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An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship

223 points by anarbadalov 5y ago

commandlinefan 5y ago
> Fear of punishment works on most bosses of news media outlets and internet platforms. If they slip up and allow the wrong content to reach the public, they may not be sent off to do hard labor in a detention camp, but they could be demoted and their day docked Can't help but note that Twitter declined to deplatform Trump for years - long before he was elected president - because he was good for business. When they finally did kick him off (yes, yes, as is their right to do as a private organization), they defended their actions by insisting that they were afraid that he might do or say something that the government might hold them legally liable for. AWS said effectively the same thing when they kicked the service Parler off of their servers because - a degree of separation away - Trump might do something on Parler that AWS might end up in legal trouble for.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  This reasoning doesn't make sense since every person or company using any public platform or any public cloud infrastructure can do bad. Person who does "bad" is liable for it not underlying platform. For example politicians who don't like Bitcoin say something like "Bitcoin is used for drugs" yea but dollars and euros are used for drugs as well so it makes no sense to say Bitcoin is bad or declare any person using public service as good or bad.
- ManBlanket 5y ago
  So equating banning a user to the rights of a private organization might be a _little_ disingenuous? Some might say a straw man for the fact Twitter did so out of fear of liability pursuant of a government which deemed that user's opinions offensive? Would Twitter have removed the authors of the US constitution for fear of legal liability from the Crown? Isn't that, like, the reason the first amendment even exists? So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Because... private company?
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    >So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Courts have constitutional ground and duty to judge and decide upon laws and constitution.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  In Machiavellian terms, what better way to help ingratiate your company with the incoming administration? Especially since the outgoing one will no longer be able to retaliate.
slibhb 5y ago
> As Antonio Gramsci understood, rules achieve hegemonic domination when they are able to cloak their coercion with the consent of the ruled. If something has the consent of the ruled, can it be coercive? If it can, what even is consent?
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  The "coercion" is cloaked with the "consent of the ruled". It's not actually the consent of the ruled, it is coercion wearing a disguise. If a 10,000-strong anti-skub march happens in my town, but the nightly news doesn't mention it at all and instead airs man-on-the-street interviews with smiling middle-class people who all quite like skub, what just happened? Are the populace for or against skub? It doesn't really matter if any anti-skub organizations can be made to appear to be ineffectual or aberrant or insane or invisible.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    Your example is straightforward cocercion, it's not what Gramsci was talking about. He argued that culture and religion instill bourgeois values. It's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination. It blurs the line between coercion and consent. It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).
    - mc32 5y ago
      So every *ism is coercion. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Buddhism, etc., except it’s not coercion if you’re looking inwardly, I guess.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      >Your example is straightforward cocercion Why do you think that? Keep reading the article. The West doesn't really need Fear (except against whistleblowers etc), but uses Friction and Flooding extremely effectively. The "mysterious" coordination of the increasingly-consolidated media helps provide Friction against organizing effectively against skub, and a steady insistent Flood of pro-skub messaging ensures those without much investment in skub either way suffer the mere-exposure effect and think skub is normal (those man-on-the-street interviews, skub showing up in movies and TV, ads for skub, weirdly patriotic messaging about skub). >It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual). I think it suggests that people should make decisions based on unadulterated information, rather than that which is spoon-fed to them by authoritarians. Did you read the rest of the article? "Marxist" is an analytical lens, not indicative of someone who wants to give your toothbrush to the revolution.
bwship 5y ago
Meanwhile the spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate has 360K followers on Twitter.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Ideologically it troubles me that political opponents are censored in USA (Trump) even though I vehemently disagree with every thing he has to say and I understand it’s damaging to the society through incitement of violence.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    I'm less troubled that the censorship actually happened, as much as I am troubled by the increasing demand for such censorship. social media networks give you all the tools you could possibly want to prevent you from seeing posts you don't want to see, but that's not good enough—people are demanding that people get deplatformed for speech. ubiquitous smartphone and social media access brought about the slow death of the "libertarian free speech haven" aspect of the Web, and there's no reason to think those ideals will come back into vogue anytime soon.
    - sureglymop 5y ago
      Those "ideals" absolutely exist on the internet... they just don't have a place in mainstream media. For example, I often use Mastodon and other platforms like it. Now while popular Mastodon instances obviously don't want to federate with "free speech" instances, those instances still exist and stand on their own. I still remember a discussion some time ago, about federating with what I think was called Gab. At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform, but should you want to create or host your own alternative to Twitter? Well you can, so you're not restricted in your free speech.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        >At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform Perhaps in law, but certainly not spirit. I understand the dilemma. Twitter doesn't want the KKK on their site, but they've gone way too far. It's nothing more than a thinly veiled self-serving propaganda machine anymore, as is all the other large social media sites. The original dream of internet freedom is dead.
neither_color 5y ago
For me the creepiest thing about 1984 wasn't the degradation of language or the censorship. What I found most concerning was Winston risking his life for a resistance movement that turned out to be fake. There are two well-known groups of violent protestors that the opposing side believe keeps getting away with reprehensible behavior that the authorities seemingly could stop at any time but choose not to. It didn't click with me until the doc "Social Dilemma" alluded to it with the "extreme center" protests. I think many would-be freedom fighters are falling for that trap.
- mistermann 5y ago
  Are you referring to QAnon perchance? I've always found the "advertised risk" of QAnon to be inconsistent with the apparent lack of investigation (and lack of curiousity about a lack of investigation) a bit curious, as compared to say the Unabomber scenario. It could be nothing of course, but then it could also be something.
  - krapp 5y ago
    Lack of investigation into what? Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      > Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious. Oh, it sounds like you are referring to QAnon's ideas - I am referring to QAnon the organization, including its leadership, if any. We regularly hear (perhaps not so much lately now that the election is over) about how dangerous QAnon is, my thinking is that if this organization is so dangerous, why does no one do anything about it, and why do journalists not wonder why no one does anything about it.
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        Probably because calling things dangerous is a way to rile up hate which is what journalists do.
jccc 5y ago
Orwell's concern was Us, not Them: "[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."
keewee7 5y ago
Considering how fast Reddit is growing I think people should keep an eye on the moderators of r/worldnews and r/news. The viewership of these subreddits is several times bigger than their subscriber count because both subreddits are regularly featured on r/all and r/popular. It's also no secret that many journalists use these subreddits to gauge which topics interests people. It's possible that in a few years all an authoritarian regime has to do to shut down bad publicity is to get a moderator on r/worldnews.
- ep103 5y ago
  In the future? Mods of the major subreddits have been on payrolls for years. Its a topic that used to come up with regularity ~6 years ago. I would be absolutely shell-shocked if it wasn't commonplace now.
  - Covzire 5y ago
    My thoughts as well, /r/worldnews is for a long while already an echo chamber dominated by one political perspective that, to use a courtroom analogy, act exclusively as prosecutors against populists, centrists and conservatives or they act as defense attorney's for those they already vote for, depending on the hot issues of the day.
- meowkit 5y ago
  The inability for users to police mods on reddit is becoming a serious problem in my opinion. An additional problem is that most mods enable the rapid development of echo chambers through often well intentioned rules that become draconian when enforced by the right mod(s).
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    As long as people keep using reddit, nothing is a problem (for reddit).
  - aeternum 5y ago
    How would users police mods? It's very easy to write a karma-farming bot, you would end up with bots controlling mods, not users.
rodolphoarruda 5y ago
Not a single line about the state of censorship in Brazil. Odd.
- anonleb4 5y ago
  Not really, it's a piece for US readers about the US current views of who's "bad", they're not going to criticize their political and economic partners. There's nothing about Saudis either, see.
  - elmo2you 5y ago
    Or about the situation regarding censorship in the USA, which makes this a rather blatant political propaganda piece by itself. For those who feel like censorship in the USA is less problematic, because it's not state controlled (that is, if it actually isn't) .. consider this: If business can introduce arbitrary censorship, regardless of justification, on platforms that are widely used by many, is this not far more dangerous than any state controlled censorship? While any governments can of course ignore their supposed accountability for their behavior, business have far less of that accountability to begin with. Although, if the USA was true state of law (not a powerful banana republic pretending), it should hold those companies accountable for limiting the freedoms of citizens regarding what should be allowed according and protected by law. But heck, almost all (emerging) fascistic systems have started (and flourished) on a collusion between corrupt business and an equally criminal government, with a shared interests in each expanding their own powers and influence. Almost funny to see articles like these coming from the USA these day, knowing in which direction the country is currently moving. Somehow "the emperor has no clothes" comes to mind.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Reading this I had a realization. The "soft fear" is alive and well in the USA. A huge fear right now is slipping up in life and falling off the capitalist progression. There is no safety net here, so if you screw up and end up homeless because you didn't work hard enough or save enough money, your chances of climbing out are almost nill. So rather than sending someone off to a Gulag or prison camp, the gulags are the ghettos patrolled by the police departments. Here, we say to ourselves, "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects." And then the system works to keep you there, from all sides. By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem; yet we live in fear that if we lose our jobs we might end up in these hopeless places. And many will blame themselves because that is the narrative. Clever, and insidious: the prisons are all around us, just without walls and barbed wire.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects." But that's like saying "we don't have torture, but if you don't help, you're not getting any cake". Yes, living in social housing isn't great because of your neighbors. But it's much better than being homeless. And it's much, much, much, much better than being in a labor camp. Nobody is stopping you from walking out of the projects. Guess how that works out in a Gulag when you say "thanks, I'd rather live in the forest".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- laurent92 5y ago
  > By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem Actually, this is the definition of ideology, and you are not identifying it. Ideology starts when they accept victims in pursuit of their goal. When you accept negative side-effect that would be considered offsetting whatever good you are trying to provide in any other ideology. - Capitalist ideology: We accept human victims as a side effect of meritocracy, whereas we wouldn’t accept human victims under Christian ideology, - Christianity: Caring for poor people; White supremacist ideology: Accepting that we do not care for migrants while we care about local people. - Feminist ideology: Accepting male victims, for example suicide or work, while rejecting non-life-threatening difficulties for women. (whereas under any other ideology, the two genders’ issues would be treated equally). - Communist ideology: Accepting to shoot up a head of state in the pursuit of the greater good for all other citizen.
PontifexMinimus 5y ago
> Friction is about making it harder and less convenient to access unapproved material. And of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al would never do anything like that, would they?
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Big Tech was censoring people last year who were saying things Congress is saying this year. But don't worry, I'm sure they learned from their mistakes with censoring people.
gootler 5y ago
Yeah, even here on "hacker news" bullshit assholes in new york
motohagiography 5y ago
Unfortunately this article isn't criticism, it's an instruction manual for groups that organize and co-ordinate using projection. Essentially anything groups aligned to authorities accuse outgroups of doing is a way of signalling and establishing consensus on what they plan to do next. They aren't projecting because they are stupid, they are projecting because they're coordinating. It only takes about 6-8 years to go from street riots to camps and gulags, and in Canada and Australia, we're about 60% of the way down that road. The only meaningful political question right now is how much civilization we must give up to isolate and remove a totalitarian movement that has subverted and taken root in our institutions, while they used other more legitimate movements as cover. Complaining about censorship, or any signal of skepticism or belief in principle at all just gets you on a list of being among the first to stop applauding. Who really thinks someone who uses the cynical realpolitik of deception and censorship is going to be swayed by a principled argument? The only thing nihilists understand is power and conseqeunces. If you are really concerned about censorship, the most valuable act of defiance now is to build close personal networks of friends and family that do not depend on the platforms, and which are immune to the relentless official propaganda disgorged by tech companies. This all sounds very dark, but really, if you can't countenance it, you aren't going to be innoculated to it, and you are going to be subject to it.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  I've come to the same conclusions with the added step that I believe we should focus our efforts on creating platforms and protocols to protect anonymity, encrypted communication, alternate payment mechanisms, and freedom of speech. As a conservative I've seen all of these things attacked in order to control what is allowed to be said and who is allowed to be compensated.
  - clairity 5y ago
    > "As a conservative..." you had a good comment going until you tribalized yourself (with a false dichotomy, to boot). the pull of the tribe will always subvert independent thinking. that's not to say we can exist devoid of identities, but that we should always be cognizant of the bias they introduce, and actively reduce the attack surface of that bias by not adopting identifying ideologies needlessly. you can for example be amenable to many "conservative" ideas without considering yourself a conservative, and especially without joining an ideological party (like the republicans). the goals you mention are not ideological, so why bring ideology into the conversation?
grillvogel 5y ago
you can definitely see "Flooding" on all the major social media platforms these days
- jl6 5y ago
  It’s not just “these days”. Flooding is the bread and circuses spoken of nearly 2000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses We’re talking about the distraction and daily grind that occupies the otherwise-idle hands for which the ruling class’s devils might make work.
pawn13 5y ago
"Modern authoritarian regimes". Authoritarian regimes are pretty obvious and easy to deal with. Hey I grew up in soviet union, everyone knew media/authorities lie, nobody took it serious and all information was taken with a grain of salt. What is much more dangerous is countries where people they live under a democracy but once some information about people in power pop up it could be silenced, flooded with disinformation, you may disappear, you may hide for rest of your life in some embassy like Assange. Anything can happen. And people with money and power have total control. They just often use indirect, hidden measures to achieve that. We don't even know who are those people, they don't have to be public figures like dictators etc. This is much more scary. And KGB, stasi, etc never ever dreamed of such control on people and survivlence modern social networks and technologies provide. And western 3-letter agencies have much more power those could even dream of. And you know what is more scary? That nobody give a f*. Even if information about some really scary stuff appear in media everyone would just forgot about that next day. Or media would even make a show out of it. Like that episode in a black mirror. Everyone knows their phones are spying on them but keep using them. It's not just convinient, I can't order a taxi anymore without a smartphone. Few years ago I could just catch a car not anymore. You can't take a subway or a bus without being seen on 100 CCTV cams with facial recognition. And if you question if that's normal you would be asked "what you have something to hide or what?". Maybe I'm just not an exhibicionist.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  As others have said, privacy is not about having nothing to hide, it's about having nothing you want to share.
- curation 5y ago
  Yes. Thank you. "free" in the land of "unfree" in the west where we equate free to surfing the net, shopping for infinite products compartmentalizing paradoxes as we go - working ourselves to death even though we don't believe in any future.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I fear that people only care if they're told they should care, vis-à-vis the news media telling them to. Not the people are 'sheep' or anything condescending like that, but rather, people take cues from the atmosphere around them on what to be worried about and how much they need to worry about something. If the news isn't making a big stink out of something, society at large just doesn't react.

223 points by anarbadalov 5y ago

> Fear of punishment works on most bosses of news media outlets and internet platforms. If they slip up and allow the wrong content to reach the public, they may not be sent off to do hard labor in a detention camp, but they could be demoted and their day docked Can't help but note that Twitter declined to deplatform Trump for years - long before he was elected president - because he was good for business. When they finally did kick him off (yes, yes, as is their right to do as a private organization), they defended their actions by insisting that they were afraid that he might do or say something that the government might hold them legally liable for. AWS said effectively the same thing when they kicked the service Parler off of their servers because - a degree of separation away - Trump might do something on Parler that AWS might end up in legal trouble for.

mrkramer 5y ago
This reasoning doesn't make sense since every person or company using any public platform or any public cloud infrastructure can do bad. Person who does "bad" is liable for it not underlying platform. For example politicians who don't like Bitcoin say something like "Bitcoin is used for drugs" yea but dollars and euros are used for drugs as well so it makes no sense to say Bitcoin is bad or declare any person using public service as good or bad.
ManBlanket 5y ago
So equating banning a user to the rights of a private organization might be a _little_ disingenuous? Some might say a straw man for the fact Twitter did so out of fear of liability pursuant of a government which deemed that user's opinions offensive? Would Twitter have removed the authors of the US constitution for fear of legal liability from the Crown? Isn't that, like, the reason the first amendment even exists? So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Because... private company?
- mrkramer 5y ago
  >So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Courts have constitutional ground and duty to judge and decide upon laws and constitution.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
In Machiavellian terms, what better way to help ingratiate your company with the incoming administration? Especially since the outgoing one will no longer be able to retaliate.

slibhb 5y ago

> As Antonio Gramsci understood, rules achieve hegemonic domination when they are able to cloak their coercion with the consent of the ruled. If something has the consent of the ruled, can it be coercive? If it can, what even is consent?

revolvingocelot 5y ago
The "coercion" is cloaked with the "consent of the ruled". It's not actually the consent of the ruled, it is coercion wearing a disguise. If a 10,000-strong anti-skub march happens in my town, but the nightly news doesn't mention it at all and instead airs man-on-the-street interviews with smiling middle-class people who all quite like skub, what just happened? Are the populace for or against skub? It doesn't really matter if any anti-skub organizations can be made to appear to be ineffectual or aberrant or insane or invisible.
- slibhb 5y ago
  Your example is straightforward cocercion, it's not what Gramsci was talking about. He argued that culture and religion instill bourgeois values. It's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination. It blurs the line between coercion and consent. It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).
  - mc32 5y ago
    So every *ism is coercion. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Buddhism, etc., except it’s not coercion if you’re looking inwardly, I guess.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    >Your example is straightforward cocercion Why do you think that? Keep reading the article. The West doesn't really need Fear (except against whistleblowers etc), but uses Friction and Flooding extremely effectively. The "mysterious" coordination of the increasingly-consolidated media helps provide Friction against organizing effectively against skub, and a steady insistent Flood of pro-skub messaging ensures those without much investment in skub either way suffer the mere-exposure effect and think skub is normal (those man-on-the-street interviews, skub showing up in movies and TV, ads for skub, weirdly patriotic messaging about skub). >It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual). I think it suggests that people should make decisions based on unadulterated information, rather than that which is spoon-fed to them by authoritarians. Did you read the rest of the article? "Marxist" is an analytical lens, not indicative of someone who wants to give your toothbrush to the revolution.

bwship 5y ago

Meanwhile the spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate has 360K followers on Twitter.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Ideologically it troubles me that political opponents are censored in USA (Trump) even though I vehemently disagree with every thing he has to say and I understand it’s damaging to the society through incitement of violence.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  I'm less troubled that the censorship actually happened, as much as I am troubled by the increasing demand for such censorship. social media networks give you all the tools you could possibly want to prevent you from seeing posts you don't want to see, but that's not good enough—people are demanding that people get deplatformed for speech. ubiquitous smartphone and social media access brought about the slow death of the "libertarian free speech haven" aspect of the Web, and there's no reason to think those ideals will come back into vogue anytime soon.
  - sureglymop 5y ago
    Those "ideals" absolutely exist on the internet... they just don't have a place in mainstream media. For example, I often use Mastodon and other platforms like it. Now while popular Mastodon instances obviously don't want to federate with "free speech" instances, those instances still exist and stand on their own. I still remember a discussion some time ago, about federating with what I think was called Gab. At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform, but should you want to create or host your own alternative to Twitter? Well you can, so you're not restricted in your free speech.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      >At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform Perhaps in law, but certainly not spirit. I understand the dilemma. Twitter doesn't want the KKK on their site, but they've gone way too far. It's nothing more than a thinly veiled self-serving propaganda machine anymore, as is all the other large social media sites. The original dream of internet freedom is dead.

neither_color 5y ago

For me the creepiest thing about 1984 wasn't the degradation of language or the censorship. What I found most concerning was Winston risking his life for a resistance movement that turned out to be fake. There are two well-known groups of violent protestors that the opposing side believe keeps getting away with reprehensible behavior that the authorities seemingly could stop at any time but choose not to. It didn't click with me until the doc "Social Dilemma" alluded to it with the "extreme center" protests. I think many would-be freedom fighters are falling for that trap.

mistermann 5y ago
Are you referring to QAnon perchance? I've always found the "advertised risk" of QAnon to be inconsistent with the apparent lack of investigation (and lack of curiousity about a lack of investigation) a bit curious, as compared to say the Unabomber scenario. It could be nothing of course, but then it could also be something.
- krapp 5y ago
  Lack of investigation into what? Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious. Oh, it sounds like you are referring to QAnon's ideas - I am referring to QAnon the organization, including its leadership, if any. We regularly hear (perhaps not so much lately now that the election is over) about how dangerous QAnon is, my thinking is that if this organization is so dangerous, why does no one do anything about it, and why do journalists not wonder why no one does anything about it.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      Probably because calling things dangerous is a way to rile up hate which is what journalists do.

jccc 5y ago

Orwell's concern was Us, not Them: "[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."

keewee7 5y ago

Considering how fast Reddit is growing I think people should keep an eye on the moderators of r/worldnews and r/news. The viewership of these subreddits is several times bigger than their subscriber count because both subreddits are regularly featured on r/all and r/popular. It's also no secret that many journalists use these subreddits to gauge which topics interests people. It's possible that in a few years all an authoritarian regime has to do to shut down bad publicity is to get a moderator on r/worldnews.

ep103 5y ago
In the future? Mods of the major subreddits have been on payrolls for years. Its a topic that used to come up with regularity ~6 years ago. I would be absolutely shell-shocked if it wasn't commonplace now.
- Covzire 5y ago
  My thoughts as well, /r/worldnews is for a long while already an echo chamber dominated by one political perspective that, to use a courtroom analogy, act exclusively as prosecutors against populists, centrists and conservatives or they act as defense attorney's for those they already vote for, depending on the hot issues of the day.
meowkit 5y ago
The inability for users to police mods on reddit is becoming a serious problem in my opinion. An additional problem is that most mods enable the rapid development of echo chambers through often well intentioned rules that become draconian when enforced by the right mod(s).
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  As long as people keep using reddit, nothing is a problem (for reddit).
- aeternum 5y ago
  How would users police mods? It's very easy to write a karma-farming bot, you would end up with bots controlling mods, not users.

rodolphoarruda 5y ago

Not a single line about the state of censorship in Brazil. Odd.

anonleb4 5y ago
Not really, it's a piece for US readers about the US current views of who's "bad", they're not going to criticize their political and economic partners. There's nothing about Saudis either, see.
- elmo2you 5y ago
  Or about the situation regarding censorship in the USA, which makes this a rather blatant political propaganda piece by itself. For those who feel like censorship in the USA is less problematic, because it's not state controlled (that is, if it actually isn't) .. consider this: If business can introduce arbitrary censorship, regardless of justification, on platforms that are widely used by many, is this not far more dangerous than any state controlled censorship? While any governments can of course ignore their supposed accountability for their behavior, business have far less of that accountability to begin with. Although, if the USA was true state of law (not a powerful banana republic pretending), it should hold those companies accountable for limiting the freedoms of citizens regarding what should be allowed according and protected by law. But heck, almost all (emerging) fascistic systems have started (and flourished) on a collusion between corrupt business and an equally criminal government, with a shared interests in each expanding their own powers and influence. Almost funny to see articles like these coming from the USA these day, knowing in which direction the country is currently moving. Somehow "the emperor has no clothes" comes to mind.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Reading this I had a realization. The "soft fear" is alive and well in the USA. A huge fear right now is slipping up in life and falling off the capitalist progression. There is no safety net here, so if you screw up and end up homeless because you didn't work hard enough or save enough money, your chances of climbing out are almost nill. So rather than sending someone off to a Gulag or prison camp, the gulags are the ghettos patrolled by the police departments. Here, we say to ourselves, "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects." And then the system works to keep you there, from all sides. By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem; yet we live in fear that if we lose our jobs we might end up in these hopeless places. And many will blame themselves because that is the narrative. Clever, and insidious: the prisons are all around us, just without walls and barbed wire.

luckylion 5y ago
> "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects." But that's like saying "we don't have torture, but if you don't help, you're not getting any cake". Yes, living in social housing isn't great because of your neighbors. But it's much better than being homeless. And it's much, much, much, much better than being in a labor camp. Nobody is stopping you from walking out of the projects. Guess how that works out in a Gulag when you say "thanks, I'd rather live in the forest".
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laurent92 5y ago
> By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem Actually, this is the definition of ideology, and you are not identifying it. Ideology starts when they accept victims in pursuit of their goal. When you accept negative side-effect that would be considered offsetting whatever good you are trying to provide in any other ideology. - Capitalist ideology: We accept human victims as a side effect of meritocracy, whereas we wouldn’t accept human victims under Christian ideology, - Christianity: Caring for poor people; White supremacist ideology: Accepting that we do not care for migrants while we care about local people. - Feminist ideology: Accepting male victims, for example suicide or work, while rejecting non-life-threatening difficulties for women. (whereas under any other ideology, the two genders’ issues would be treated equally). - Communist ideology: Accepting to shoot up a head of state in the pursuit of the greater good for all other citizen.

PontifexMinimus 5y ago

> Friction is about making it harder and less convenient to access unapproved material. And of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al would never do anything like that, would they?

merpnderp 5y ago
Big Tech was censoring people last year who were saying things Congress is saying this year. But don't worry, I'm sure they learned from their mistakes with censoring people.

gootler 5y ago

Yeah, even here on "hacker news" bullshit assholes in new york

motohagiography 5y ago

Unfortunately this article isn't criticism, it's an instruction manual for groups that organize and co-ordinate using projection. Essentially anything groups aligned to authorities accuse outgroups of doing is a way of signalling and establishing consensus on what they plan to do next. They aren't projecting because they are stupid, they are projecting because they're coordinating. It only takes about 6-8 years to go from street riots to camps and gulags, and in Canada and Australia, we're about 60% of the way down that road. The only meaningful political question right now is how much civilization we must give up to isolate and remove a totalitarian movement that has subverted and taken root in our institutions, while they used other more legitimate movements as cover. Complaining about censorship, or any signal of skepticism or belief in principle at all just gets you on a list of being among the first to stop applauding. Who really thinks someone who uses the cynical realpolitik of deception and censorship is going to be swayed by a principled argument? The only thing nihilists understand is power and conseqeunces. If you are really concerned about censorship, the most valuable act of defiance now is to build close personal networks of friends and family that do not depend on the platforms, and which are immune to the relentless official propaganda disgorged by tech companies. This all sounds very dark, but really, if you can't countenance it, you aren't going to be innoculated to it, and you are going to be subject to it.

gnarbarian 5y ago
I've come to the same conclusions with the added step that I believe we should focus our efforts on creating platforms and protocols to protect anonymity, encrypted communication, alternate payment mechanisms, and freedom of speech. As a conservative I've seen all of these things attacked in order to control what is allowed to be said and who is allowed to be compensated.
- clairity 5y ago
  > "As a conservative..." you had a good comment going until you tribalized yourself (with a false dichotomy, to boot). the pull of the tribe will always subvert independent thinking. that's not to say we can exist devoid of identities, but that we should always be cognizant of the bias they introduce, and actively reduce the attack surface of that bias by not adopting identifying ideologies needlessly. you can for example be amenable to many "conservative" ideas without considering yourself a conservative, and especially without joining an ideological party (like the republicans). the goals you mention are not ideological, so why bring ideology into the conversation?

grillvogel 5y ago

you can definitely see "Flooding" on all the major social media platforms these days

jl6 5y ago
It’s not just “these days”. Flooding is the bread and circuses spoken of nearly 2000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses We’re talking about the distraction and daily grind that occupies the otherwise-idle hands for which the ruling class’s devils might make work.

pawn13 5y ago

"Modern authoritarian regimes". Authoritarian regimes are pretty obvious and easy to deal with. Hey I grew up in soviet union, everyone knew media/authorities lie, nobody took it serious and all information was taken with a grain of salt. What is much more dangerous is countries where people they live under a democracy but once some information about people in power pop up it could be silenced, flooded with disinformation, you may disappear, you may hide for rest of your life in some embassy like Assange. Anything can happen. And people with money and power have total control. They just often use indirect, hidden measures to achieve that. We don't even know who are those people, they don't have to be public figures like dictators etc. This is much more scary. And KGB, stasi, etc never ever dreamed of such control on people and survivlence modern social networks and technologies provide. And western 3-letter agencies have much more power those could even dream of. And you know what is more scary? That nobody give a f*. Even if information about some really scary stuff appear in media everyone would just forgot about that next day. Or media would even make a show out of it. Like that episode in a black mirror. Everyone knows their phones are spying on them but keep using them. It's not just convinient, I can't order a taxi anymore without a smartphone. Few years ago I could just catch a car not anymore. You can't take a subway or a bus without being seen on 100 CCTV cams with facial recognition. And if you question if that's normal you would be asked "what you have something to hide or what?". Maybe I'm just not an exhibicionist.

brokenmachine 5y ago
As others have said, privacy is not about having nothing to hide, it's about having nothing you want to share.
curation 5y ago
Yes. Thank you. "free" in the land of "unfree" in the west where we equate free to surfing the net, shopping for infinite products compartmentalizing paradoxes as we go - working ourselves to death even though we don't believe in any future.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I fear that people only care if they're told they should care, vis-à-vis the news media telling them to. Not the people are 'sheep' or anything condescending like that, but rather, people take cues from the atmosphere around them on what to be worried about and how much they need to worry about something. If the news isn't making a big stink out of something, society at large just doesn't react.