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I love the Internet Archive, but they’re fighting the last war here. There will never be any scary, Orwellian ministry of truth in our timeline, because there’s

I love the Internet Archive, but they’re fighting the last war here. There will never be any scary, Orwellian ministry of truth in our timeline, because there’s no need for one when all the power is concentrated in a few oligopolistic platform providers whose risk appetite is such that deplatforming is the only acceptable measure when that appetite is exceeded. Furthermore, the calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point. In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation, even organizations like the ACLU have come to support platforms clamping down on speech - and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government. I don’t have any solutions to this, but the future to worry about is not what’s dramatized here. It’s something much tidier, less threatening, and more insidious.

phreeza 5y ago
Never is a long time, and the US is not the only country in the world.
- cube00 5y ago
  "Australia gave police power to compel sysadmins into assisting account takeovers – so they plan to use it" https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_bill_australia/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_...
- tchalla 5y ago
  It’s surprising how many US citizens I meet throughout the world whose talking points are filled worth US solipsism. A recent example was a few days ago when, I had a discussion with a Texas “communist” who wanted to butt heads against the police force in a European city due to police brutality. I asked the person if he had checked up on police brutality cases in the city and he hadn’t. I’m amazed at their self confidence and world view.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    I was in total disbelief when I found out that majority of British police force does not even carry a weapon. I am now watching British police drama “Line of Duty” and they show their “SWAT” outings and the amount of procedure around this is insane. The cherry on top is how they chase an extremely dangerous suspect in a Mercedes van. A van! Such a stark contrast with militarized SWAT teams in North America, their weapons, tactics, and vehicles.
    - Jenk 5y ago
      Not only that but the police have refused to carry weapons multiple times here. Recent governments have attempted to approach the subject (with rumours of lobbying from large arms companies) but every time it's been taken to the police they have rejected the idea.
    - redwall_hp 5y ago
      Yep. And while in the US we have coward cops who shoot people because they're "afraid," the UK has officers like the guy who charged multiple knife-wielding assailants with only a baton, while the armed response was en route. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/28/policeman-fought-london-bridge-attackers-baton-wayne-marques https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/28/policeman-fo... I thought that was a stark contrast at the time, and that was before the current wave of protests over police violence in the US...
- est31 5y ago
  It is not, but US run services dominate in much of the western world, so western internet users have to abide by US rules.
- tim333 5y ago
  China has a somewhat ministry like building https://archive.ph/ivtGK https://archive.ph/ivtGK where "news reporting about topics which are sensitive to the CCP is distorted and often used as a weapon against the party's perceived enemies" according to Wikipedia.
matt123456789 5y ago
You’re missing the point. Or perhaps, the messaging from this page on the Internet Archive is missing the point. The Archive saves and serves the content even after the deplatforming has occurred, regardless of whether the removal occurred due to a governmental thoughtcrime department or an oligopolistic private company. The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive.
- adolph 5y ago
  ACLU should be granted copyright to all the badthink so they can DCMA places like TIA. There’s probably a bunch of president tweets on there causing indirection right now.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive. No, it isn't. What IA stores long-term is relevant to future generations, less so to us now. What matters for us is that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt. IA won't be able to capitalize on this opportunity for disruption until copyright law gets completely overhauled. I don't see this happening soon, as powers that be - both public and private - are all aligned in their interest to make IP protection even stronger.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Archvial libraries have rights under copyright law.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt. IA claims to have fixed that, and it's been a couple years since I've caught them respecting robots.txt. If you have examples of them respecting robots.txt more recent than, say, 2018... citation please? This was a serious problem in the past, but I had hoped (and believed) it was no longer a thing. (I'm deliberately avoiding saying "They don't do that anymore.", since it's a low-probability, high-impact event, and I may just not have encountered it, but complying with robots.txt would be a really vile thing for a supposed library to do.)
iammisc 5y ago
> and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government. No they do not. This 'argument' comes about because everyone's forgotten about why it is that we don't want government to infringe upon certain rights. It's not because governments have been granted some particular characterization by God, it's because government's are powerful, centralized organizations, with power most people, or small grassroots groups of people, cannot achieve. In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government. Just because you fill out articles of incorporation, doesn't make you suddenly immune to respecting individual rights.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  > In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government. This is one of the main reasons antitrust law was created. They ought not to be treated the same as government, they ought to be broken up and not allowed to be as powerful as government.
  - adolph 5y ago
    The power differential between govt and industry doesn’t seem to address the root issue, which is the power differential between individual humans and industry and/or govt.
    - ViViDboarder 5y ago
      If you imagine individuals at less power than government and industry today, then you take industry and cut their power in half, their power now sits closer to that of individuals than it did before.
      - winstonewert 5y ago
        That depends. What happens to the industry power? Does it go back to individuals or does it accrue to the government?
colechristensen 5y ago
> calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point They would in any orwellian society, the denial is in the assumption that people aligned with you are the "good guys", when it turns out the people who seemed to be for a free and open society will turn to thought control whenever it's "on their side".
patrakov 5y ago
This is a very US-centric point of view.
- echelon 5y ago
  What many of us in the US have yet to realize is that while our country was front and center in the 90's and 00's due to our explosive tech sector, the genie has left the bottle. Every country is now growing domestic talent, earning venture dollars, and growing capabilities to match or exceed. Fintech, logistics, social media, game and film production studios, you name it. The US only has 330M people. The world has a whole lot more talent.
noduerme 5y ago
Deplatforming isn't taking away the right to free speech... it's taking away the privilege of using someone else's megaphone to be heard.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  Giving one person a megaphone gives them large advantage over everyone else. Giving everyone access to megaphones leaves everyone as well off as before- save for their hearing. Giving everyone access to megaphones save one person is a good way to silence that person. I a world of megaphones, who can listen to a mere voice?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Hm. It's a good point and it maybe it requires a more formal expression. We're kind of in the middle of a conversation about whether regulating your privilege to use other people's private networks to disseminate your speech is actually a curtailment of speech, or whether it's just those network owners expressing their own speech. But what is the relationship or the ratio of importance between freedom to speak and the ability to ve heard? If it's like you say, then denying someone use of your megaphone is tantamount to cutting out their tongue. But since I was born before any of these megaphones existed, and I know plenty of people who've built their own megaphones, I'm reluctant to say it's anyone's right to use one against its owners'/builders' wishes, regardless of how ubiquitous it has become.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  Deplatforming is anti-competitive behavior in the marketplace of ideas. We all think some should not be allowed to compete, but we all are impacted negatively by the emergent monopoly.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting misinformation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business ( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not ( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked (X) Assumes that popularity equals truth ( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located ( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny ( ) Requires mind reading ( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations ( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it ( ) ISPs won’t put up with it ( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done ( ) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies ( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal (X) “Trust No One” is not a solution ( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with — Specifically, your plan fails to account for ( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers (X) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth (X) Black Hat SEO tactics ( ) “Residential IP” proxies ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Legitimate disagreement ( ) Context ( ) Bias ( ) Asshats ( ) Dog-whistle politics ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Linguistic drift (X) Asymmetry of information (X) Asymmetry of available resources ( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it ( ) New information coming out after a story has been published ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of fake news (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic ( ) Technical illiteracy ( ) Hacking (X) Astroturfing (X) People with valuable information, but no capital ( ) Laziness ( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers — and the following philosophical objections may also apply: ( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( ) Technically, that’s how it already works ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail” ( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid ( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable ( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times ( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true? ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem (X) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common ( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut ( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut ( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut ( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet ( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet ( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough — Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! — This is a very, very old meme. Here’s a few older versions of it. https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
smsm42 5y ago
In other words, there is a ministry of truth, only it evolved to take a form which doesn't scare most of us - in fact, for most of the people not going specifically to look for it, it's completely imperceptible. > In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation And this is how you learned to love the Big Brother.

phreeza 5y ago

Never is a long time, and the US is not the only country in the world.

cube00 5y ago
"Australia gave police power to compel sysadmins into assisting account takeovers – so they plan to use it" https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_bill_australia/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_...
tchalla 5y ago
It’s surprising how many US citizens I meet throughout the world whose talking points are filled worth US solipsism. A recent example was a few days ago when, I had a discussion with a Texas “communist” who wanted to butt heads against the police force in a European city due to police brutality. I asked the person if he had checked up on police brutality cases in the city and he hadn’t. I’m amazed at their self confidence and world view.
- mynegation 5y ago
  I was in total disbelief when I found out that majority of British police force does not even carry a weapon. I am now watching British police drama “Line of Duty” and they show their “SWAT” outings and the amount of procedure around this is insane. The cherry on top is how they chase an extremely dangerous suspect in a Mercedes van. A van! Such a stark contrast with militarized SWAT teams in North America, their weapons, tactics, and vehicles.
  - Jenk 5y ago
    Not only that but the police have refused to carry weapons multiple times here. Recent governments have attempted to approach the subject (with rumours of lobbying from large arms companies) but every time it's been taken to the police they have rejected the idea.
  - redwall_hp 5y ago
    Yep. And while in the US we have coward cops who shoot people because they're "afraid," the UK has officers like the guy who charged multiple knife-wielding assailants with only a baton, while the armed response was en route. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/28/policeman-fought-london-bridge-attackers-baton-wayne-marques https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/28/policeman-fo... I thought that was a stark contrast at the time, and that was before the current wave of protests over police violence in the US...
est31 5y ago
It is not, but US run services dominate in much of the western world, so western internet users have to abide by US rules.
tim333 5y ago
China has a somewhat ministry like building https://archive.ph/ivtGK https://archive.ph/ivtGK where "news reporting about topics which are sensitive to the CCP is distorted and often used as a weapon against the party's perceived enemies" according to Wikipedia.

matt123456789 5y ago

You’re missing the point. Or perhaps, the messaging from this page on the Internet Archive is missing the point. The Archive saves and serves the content even after the deplatforming has occurred, regardless of whether the removal occurred due to a governmental thoughtcrime department or an oligopolistic private company. The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive.

adolph 5y ago
ACLU should be granted copyright to all the badthink so they can DCMA places like TIA. There’s probably a bunch of president tweets on there causing indirection right now.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive. No, it isn't. What IA stores long-term is relevant to future generations, less so to us now. What matters for us is that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt. IA won't be able to capitalize on this opportunity for disruption until copyright law gets completely overhauled. I don't see this happening soon, as powers that be - both public and private - are all aligned in their interest to make IP protection even stronger.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Archvial libraries have rights under copyright law.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt. IA claims to have fixed that, and it's been a couple years since I've caught them respecting robots.txt. If you have examples of them respecting robots.txt more recent than, say, 2018... citation please? This was a serious problem in the past, but I had hoped (and believed) it was no longer a thing. (I'm deliberately avoiding saying "They don't do that anymore.", since it's a low-probability, high-impact event, and I may just not have encountered it, but complying with robots.txt would be a really vile thing for a supposed library to do.)

iammisc 5y ago

> and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government. No they do not. This 'argument' comes about because everyone's forgotten about why it is that we don't want government to infringe upon certain rights. It's not because governments have been granted some particular characterization by God, it's because government's are powerful, centralized organizations, with power most people, or small grassroots groups of people, cannot achieve. In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government. Just because you fill out articles of incorporation, doesn't make you suddenly immune to respecting individual rights.

ViViDboarder 5y ago
> In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government. This is one of the main reasons antitrust law was created. They ought not to be treated the same as government, they ought to be broken up and not allowed to be as powerful as government.
- adolph 5y ago
  The power differential between govt and industry doesn’t seem to address the root issue, which is the power differential between individual humans and industry and/or govt.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    If you imagine individuals at less power than government and industry today, then you take industry and cut their power in half, their power now sits closer to that of individuals than it did before.
    - winstonewert 5y ago
      That depends. What happens to the industry power? Does it go back to individuals or does it accrue to the government?

colechristensen 5y ago

> calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point They would in any orwellian society, the denial is in the assumption that people aligned with you are the "good guys", when it turns out the people who seemed to be for a free and open society will turn to thought control whenever it's "on their side".

patrakov 5y ago

This is a very US-centric point of view.

echelon 5y ago
What many of us in the US have yet to realize is that while our country was front and center in the 90's and 00's due to our explosive tech sector, the genie has left the bottle. Every country is now growing domestic talent, earning venture dollars, and growing capabilities to match or exceed. Fintech, logistics, social media, game and film production studios, you name it. The US only has 330M people. The world has a whole lot more talent.

noduerme 5y ago

Deplatforming isn't taking away the right to free speech... it's taking away the privilege of using someone else's megaphone to be heard.

inkblotuniverse 5y ago
Giving one person a megaphone gives them large advantage over everyone else. Giving everyone access to megaphones leaves everyone as well off as before- save for their hearing. Giving everyone access to megaphones save one person is a good way to silence that person. I a world of megaphones, who can listen to a mere voice?
- noduerme 5y ago
  Hm. It's a good point and it maybe it requires a more formal expression. We're kind of in the middle of a conversation about whether regulating your privilege to use other people's private networks to disseminate your speech is actually a curtailment of speech, or whether it's just those network owners expressing their own speech. But what is the relationship or the ratio of importance between freedom to speak and the ability to ve heard? If it's like you say, then denying someone use of your megaphone is tantamount to cutting out their tongue. But since I was born before any of these megaphones existed, and I know plenty of people who've built their own megaphones, I'm reluctant to say it's anyone's right to use one against its owners'/builders' wishes, regardless of how ubiquitous it has become.
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
Deplatforming is anti-competitive behavior in the marketplace of ideas. We all think some should not be allowed to compete, but we all are impacted negatively by the emergent monopoly.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting misinformation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business ( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not ( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked (X) Assumes that popularity equals truth ( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located ( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny ( ) Requires mind reading ( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations ( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it ( ) ISPs won’t put up with it ( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done ( ) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies ( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal (X) “Trust No One” is not a solution ( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with — Specifically, your plan fails to account for ( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers (X) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth (X) Black Hat SEO tactics ( ) “Residential IP” proxies ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Legitimate disagreement ( ) Context ( ) Bias ( ) Asshats ( ) Dog-whistle politics ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Linguistic drift (X) Asymmetry of information (X) Asymmetry of available resources ( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it ( ) New information coming out after a story has been published ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of fake news (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic ( ) Technical illiteracy ( ) Hacking (X) Astroturfing (X) People with valuable information, but no capital ( ) Laziness ( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers — and the following philosophical objections may also apply: ( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( ) Technically, that’s how it already works ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail” ( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid ( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable ( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times ( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true? ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem (X) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common ( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut ( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut ( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut ( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet ( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet ( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough — Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! — This is a very, very old meme. Here’s a few older versions of it. https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

smsm42 5y ago

In other words, there is a ministry of truth, only it evolved to take a form which doesn't scare most of us - in fact, for most of the people not going specifically to look for it, it's completely imperceptible. > In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation And this is how you learned to love the Big Brother.