead of having multiple echo chambers on one centralized network, let's now have multiple echo chambers on a decentralized service where it's even harder to hear opposing viewpoints! The sad reality is that humanity is not ready for something like the Internet. If you said dumb shit in your town's square, you'd get hit upside your head. Say it on the Internet, your little numbers go up and you get a dopamine hit.
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  I prefer the Web over the Fediverse. Blogs +RSS/microformats/Webmention are decentralized, and with much better support and accessibility. ActivityPub seems to me an overcomplicated restrictive implementation of blogging.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    I'd argue the web is the Fediverse. You access instances called websites, some of which are controlled exclusively by one person and some of which allow you to post on them. The websites all communicate with each other via a protocol called a hyperlink, but they may choose to use richer content sharing protocols at their discretion, and can also block certain hyperlinks or entire instances deemed unsuitable for their website. Websites' moderation policies vary from only one person having write access to allowing users to write and link to what they want alongside content syndicated from other fully independent websites, and users can visit many websites, and be as selective as they like about following hyperlinks. Turns out people really like the big monolithic websites with the most users though...
  • lucideer 6y ago
    What do you define as the Fediverse? My understanding of the term is that RSS & Webmentions are part of the Fediverse. Email is probably the best-known part of the Fediverse. ActivityPub is just a new/upcoming technology that's as much a part of the Web as RSS. Not everything in the Fediverse is part of the Web: email, mastodon & matrix are examples that exist outside of the Web (though mastodon is mostly Web-based, and there is also webmail, Element webapp, etc.). And obviously, not everything in the Web is part of the Fediverse: mainly Facebook, but also most SaaS out there.
    • dgellow 6y ago
      Where do you get that definition from? I've never seen email or RSS feeds to be considered part of the fediverse. In fact I've only seen the term being used for ActivityPub and Diaspora.
      • 6y ago
• coldtea 6y ago
  Yes, but nobody cares about democracy and has power. For politicians and corporations and pundits it's just fine.
• kortilla 6y ago
  > Turns out not many people like talking to or platforming fascists. Ironic to call the group you forcibly censor “fascists”. Is the alt-right even into promoting censorship of opposing ideas?
  • kiba 6y ago
    Exactly when we gave social media platforms the duties of not deplatforming fascists? These are the very same platform that gave fascists megaphones to increase engagement metrics for their business models.
• chmod600 6y ago
  Decentralization describes my polticial philosophy pretty well. The challenge is: how? Laissez-faire is a decent default, though obviously companies can cetralize power a lot. Regulation seems reasonable, but it implicitly requires you to give some government power, and they tend to expand the scope of that power over time. I think it's best when government is decentralized, and the smaller units of government can do what they want; while something as big as the US givernment would be highly constrained. Allowing individual, smaller governments to regulate makes it harder for companies to take over. But if the government amasses too much power, you just move a few towns over.
• kodah 6y ago
  I started to try to understand this debate through a political lens, since it seems so many political people are interested in it's answer. Centralization is a key tenant to progressivism, largely in the name of efficiency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_... > The progressives' quest for efficiency was sometimes at odds with the progressives' quest for democracy. Taking power out of the hands of elected officials and placing that power in the hands of professional administrators reduced the voice of the politicians and in turn reduced the voice of the people. Centralized decision-making by trained experts and reduced power for local wards made government less corrupt but more distant and isolated from the people it served. Progressives who emphasized the need for efficiency typically argued that trained independent experts could make better decisions than the local politicians. In his influential Drift and Mastery (1914) stressing the "scientific spirit" and "discipline of democracy", Walter Lippmann called for a strong central government guided by experts rather than public opinion. At first I thought, well hell, of course these people are constantly at odds with each other. Then I discovered this on the dangers of decentralization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism > Other challenges, and even dangers, include the possibility that corrupt local elites can capture regional or local power centers, while constituents lose representation; patronage politics will become rampant and civil servants feel compromised; further necessary decentralization can be stymied; incomplete information and hidden decision-making can occur up and down the hierarchies; centralized power centers can find reasons to frustrate decentralization and bring power back to themselves It turns out the answer to this has been studied and sounds like it's somewhere in the middle: https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/61430/1/MPRA_paper_61430.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.un... 1. Social Preparedness and Mechanisms to Prevent Elite Capture 2. Strong Administrative and Technical Capacity at the Higher Levels 3. Strong Political Commitment at the Higher Levels 4. Sustained Initiatives for Capacity-Building at the Local Level 5. Strong Legal Framework for Transparency and Accountability 6. Transformation of Local Government Organizations into High Performing Organizations 7. Appropriate Reasons to Decentralize: Intentions Matter 8. Effective Judicial System, Citizens' Oversight and Anticorruption Bodies to prevent Decentralization of Corruption How this translates to Fediverse hosts likely matters and is probably worth reading for anyone interested in hosting. My takeaway from this is that the web does need to go back to being decentralized, but a loose yet robust framework, like the one described above, should be in place for providers and community maintainers alike.
• mrtksn 6y ago
  Centralised or de-centralised, why would make any difference? The lies are lies, if you don't have a centralised platform they will spread p2p as long as people can communicate. What we need is a mechanism for breaking circuits of lies and propaganda. In real world social networks we have methods like labelling liars(You have one identity and you risk it every time you say something), right to defend yourself(You can actually identify and force your way to reach the people who are exposed to, or facilitate it) if you are being smeared for or accused of wrongdoing. You don't have these mechanism in the digitalised version of social networks. Social networks work like cults, your reply to an online mob at Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/FB etc. reaches no one else but your own cult(if you have one). Oh and believe me, lies are dangerous. In istanbul there are many abandoned beautiful buildings in central locations, many these belong to Greeks who lived in Istanbul for generations but in 1955 were targeted by the Turks who were told by a newspaper that the Greeks bombed the Turkish consulate and Ataturk's birth house in Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom There was nothing centralised about this Progom, the newspaper was not the governments publication like in a Communist dictatorship. Yet, it caused so much pain to the Greek minority and Turkey lost so much as the Greek christian population declined from 120K to 7K in 20 years. If anything, decentralised networks can be targeted very efficiently by a bad actor and the rest would have no recourse. There's nothing stoping (fascists/communits/liberals/$_YOURBOOGYMAN) to identify decentralised networks, connect to all of them, participate and run a propaganda campaign through a centralised unit that connects to all the decentralised networks. If there were thousands of decentralised social networks, QAnon could have used Buffer to manage their presence in all of them.
  • simonh 6y ago
    >What we need is a mechanism for breaking circuits of lies and propaganda. I think this is dangerous thinking, lies are bad but censorship is worse because someone has to decide what is a lie and what isn't, and that quickly becomes politicised. That never works out well. Since you mention Turkey, look at the current government's suppression of journalism. Freedom of expression must be protected as a legal right to maintain democracy. On the other hand, freedom of expression includes the freedom not to facilitate other people's speech if you choose. I fully support the Parler people's right to propagate whatever bullshit they like as long as it isn't planning or inciting crimes. Equally I completely support Twitter, Facebook, AWS, etc's right to choose what they do and do not allow on their platforms. That's freedom too. This is all part of the process of civil discourse. However uncivil it might seem right now, it's something we all need to work out as free citizens.
• cwyers 6y ago
  I think this is a very compelling point, and much better than most of the "fediverse is for freedom" talking points I have seen on HN: > I have participated in many a public forum on Internet governance, and whenever anyone pointed out that social platforms like Facebook need to do more as far as content moderation is concerned, Facebook would complain that it’s difficult in their huge network, since regulation and cultures are so different across the world. > They’re not wrong! But while their goal was to stifle further regulation, they were in fact making a very good argument for decentralisation. > After all the very reason they are in this “difficult position” is their business decision to insist on providing centrally-controlled global social media platforms, trying to push the round peg of a myriad of cultures into a square hole of a single moderation policy. I think if there was a more robust social media market instead of a Facebook/Twitter duopoly, we would have seen at least _some_ platforms move to restrict things sooner, and maybe even a majority of platforms. That would have kept us from hitting a moment so fraught that the President ended up banned from all social media overnight.
  • CaptArmchair 6y ago
    I agree with your assertion. And I would add a bit on the "content moderation is difficult" argument. The current state of content moderation - or lack thereof - on these platforms didn't happen by accident. It's the direct consequence of their business model. If you create a digital space and you host millions of people, you will also pull in the fraught complexity of human relationships. The digital space isn't free from the same challenges regarding governance of communities you'd encounter in the physical world. However, the businesses that provide the infrastructure and engineering that underpins digital spaces aren't in the "building communities" business. They are selling advertising and business intelligence. Which is a very different proposition. As such, the very design of the large platforms never quite incorporated proper tooling that models the complexities of (self) governing millions of people in a central digital space. On the contrary. Recommendation engines - people who you know, people to follow, this might interest you as well, this article was shared x times,... - do the exact opposite. They have helped shape emerging social dynamics which are spilling over in the real world, with real world consequences, creating social feedback loops that escape control. Rather then acknowledging this fundamental issue, these centralized platforms assumed that they could solve this through centralized content filtering, or through centralized human moderation teams which have to follow company policies. Which is an incredibly difficult proposition considering the amount of digital data produced daily by billions of people. So, why did they chose this type of content moderation? Because the social issues that stem from these platforms are seen as an expense which ought to be externalized. There's only an incentive to invest in content moderation to the point where the issues caused by the people they host are threatening the performance of the business model. In that regard, I think that a "social media market" were platforms provide affordances for equitable (self)governance of communities involves a fundamental reflection/reshaping/rethinking/overhaul of the business models and business incentives that underpin such a market.
• Mizza 6y ago
  Judging by the comments on these and similar threads, it seems that the biggest danger to democracy is voters who have different ideas about how the country should be run. The fundamental danger, of course, is money. Everything else is noise.
  • username90 6y ago
    Money being able to influence elections is called corruption. Money isn't a problem in itself, corruption is. Just giving up and saying that money will always have this kind of influence and that all politicians will always be bought and there is nothing you can do is how you ensure corruption festers and grow.
    • gedy 6y ago
      The challenge is, aside from a few people, most are perfectly happy with money, censorship, etc if it helps their side.
  • simonh 6y ago
    I'ma Brit, but as far as I can see democracy in the USA is working fine and exactly as it is supposed to. The voters experimented with something unusual for a few years, then switched back to something more familiar, they'll get more chances to choose over the coming years. In fact it's precisely because democracy worked so well that the MAGA core lost their shit and tried to over-rule it. They failed, democracy won, a few extremists are dead or will end up in prison and it's time to move on. I just feel bad for the cop who lost his life, and his family.
• cies 6y ago
  I believe the premise of the title. But the main question should be: why? And the article does not really answer that, well beyond censorship. I think the reason why centralization is a danger to democracy, is because of lobbying. Lobbying is much easier in a centralized power structure. See how much lobbying goes on in and around the power centers of this world: DC, Brussels, London. Lobby is power for money, democracy is power for votes (at least it should be). Currently lobbies have more power in the decision process than voters (any political sciences professor will agree). So democracy is a hollow word, or worse: a facade, a lie. Lobbies basically work in favour of the super rich. If we see the gap widening we see that they get what they pay for, and the for-sure-not-super-rich masses dont get what they vote for.
  • hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Which might be measured as the proportion of wealth owned by the wealthiest few, and the rest of the peoples. It's like a majority attack, on one side of wealth, on another of votes. While the combined wealth of all voters exceeds that of the few lobbyists, in theory votes should win. It's good to recall that democracy didn't come about in a vaccuum; It came about to displace monarchy. Because democracy is "fair", the aristocrats are among us with at least as much power as any of the rest of us. The greater the wealth disparity, however, the more power they can purchase by bribing the poor politicians. Which in turn begs the masses to pay politicians well enough that corruption becomes at best unnecessary. The only remaining cure for greed is transparency, accountability, and journalism. Therefore it is in the wealthy elite's interest to lobby for laws that erode any established amounts of the aforementioned qualities, steadily inching the power structures towards secrecy, carte blanche, and censorship. Can you think of any government agency that has such powers? I'm thinking of several, and most of them are in the US. Capitalism is allergic to wealth redistribution, which is the true name for the action that begins to solve the issue. The only question is: How much? One practical example is speeding tickets. AFAIK in the US speeding tickets are flat fees. So a wealthy person barely cares about speeding in traffic. In Finland, a more socialist republic, speeding tickets are proportional to income. So a wealthy person speeding will feel the hurt. Every so often some asshole with a Ferrari gets a million dollar speeding ticket. (possibly exaggerated, don't recall exact amounts)
• enriquto 6y ago
  For the same reason, smallish countries seem to be much more democratic and closer to the people (e.g., Switzerland). The "sweet spot" seems to be between 5 and 10 million people maybe?
  • username90 6y ago
    Politicians would rather run a large country though so they tend to push for centralization.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    The list of countries between 5 and 10 million includes more countries noted for human rights violations or recent civil wars than liberal democracies. Even success stories in maximising their geographic advantages like Singapore hardly qualify as 'more democratic' The factor Switzerland seems to have in common with other liberal democracies of that size is being based in Europe, something it also shares with a larger liberal democracies. Exceptional features like the canton system, regular referenda and not going to war are unique to Switzerland (and arguably not as attractive as they superficially sound)
    • enriquto 6y ago
      > The list of countries between 5 and 10 million includes more countries noted for human rights violations or recent civil wars than liberal democracies. Citation needed? Anyhow, the interesting measure is the total number of people living in small vs. large countries noted for human right violations or wars, not the total number of countries with that condition. I agree that Singapore is a hellish dystopia, but Switzerland's referenda and its strong stance on not going to war (but keeping a strong army for defense) are undeniable attractive points. These are the European countries with population between 4 and 9 million: Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Ireland, Croatia. That's quite a "dream team" in my view!
      • notahacker 6y ago
        The governments of larger states like Britain, France, Spain and Germany are not without problems, but we're not casting envious glances at how Serbia and Bulgaria are run, never mind Belarus :) Outside Europe you've got a group which includes central American states famed for frequent coups and revolutions, nations synonymous with conflict like Libya, Sierra Leone and Israel/Palestine, extremely authoritarian post USSR central Asian states, a rare communist holdout in Laos, the absolute monarchy of the UAE and Togo which might as well be having been ruled by the same family for its entire history. Singapore isn't a 'hellish dystopia', its positively paradise compared with most of them, despite the obvious limits to its democracy. Costa Rica's last half century is positive too, I guess.
• cheph 6y ago
  TL;DR: Centralization is a danger to democracy because we can more effectively silence people if we have decentralization. Too bad the deplatforming did not stop the insurrection at the US Capitol. But I'm sure if you just do it harder it will work.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• lhnz 6y ago
  The problem, I feel, is that both centralisation and decentralisation are a danger to democracy. Centralisation because it enables elites within the tech/media/state to conspire together to wield much more power within a "democracy" than such a system needs to run equitably. Decentralisation because it allows foreign actors to more-or-less do military manouvres within social media in order to cause particular outcomes (e.g. polarisation, destabilisation, regime change, forming opinions within a population that are economically beneficial to the attacking country, etc).
• mac01021 6y ago
  I was hoping this would be about the centralization of the power to govern in the federal government and the need to transfer much power back to the states.
• visarga 6y ago
  What we need is "diversity in unity and unity in diversity". Let's take railroads for example: we want many constructors of rails and trains, but we want them to be interoperable - they need to agree on a common track standard. The internet - we want to have many independent websites, but they all need to use a common protocol in order to have wide reach. In politics we want multiple independent parties, but they should play fair with constitution and elections. We need both the ability to centralize some aspects and diversify other aspects. For Google, FB and Twitter I'd like more diversity on the front end part - UI, personalisation of filtering and ranking, and on the user data storage part - portable user pods.
• loceng 6y ago
  Centralization without decentralized failsafes is a danger to democracy; FTFU.
• zwaps 6y ago
  Counterpoint: Here in Germany there is relatively little centralization. For example, the government could not implement country wide corona measures, which in the end meant that much less was accomplished compared to centralized countries such as France. In France, one can just close borders and announce curfews. In Germany, such measures always end up as the minimum consensus between 16 states. Frequently, federal politicians pursue policies beneficial for their home state. For example, the current government is dominated by Bavarian politicians, who channel funds and attention toward a state that is already doing well. Indeed this is likely to continue with the next chancellor being likely a right wing Bavarian. By contrast, people from other states, especially ones with higher population like NRW, feel like they have little to none representation in a federal level. This gives an incentive to vote for opportunistic demagogues. The same thing is probably happening on an EU level, where many people feel their local government has less power than before, but the EU institutions are dominated by countries with different interests. For someone from a relative minority, decentralization seems to be a one way street. If some countries do their own thing, then I would like my country to be separate entirely. So I‘d say decentralization can also endanger democracy, as only complete separation can really be fair. In a centralized system, however, there is at least the chance that the central governance actually represents all of the population.
  • rglullis 6y ago
    To me this sounds like you made an excellent argument for more decentralization, not less. - Germany vs France in regards to Corona: similar sized countries, yet I venture that Germany has been doing far better than France in dealing with the pandemic. Maybe it is because the local governors have a better idea of what are the real challenges of their regions than some bureaucrat sitting in Berlin? - Bavaria takes too much money from the federal government: maybe that would be an argument to have less federal taxes and more to the state-level. Remove power from the central entity, and there will be less of an incentive/risk of abuse? - EU: you say probably to something that every Euro-skeptic has been saying for decades already. People outside of the Germany/France/Italy circle are getting more and more tired of losing autonomy over their lives, business and even who they get to have as neighbors to someone in Brussels, who has more to gain by listening to lobbyists than their voters. > there is at least the chance that the central governance actually represents all of the population. No. Not at the scales that we talking about and not at this globalized world that we have. In today's world, all that central governance does is foment polarization in order to run divide-and-conquer of the people. Maybe (if you are lucky) you get some alternance of power so that no single group gets to be in control and some equilibrium gets to be established.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Centralization is a danger in an environment where there are a handful of individuals 100,000x more wealthy than everyone else. It is extremely easy to take control of a centralized system when you have enough wealth; and unfortunately, our system has produced more than a few of these edge cases.
• coldtea 6y ago
  >After all, nothing really changed in President Trump’s rhetoric, or in the wild substance of QAnon conspiracy theories What "rhetoric"? A sitting politician complained for fraud. Such complaints are a dime a dozen in elections all around the world. Heck, that's what the other side complained about too, in 2016, and has a long history in US politics. And if he "orchestrated" a walk-in into the Capitol (where nothing much happened, and politicians were up to business as usual the very same day), the other side has organized and lauded dozens of protests, including some with looting and even burning of police departments and areas of cities, throughout 4 years. As a European, I see a lot of cant on both sides, and a lot of pearl clutching by the side that gets all the legitimacy offered by the mainstream media and the "polite society". In other words, it's partisanship 101. Downvote freely, it's a partisan country anyway
  • whatever1 6y ago
    Comparing a deadly coup attempt and a direct attack against the representatives and the VP himself in the US capitol the day that the election results were certified by the Houses with random protests?
    • eplanit 6y ago
      Like the comment said, pearl clutching all of the sudden.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >Comparing a deadly coup attempt and a direct attack against the representatives and the VP himself in the US capitol the day that the election results were certified by the Houses with random protests? No, comparing some random people getting into a government building in protest, being basically tame inside, and business continuing as usual the very next day (or same?). That was a "coup"? What was the plan to establish the new government? Who was the leader? The guy with the horns? The ex-president who didn't care less about the incident, and called for people going home? And it was only deadly because in the US people are trigger happy, and even getting out of your car, unarmed, to a traffic cop, can be deadly. Even so, from what I read a guard was killed in an altercation with the mob, and a protestor was shot by police. A few others had "medical emergencies". Pearl clutching aside, I wouldn't even call it a "violent protest", much less a coup...
• InfiniteRand 6y ago
  There was a debate (not a formal debate but a theme I saw in numerous articles) in the 90's (or maybe early 2000's) among Middle East experts who were involved in pro-democracy movements, about whether or not cracking-down on radical Islamist movements was counter-productive even when they were close to, but not directly involved with, violent extremists. The idea was that by including such violent-adjacent (but not directly violent) people into the political mainstream, they would be over time deradicalized even if they might praise violence abstractly, they would eventually become invested in the political process and participate. Many of the articles discussing this talked about how socialist movements of the early 20th century often started out radical but then became centrist. On the other hand, cracking down on the violent-adjacent would just further radicalize them and push them into the violent underground. The debate became something of a moot point eventually, in the 90's it looked like democracy advocates in many Middle Eastern countries would gradually gain power and would need to make decisions about whether or not to crack down, of course that did not happen (except in Tunisia, where I think this debate still has some significance). Anyways the current discussions about whether or not to "deplatform" the far-right remind me a little of these debates in the 90's. Of course, deciding whether or not to "deplatform" is very different than deciding whether or not to round-up and jail everyone, and so the parallels are strictly limited.
• 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  isnt this what india china kazhakistan and other places are doing?
• jjk166 6y ago
  > After all the very reason they are in this “difficult position” is their business decision to insist on providing centrally-controlled global social media platforms, trying to push the round peg of a myriad of cultures into a square hole of a single moderation policy. Facebook does have decentralized moderation. Every facebook group could in theory individually decide that Qanon conspiracies are unacceptable and remove them, and indeed most do. The problem is a minority won't, and the crazies just aggregate there. And the same principle applies whether the decentralized authorities are subreddit moderators or small site admins or what have you. Moderation is fundamentally forced upon people against their individual will for the sake of the larger community. If the "baddies" self-censored, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Decentralized authority can work in situations where people can't freely associate, for example if my town forbids me from putting a "Hail Satan" sign on my lawn, it's a significant burden to move to a town of satanists, and even if I did, it would no longer be a problem for the town I left. But online it's trivial to find some place that will let me post "hail satan" and ignoring its existence will just have to be good enough for those who don't like it. There is no "local" on the internet - there is no distance nor natural barriers over which the actions of others lose potency. You are never more than a few keystrokes away from the deepest darkest pits of the internet, and there is no way of ensuring any concept stays in those pits. I am not in favor of global censorship as I feel the harm outweighs the good. Unfortunately, local censorship is not a way to have our cake and eat it too.
• mindslight 6y ago
  This piece does a good job reminding me of the larger context for what I've been feeling the past few weeks. Communications freedom is basically my main political issue, but I've had a really hard time caring about The Purge. It seems basically inevitable after what occurred. What is happening with Big Tech is the same arc as many other instances of American exploitation - an industry springs up around some type of obvious exploitation, but everybody speaking out about it is ignored because they're preaching against business expedience (eg the handful of HN users talking about centralized webapps being a bad idea for the past decade, outnumbered by those with get rich quick startup dreams). Finally the externalities grow too great to ignore and the industry finds itself in an untenable position (financially and socially). The innovative exploiters retreat, while those that bought into the system fight to preserve the status quo, creating a pleb-vs-pleb political issue while the initial exploiters have simply moved on to creating a new manner of exploitation. Even slavery fits this general pattern, and we're still suffering its resulting mess today. One question I've been pondering is if polarization/propagandization (foreign or domestic) is even possible at the scale we're observing without these centralized watering holes? It's really big tech "social media" that offers this promise of unsophisticated users connecting with socially-distant low-reputation nyms as if they are other good-faith individuals (ie non-Sybil), essentially filling in the companies own reputation in their place. High fanout bad faith actors (political demagogues) will always exist, but it takes an impedance-matching middle layer creating social proof to enable them at such scale. It feels like that would be harder to pull off if people were only connected to closer nodes by default. Although this is probably a hypothetical question now that such structure has already been created.