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Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

161 points by gigama 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
This issue is so complicated. Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them. The alarming thing are the calls for censorship. Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions. When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon they'll censor women's health issues. Censorship is a threat to democracy.
- mantaraygun 5y ago
  > Soon they'll censor women's health issues. Surely you mean "people who menstruate"
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't post flamebait here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- toss1 5y ago
  Active amplification of disinformation is just as much a threat to democracy. Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every minute. Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free. If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving to censorship alarms is no less simplistic. People and companies need to be responsible for the consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling a moral compass is not sustainable.
  - anjbe 5y ago
    > Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free. And that sentiment—that very example, even—has been used to justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or should put up with today, such as opposing the military draft. “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States
    - toss1 5y ago
      Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment. Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit. That is THE POINT here - that it can not be absolute in either direction, and we, as a society, must do the work of striking the right balance. And no, it is not an argument that "there was also bad stuff before" (e.g., yellow journalism), so it must be OK now.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        > Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment. Except in this case, the origin of that phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a US Supreme Court Case in 1919 that upheld the prosecution of of an anti-war protestor for pamphleting against the draft. This is the approach to free speech that is being referenced when people use this phrase in argument. > Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit. For someone arguing against absolutism, you see to think in very absolutist terms about supporters of free speech. Very few advocates of free speech advocate for no restrictions on speech. Censorship should not be the first tool you reach to do deal with misinformation. Algorithmic censorship carries huge risks and can cause great damage, much like algorithmic amplification. Censoring alleged misinformation and propaganda is a common and widely used tactic of authoritarian governments around the world. Normalizing that censorship makes it easier for am authoritarian leaning administration to push us in that direction. It is extremely dangerous.
- philjohn 5y ago
  How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The problem is, everyone thinks they've become an epidemiologist and virologist over the last 18 months, people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want - some of the trials that claimed to show Ivermectin as a wonder drug were plagued with badly designed trial protocols, and flat out suspected fraud. Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") that's different.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study. > If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
    - philjohn 5y ago
      Do you have examples you can share of people censored for raising the question, not declaring as a definitive fact?
  - F6F6FA 5y ago
    [flagged]
karl11 5y ago
Just to make sure I understand this — the argument is that in order to combat authoritarianism, Silicon Valley companies should censor more content?
- chroem- 5y ago
  Correct. I am absolutely done with this level of doublespeak.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    The article is factually incorrect. For instance, the Russian journalist did not mention Silicon Valley companies nor did he intend to mean that social networks are promoting authoritarianism and waging war. Instead, he referred multiple times to the mainstream media in Russia that is tightly controlled by the state and is acting as a propaganda device that serves short-term goals of the ruling elite, promoting war in Ukraine and anti-western sentiments along the way. NPR took pretext of an event to present an opinion.
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      This should be the story itself. NPR and most other US commercial media establishments are arsonist-firefighters. Is there a link to a non-skewed story that could be shared to replace this one?
    - MaxDPS 5y ago
      Seems like the title is based on Ressa’s quote: "Silicon Valley's sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill," she said. "What happens on social media doesn't stay on social media."
      - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
        Look at the title. It says "laureatS". But even Ressa's quote is tangential to what NPR is saying in its fake news piece.
1cvmask 5y ago
If they were going to give their award to a truly deserving recipient it would have been the tortured and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange who is an advocate of free speech and an independent media and voices. Instead they gave the awards deliberately to censorship advocates. It's the journalistic equivalent of giving war criminals and killers of children Nobel Peace Prizes like Kissinger and Obama. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombing_n_5615690ce4b021e856d33d51 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
- mc32 5y ago
  That would be impossible. Can you imagine: United States imprisons Nobel prize laureate.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    I can imagine them imprisoning Nobel Prize laureates as they have bombed Nobel Prize recipients as well. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombing_n_5615690ce4b021e856d33d51 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
    - q1w2 5y ago
      The Nobel Peace prize has become somewhat of a joke. It's been handed out by politics, with prizes handed to people who have ordered attacks on civilians time and time again.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I don't understand why one would be surprised at the recipients of the Peace Prize. Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil. Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
whitepaint 5y ago
Aren't governments (especially Germany and Australia for what they are doing at the moment) way more scarier than big tech? I am not scared of Google or Facebook at all. I am, however, scared of governments. Especially seeing how the pandemic was handled and how little resistance the handling got from the citizens.
- uhtred 5y ago
  What is Germany doing? And what did you not like about how the pandemic was handled by the government?
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I agree. Facebook can try to show me targeted ads, but that's pretty benign compared to what my government can do to me with absolutely zero recourse.
- smt88 5y ago
  Those governments (and the ones in the US) are at least beholden to voters. Large companies have no accountability, and if they disrupt the democratic process, they have no consequences either. Mark Zuckerberg is the authoritarian ruler of an extremely powerful entity that, in some countries, is more powerful than any local government.
  - jakear 5y ago
    > more powerful than any local government I’ll believe that when I see FB agents smashing down doors to imprison (/kill) activists.
    - sergiomattei 5y ago
      They can, indirectly. The side effects of their actions and deep knowledge on individuals can be used for violence or ill will.
      - tomnipotent 5y ago
grover35 5y ago
That was the same "authoritarianism" that saved us from a violent insurrection and another Donald Trump presidency.
- playguardin 5y ago
  Trump 2024 bitch
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Not a free speech fan I see. Or maybe just a subset of speech should be free?
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
i think one key passage from Muratov's Nobel lecture is the following: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture... ""Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another.” These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a great thinker. His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on Thursday, December 11, 1975. I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov’s words here, in this world-famous hall. Why is it important today for us, for me? The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore. The world has become disappointed with the power elite. The world has begun to turn to dictatorship. We’ve got an illusion that progress can be achieved through technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms."
cletus 5y ago
> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts? This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth. You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed. Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it. So what could the US do? Three things: 1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature; 2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday; 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and 4. Preferential or ranked choice voting. Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote. I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded. The tech giants have very little to do with that.
- mc32 5y ago
  Facebooks lawyers claimed that their fact checking was opinion (not fact)[1]. So there is that too! Facts can be opinions instead. [1] https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-are-protected-opinions/amp/ https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-a...
- cgriswald 5y ago
  > 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and How is this enforced?
yes_man 5y ago
Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote, but not every soul is equally equipped to be critical about information they are exposed to. The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical. Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train. So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out. On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote. The one people, one vote, is a problem that has been 'fixed' since the start with gentle corrections and tricks. If your vote score 1 point and mine score 1000 points, then it does not matter if you are very well informed or not.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  The problem here is that we're in a situation where those most gullible are sure that they are the most critical. As with everything in this weird world, "critical" has been peaked beyond recognition and turned onto itself. The word became meaningless in the online and later offline discourse. There isn't even a way to communicate the issue to those which needs education as every contingency for education has been co-opted into this ridiculous reality they (and ultimately we all) live in. Unfortunately this reality is quite profitable. As cliche as it may sound: we need an outside the box view on the whole thing and I don't even know who or what that could be which would look from outside this box we're trapped in.
voz_ 5y ago
Nobel Peace prizes? The one that Obama got for drone striking Pakistani kids? Or the one that Arafat got for bombing Israeli kids? Oh no, wait, the one that Kissinger got for bombing Vietnamese kids, must be that one, right?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  You're a facist who should be censored to prevent authoritarianism if you don't agree that when _we_ bomb poor brown people on the other side of the world it's for the greater good.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Obama never got a Nobel for killing Pakistani kids. Nobel academics can't predict the future. To claim that is not really fair.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Maybe it was the one Aung San Suu Kyi got before all that unpleasantness with the Rohingya.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    Abiy Ahmed? I can keep it up.
noodlesUK 5y ago
Each time I visit NPR to read an article, I’m always so pleased by their “text” mode (text.npr.org). It’s a joy to use, and a welcome change from the normal “modern” news websites we so often encounter, which are riddled with ads and megabytes of JS.
hereforphone 5y ago
Keep in mind that the Nobel Prize is a political prize as much as anything else. It's there to reward certain behaviors. I can cite examples but I'd rather not be inflammatory.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  This time, the committee made a decent choice. They basically took two not very well known but highly respectable journalists and shunned them from premature death by giving them the prize.
cowpig 5y ago
This comment section is a painful read--when it comes to "free speech" this community somehow loses all sense of nuance or introspection. Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers. That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable. With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously. How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?
fareesh 5y ago
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded Barack Obama, Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. It is a joke relic of an organization that deserves nothing but mockery. I don't know much about this year's recipients but, per article, they seem to think that the tech companies can engage in more censorship in order to fight misinformation, and somehow this fights authoritarianism. Truly incredible stuff. If it's a true and complete representation of their views, it amplifies the need for more mockery. Who are these folks? Have they ever worked on any kind of complex system?
- pvaldes 5y ago
  It always was a soft power weapon. Everybody knows that there is a strong political component in some of the categories.
EGreg 5y ago
We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Nobel Committee and Governments are too centralized. It's a lot of elites and their propositions are all the same. I discuss this with Noam Chomsky earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc And a few months before that, Noam and I had another conversation about this same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Has Nobel bar been lowered? I can't tell if this is a misunderstanding of the current state of the world, hypocrisy, or a combination of both. The State (as well as traditional Media), regardless of country, is losing its power and influence. Big Tech knows more and thus is able to influence more. The USA and other "democracies" are not immune to this shift. If nothing else, Covid has swung the pendulum back a bit, or has at least delayed Big Tech's complete undermining of the long standing status quo. That status quo isn't going to surrender. So do not expect 21st Century totalitarianism to look like the 20th Century variety. No one saw it coming then, just as too few see it coming now. I mention this book often on HN, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" spells out the history and The Truth in a very 21st Century way. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw Calling out Russia isn't bold or new. In fact, it's a dangerous distraction.
- christophilus 5y ago
  When was the bar high for the Peace prize? It’s seemed like a misnomer for a long time. Someone else mentioned Arafat and Kissinger being notorious examples.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Good point. Obama is worth adding as well. But aside from that flaw, the rest is ok.
foxhop 5y ago
First step is to start building community off these platforms. I made my tool free this year in solidarity https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Ironically, these two Nobel Peace laureates are arguing for authoritarianism, in creating an elite set of gatekeepers who decide what is and isn't disinformation, and censor the latter. Like Glenn Greenwald said: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 >>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation": My personal experience with Facebook's anti-disinformation campaign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734

161 points by gigama 5y ago

This issue is so complicated. Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them. The alarming thing are the calls for censorship. Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions. When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon they'll censor women's health issues. Censorship is a threat to democracy.

mantaraygun 5y ago
> Soon they'll censor women's health issues. Surely you mean "people who menstruate"
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post flamebait here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
toss1 5y ago
Active amplification of disinformation is just as much a threat to democracy. Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every minute. Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free. If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving to censorship alarms is no less simplistic. People and companies need to be responsible for the consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling a moral compass is not sustainable.
- anjbe 5y ago
  > Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free. And that sentiment—that very example, even—has been used to justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or should put up with today, such as opposing the military draft. “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States
  - toss1 5y ago
    Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment. Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit. That is THE POINT here - that it can not be absolute in either direction, and we, as a society, must do the work of striking the right balance. And no, it is not an argument that "there was also bad stuff before" (e.g., yellow journalism), so it must be OK now.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      > Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment. Except in this case, the origin of that phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a US Supreme Court Case in 1919 that upheld the prosecution of of an anti-war protestor for pamphleting against the draft. This is the approach to free speech that is being referenced when people use this phrase in argument. > Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit. For someone arguing against absolutism, you see to think in very absolutist terms about supporters of free speech. Very few advocates of free speech advocate for no restrictions on speech. Censorship should not be the first tool you reach to do deal with misinformation. Algorithmic censorship carries huge risks and can cause great damage, much like algorithmic amplification. Censoring alleged misinformation and propaganda is a common and widely used tactic of authoritarian governments around the world. Normalizing that censorship makes it easier for am authoritarian leaning administration to push us in that direction. It is extremely dangerous.
philjohn 5y ago
How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The problem is, everyone thinks they've become an epidemiologist and virologist over the last 18 months, people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want - some of the trials that claimed to show Ivermectin as a wonder drug were plagued with badly designed trial protocols, and flat out suspected fraud. Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") that's different.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study. > If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
  - philjohn 5y ago
    Do you have examples you can share of people censored for raising the question, not declaring as a definitive fact?
- F6F6FA 5y ago
  [flagged]

karl11 5y ago

Just to make sure I understand this — the argument is that in order to combat authoritarianism, Silicon Valley companies should censor more content?

chroem- 5y ago
Correct. I am absolutely done with this level of doublespeak.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  The article is factually incorrect. For instance, the Russian journalist did not mention Silicon Valley companies nor did he intend to mean that social networks are promoting authoritarianism and waging war. Instead, he referred multiple times to the mainstream media in Russia that is tightly controlled by the state and is acting as a propaganda device that serves short-term goals of the ruling elite, promoting war in Ukraine and anti-western sentiments along the way. NPR took pretext of an event to present an opinion.
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    This should be the story itself. NPR and most other US commercial media establishments are arsonist-firefighters. Is there a link to a non-skewed story that could be shared to replace this one?
  - MaxDPS 5y ago
    Seems like the title is based on Ressa’s quote: "Silicon Valley's sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill," she said. "What happens on social media doesn't stay on social media."
    - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
      Look at the title. It says "laureatS". But even Ressa's quote is tangential to what NPR is saying in its fake news piece.

1cvmask 5y ago

If they were going to give their award to a truly deserving recipient it would have been the tortured and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange who is an advocate of free speech and an independent media and voices. Instead they gave the awards deliberately to censorship advocates. It's the journalistic equivalent of giving war criminals and killers of children Nobel Peace Prizes like Kissinger and Obama. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombing_n_5615690ce4b021e856d33d51 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...

mc32 5y ago
That would be impossible. Can you imagine: United States imprisons Nobel prize laureate.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  I can imagine them imprisoning Nobel Prize laureates as they have bombed Nobel Prize recipients as well. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombing_n_5615690ce4b021e856d33d51 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
  - q1w2 5y ago
    The Nobel Peace prize has become somewhat of a joke. It's been handed out by politics, with prizes handed to people who have ordered attacks on civilians time and time again.
perl4ever 5y ago
I don't understand why one would be surprised at the recipients of the Peace Prize. Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil. Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
- 1cvmask 5y ago

whitepaint 5y ago

Aren't governments (especially Germany and Australia for what they are doing at the moment) way more scarier than big tech? I am not scared of Google or Facebook at all. I am, however, scared of governments. Especially seeing how the pandemic was handled and how little resistance the handling got from the citizens.

uhtred 5y ago
What is Germany doing? And what did you not like about how the pandemic was handled by the government?
missedthecue 5y ago
I agree. Facebook can try to show me targeted ads, but that's pretty benign compared to what my government can do to me with absolutely zero recourse.
smt88 5y ago
Those governments (and the ones in the US) are at least beholden to voters. Large companies have no accountability, and if they disrupt the democratic process, they have no consequences either. Mark Zuckerberg is the authoritarian ruler of an extremely powerful entity that, in some countries, is more powerful than any local government.
- jakear 5y ago
  > more powerful than any local government I’ll believe that when I see FB agents smashing down doors to imprison (/kill) activists.
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    They can, indirectly. The side effects of their actions and deep knowledge on individuals can be used for violence or ill will.
    - tomnipotent 5y ago

grover35 5y ago

That was the same "authoritarianism" that saved us from a violent insurrection and another Donald Trump presidency.

playguardin 5y ago
Trump 2024 bitch
hereforphone 5y ago
Not a free speech fan I see. Or maybe just a subset of speech should be free?

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

i think one key passage from Muratov's Nobel lecture is the following: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture... ""Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another.” These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a great thinker. His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on Thursday, December 11, 1975. I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov’s words here, in this world-famous hall. Why is it important today for us, for me? The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore. The world has become disappointed with the power elite. The world has begun to turn to dictatorship. We’ve got an illusion that progress can be achieved through technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms."

cletus 5y ago

> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts? This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth. You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed. Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it. So what could the US do? Three things: 1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature; 2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday; 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and 4. Preferential or ranked choice voting. Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote. I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded. The tech giants have very little to do with that.

mc32 5y ago
Facebooks lawyers claimed that their fact checking was opinion (not fact)[1]. So there is that too! Facts can be opinions instead. [1] https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-are-protected-opinions/amp/ https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-a...
cgriswald 5y ago
> 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and How is this enforced?

yes_man 5y ago

Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote, but not every soul is equally equipped to be critical about information they are exposed to. The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical. Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train. So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out. On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.

pvaldes 5y ago
> Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote. The one people, one vote, is a problem that has been 'fixed' since the start with gentle corrections and tricks. If your vote score 1 point and mine score 1000 points, then it does not matter if you are very well informed or not.
Krasnol 5y ago
The problem here is that we're in a situation where those most gullible are sure that they are the most critical. As with everything in this weird world, "critical" has been peaked beyond recognition and turned onto itself. The word became meaningless in the online and later offline discourse. There isn't even a way to communicate the issue to those which needs education as every contingency for education has been co-opted into this ridiculous reality they (and ultimately we all) live in. Unfortunately this reality is quite profitable. As cliche as it may sound: we need an outside the box view on the whole thing and I don't even know who or what that could be which would look from outside this box we're trapped in.

voz_ 5y ago

Nobel Peace prizes? The one that Obama got for drone striking Pakistani kids? Or the one that Arafat got for bombing Israeli kids? Oh no, wait, the one that Kissinger got for bombing Vietnamese kids, must be that one, right?

throwawaylinux 5y ago
You're a facist who should be censored to prevent authoritarianism if you don't agree that when _we_ bomb poor brown people on the other side of the world it's for the greater good.
pvaldes 5y ago
Obama never got a Nobel for killing Pakistani kids. Nobel academics can't predict the future. To claim that is not really fair.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Maybe it was the one Aung San Suu Kyi got before all that unpleasantness with the Rohingya.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Abiy Ahmed? I can keep it up.

noodlesUK 5y ago

Each time I visit NPR to read an article, I’m always so pleased by their “text” mode (text.npr.org). It’s a joy to use, and a welcome change from the normal “modern” news websites we so often encounter, which are riddled with ads and megabytes of JS.

hereforphone 5y ago

Keep in mind that the Nobel Prize is a political prize as much as anything else. It's there to reward certain behaviors. I can cite examples but I'd rather not be inflammatory.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
This time, the committee made a decent choice. They basically took two not very well known but highly respectable journalists and shunned them from premature death by giving them the prize.

cowpig 5y ago

This comment section is a painful read--when it comes to "free speech" this community somehow loses all sense of nuance or introspection. Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers. That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable. With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously. How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?

fareesh 5y ago

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded Barack Obama, Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. It is a joke relic of an organization that deserves nothing but mockery. I don't know much about this year's recipients but, per article, they seem to think that the tech companies can engage in more censorship in order to fight misinformation, and somehow this fights authoritarianism. Truly incredible stuff. If it's a true and complete representation of their views, it amplifies the need for more mockery. Who are these folks? Have they ever worked on any kind of complex system?

pvaldes 5y ago
It always was a soft power weapon. Everybody knows that there is a strong political component in some of the categories.

EGreg 5y ago

We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Nobel Committee and Governments are too centralized. It's a lot of elites and their propositions are all the same. I discuss this with Noam Chomsky earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc And a few months before that, Noam and I had another conversation about this same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Has Nobel bar been lowered? I can't tell if this is a misunderstanding of the current state of the world, hypocrisy, or a combination of both. The State (as well as traditional Media), regardless of country, is losing its power and influence. Big Tech knows more and thus is able to influence more. The USA and other "democracies" are not immune to this shift. If nothing else, Covid has swung the pendulum back a bit, or has at least delayed Big Tech's complete undermining of the long standing status quo. That status quo isn't going to surrender. So do not expect 21st Century totalitarianism to look like the 20th Century variety. No one saw it coming then, just as too few see it coming now. I mention this book often on HN, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" spells out the history and The Truth in a very 21st Century way. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw Calling out Russia isn't bold or new. In fact, it's a dangerous distraction.

christophilus 5y ago
When was the bar high for the Peace prize? It’s seemed like a misnomer for a long time. Someone else mentioned Arafat and Kissinger being notorious examples.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Good point. Obama is worth adding as well. But aside from that flaw, the rest is ok.

foxhop 5y ago

First step is to start building community off these platforms. I made my tool free this year in solidarity https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Ironically, these two Nobel Peace laureates are arguing for authoritarianism, in creating an elite set of gatekeepers who decide what is and isn't disinformation, and censor the latter. Like Glenn Greenwald said: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 >>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation": My personal experience with Facebook's anti-disinformation campaign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734