17 ms·

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final na

by toxik 5y ago

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.

ethbr0 5y ago
Strong encryption is the only true internet freedom.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Except where it is outlawed.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's exactly why it's outlawed. And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?
jahnu 5y ago
The maximalist version of that dream, perhaps, sure. Seems a bit early to write it off completely.
jmiskovic 5y ago
Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing force.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Zambyte 5y ago
  All three of those are centralized authoritative forces. Mediawiki (distinct from Wikipedia), Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Lemmy, Owncast, etc. are better examples of democratizing forces on the internet.
sourthyme 5y ago
To me TikTok is not the "internet" because no matter how much the app gives, the user doesn't own their content. You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
- spyder 5y ago
  Because blogs and websites aren't getting blocked in Russia or what? The only way content can be a little more resilient against blocking is P2P hosting. But even that can be made hard to access by blocking the on-ramp ( websites, app for the tools to get access to P2P ) or the protocol.
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  I see this comment and others like it. It's important to also know where the mindshare is. Where are most average individuals spending most of their internet hours? It is likely not niche-blog.com. TikTok is quickly becoming "the internet" for all intenents and purposes for some people. It's also how some folks get their news, etc.
  - tommiegannert 5y ago
    You don't even have to go that far to shoot down GP's argument. The blogs can be censored just like TikTok, as long as ISPs are incorporated in local states. Whether censorship happens by telling TikTok the rules, or telling the ISPs the rules seems inconsequential to the democritized availability of information. Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in a way that states can't block, but it seems people are working on that...)
    - trasz 5y ago
      Perhaps there could be a charity making payments for those who legally can't.
    - Jcowell 5y ago
dotancohen 5y ago
The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the internet. The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise. The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.
- nameisname 5y ago
  If you actually watch the video you can see they are no longer allowed to upload content so I think you're wrong. It's also going to be very difficult to host anything when the government has a total crackdown on internet. You host some videos of war there and I can guarantee it would come back to you very quickly.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Tor, IPFS? It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
    - georgyo 5y ago
      IPFS does two things here that you might not want to use for the use case you describe. Clients host the content they access. The real IP address of people hosting any particular content is discoverable. Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list of targets.
      - trasz 5y ago
        Huh, thanks, I didn't know that - particularly the third point. Is IPFS over Tor a thing?
- 5y ago
nazgulsenpai 5y ago
China has been doing this for almost 2 decades.
tempodox 5y ago
Exercising your freedom would start by not using such a closed platform where you have no control over the content you provide and are subject to arbitrary rules.
- criddell 5y ago
  What do you mean by "have no control over the content you provide"?
  - tempodox 5y ago
    Things like retaining ownership/copyright to said content, determining yourself who gets to see it (probably everyone, but maybe not), the ability to delete the content, etc…
- toxik 5y ago
  Alright, I did and nobody cared. What now?
wanda 5y ago
I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the internet. We are all of us here discussing this matter, after all. More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous. World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany. All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace. The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win. By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge. During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters. What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is. The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them. But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented. The internet is not to blame. The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users). It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted. The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively. The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now. If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it. Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast. I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it. There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches. The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far. I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet. It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict. People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know. and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona. I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network. There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.
nanoservices 5y ago
Their in lies the power of the internet. It exposes who and what wants to control the narrative. This is what needs to be quelled. The need and want for control is toxic and needs to end.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Yep... Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time. EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).
- toxik 5y ago
  Agreed, I was also surprised that the EU would do the very thing that is supposed to set it apart: media censorship.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    RT was targeted multiple times in the past - this is not exactly a new thing. RT itself was not really censored either (not in the way specific information is outright illegal in Russia for example) - you can still go to the source if you really want to. (See the comment below about domain blocking though) They're just forbidden from using the national broadcast, since that was always controlled by various orgs. In most EU countries you get in trouble for lying in adverts, (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/consumer_laws/advertising.html#lb6e52 https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/consumer_laws...) so I'm not surprised Russian-gov-masquerading-as-news got affected too.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Many ISPs have blocked rt.com domains on their DNS servers eg. in belgium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU-ordered_blocked_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU...
    - toxik 5y ago
      Thank you for this nuance. I thought it sounded crazy.
  - qiskit 5y ago
    EU has been at the forefront of censorship. Germany is a model for internet censorship around the world. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdowns-inspired-the-worlds-dictators-russia-venezuela-india/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow... It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion and virtue signaling.
GuB-42 5y ago
This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time. For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.
- snek_case 5y ago
  TikTok has a lot of CCP propaganda in it (fake influencers paid by the CCP). It's not just a happy place to see cute dance videos. This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
- tgv 5y ago
  Your parent is still right, though: that's what the internet largely is. Companies that try to make a quick buck by grabbing attention. And while there are still many other sites that allow open discussion, Russia can block them quite easily for a very comfortable majority of the population.
- adhoc_slime 5y ago
  This is TikTok only after a despotic government created a law about fake news that can result in a 15 year jail sentence. your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.
- toxik 5y ago
  You are parroting an old tired “it’s only protected speech when it’s the government meddling”, and to that I ask, did you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the Russian government decided to jail people over “fake news”? Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom of speech?
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
The old dream is gone, but now that we saw what corporate takeover and commercialization brings, maybe we can reconsider and attempt to save the pieces that we can. At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.
cybdestroyer 5y ago
Had to sign in to visibly laugh at this comment. Democracy is dead b/c TikTok is the most childish opinion you could post about this topic. Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 5y ago
  He didn't say democracy was dead. He said the internet is not the democratising force it was once hoped to be (e.g. during the Arab Spring). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri... Perhaps that was before your time?
jl6 5y ago
The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc. With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
  - karatinversion 5y ago
    My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of reasons you indicate. The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions. Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?
snarf21 5y ago
I disagree. The connectivity of the internet still has the ability to shine the light on the darkness. The problem is that, writ large, we don't care. (me included, we just post a grumble online and get back to our lives) Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.
jabbany 5y ago
The Internet has never been a "democratizing" force. Even now there are hardly any large services and/or platforms that use anything even close to a real _democratic_ process when it comes to dealing with content and moderation. At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy. That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.
luke_value 5y ago
Imagine believing there is freedom of speech in liberal democracies in 2022...
- standardUser 5y ago
  Can you tell us precisely which speech is being silenced by the government in the US in 2022?
qiskit 5y ago
> Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc. It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies. Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.
brimble 5y ago
In a McLuhan sense, I'm not sure the "message" of the medium of the Internet is one that's compatible with free society, ultimately, once we get past the idealism and look at how it works in practice. Which is... not great.
- r4ltman 5y ago
  Visual space is black and white, Internet is Acoustic space, resonant rather than definitive in practice
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- deleted 5y ago
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by toxik 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

Strong encryption is the only true internet freedom.

kube-system 5y ago
Except where it is outlawed.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  That's exactly why it's outlawed. And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?

jahnu 5y ago

The maximalist version of that dream, perhaps, sure. Seems a bit early to write it off completely.

jmiskovic 5y ago

Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing force.

deleted 5y ago
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Zambyte 5y ago
All three of those are centralized authoritative forces. Mediawiki (distinct from Wikipedia), Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Lemmy, Owncast, etc. are better examples of democratizing forces on the internet.

sourthyme 5y ago

To me TikTok is not the "internet" because no matter how much the app gives, the user doesn't own their content. You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".

spyder 5y ago
Because blogs and websites aren't getting blocked in Russia or what? The only way content can be a little more resilient against blocking is P2P hosting. But even that can be made hard to access by blocking the on-ramp ( websites, app for the tools to get access to P2P ) or the protocol.
haliskerbas 5y ago
I see this comment and others like it. It's important to also know where the mindshare is. Where are most average individuals spending most of their internet hours? It is likely not niche-blog.com. TikTok is quickly becoming "the internet" for all intenents and purposes for some people. It's also how some folks get their news, etc.
- tommiegannert 5y ago
  You don't even have to go that far to shoot down GP's argument. The blogs can be censored just like TikTok, as long as ISPs are incorporated in local states. Whether censorship happens by telling TikTok the rules, or telling the ISPs the rules seems inconsequential to the democritized availability of information. Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in a way that states can't block, but it seems people are working on that...)
  - trasz 5y ago
    Perhaps there could be a charity making payments for those who legally can't.
  - Jcowell 5y ago

dotancohen 5y ago

The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the internet. The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise. The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.

nameisname 5y ago
If you actually watch the video you can see they are no longer allowed to upload content so I think you're wrong. It's also going to be very difficult to host anything when the government has a total crackdown on internet. You host some videos of war there and I can guarantee it would come back to you very quickly.
- trasz 5y ago
  Tor, IPFS? It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
  - georgyo 5y ago
    IPFS does two things here that you might not want to use for the use case you describe. Clients host the content they access. The real IP address of people hosting any particular content is discoverable. Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list of targets.
    - trasz 5y ago
      Huh, thanks, I didn't know that - particularly the third point. Is IPFS over Tor a thing?
5y ago

nazgulsenpai 5y ago

China has been doing this for almost 2 decades.

tempodox 5y ago

Exercising your freedom would start by not using such a closed platform where you have no control over the content you provide and are subject to arbitrary rules.

criddell 5y ago
What do you mean by "have no control over the content you provide"?
- tempodox 5y ago
  Things like retaining ownership/copyright to said content, determining yourself who gets to see it (probably everyone, but maybe not), the ability to delete the content, etc…
toxik 5y ago
Alright, I did and nobody cared. What now?

wanda 5y ago

I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the internet. We are all of us here discussing this matter, after all. More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous. World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany. All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace. The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win. By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge. During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters. What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is. The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them. But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented. The internet is not to blame. The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users). It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted. The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively. The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now. If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it. Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast. I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it. There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches. The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far. I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet. It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict. People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know. and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona. I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network. There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.

nanoservices 5y ago

Their in lies the power of the internet. It exposes who and what wants to control the narrative. This is what needs to be quelled. The need and want for control is toxic and needs to end.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Yep... Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time. EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).

toxik 5y ago
Agreed, I was also surprised that the EU would do the very thing that is supposed to set it apart: media censorship.
- viraptor 5y ago
  RT was targeted multiple times in the past - this is not exactly a new thing. RT itself was not really censored either (not in the way specific information is outright illegal in Russia for example) - you can still go to the source if you really want to. (See the comment below about domain blocking though) They're just forbidden from using the national broadcast, since that was always controlled by various orgs. In most EU countries you get in trouble for lying in adverts, (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/consumer_laws/advertising.html#lb6e52 https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/consumer_laws...) so I'm not surprised Russian-gov-masquerading-as-news got affected too.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Many ISPs have blocked rt.com domains on their DNS servers eg. in belgium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU-ordered_blocked_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU...
  - toxik 5y ago
    Thank you for this nuance. I thought it sounded crazy.
- qiskit 5y ago
  EU has been at the forefront of censorship. Germany is a model for internet censorship around the world. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdowns-inspired-the-worlds-dictators-russia-venezuela-india/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow... It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion and virtue signaling.

GuB-42 5y ago

This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time. For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.

snek_case 5y ago
TikTok has a lot of CCP propaganda in it (fake influencers paid by the CCP). It's not just a happy place to see cute dance videos. This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
tgv 5y ago
Your parent is still right, though: that's what the internet largely is. Companies that try to make a quick buck by grabbing attention. And while there are still many other sites that allow open discussion, Russia can block them quite easily for a very comfortable majority of the population.
adhoc_slime 5y ago
This is TikTok only after a despotic government created a law about fake news that can result in a 15 year jail sentence. your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.
toxik 5y ago
You are parroting an old tired “it’s only protected speech when it’s the government meddling”, and to that I ask, did you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the Russian government decided to jail people over “fake news”? Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom of speech?

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

The old dream is gone, but now that we saw what corporate takeover and commercialization brings, maybe we can reconsider and attempt to save the pieces that we can. At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.

cybdestroyer 5y ago

Had to sign in to visibly laugh at this comment. Democracy is dead b/c TikTok is the most childish opinion you could post about this topic. Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 5y ago
He didn't say democracy was dead. He said the internet is not the democratising force it was once hoped to be (e.g. during the Arab Spring). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri... Perhaps that was before your time?

jl6 5y ago

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc. With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
- karatinversion 5y ago
  My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of reasons you indicate. The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions. Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?

snarf21 5y ago

I disagree. The connectivity of the internet still has the ability to shine the light on the darkness. The problem is that, writ large, we don't care. (me included, we just post a grumble online and get back to our lives) Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.

jabbany 5y ago

The Internet has never been a "democratizing" force. Even now there are hardly any large services and/or platforms that use anything even close to a real _democratic_ process when it comes to dealing with content and moderation. At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy. That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.

luke_value 5y ago

Imagine believing there is freedom of speech in liberal democracies in 2022...

standardUser 5y ago
Can you tell us precisely which speech is being silenced by the government in the US in 2022?

qiskit 5y ago

> Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc. It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies. Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.

brimble 5y ago

In a McLuhan sense, I'm not sure the "message" of the medium of the Internet is one that's compatible with free society, ultimately, once we get past the idealism and look at how it works in practice. Which is... not great.

r4ltman 5y ago
Visual space is black and white, Internet is Acoustic space, resonant rather than definitive in practice

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