13 ms·

Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see

464 points by moose_man 4y ago

clouddrover 4y ago
> “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” Holz posted on Discord Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. > He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” No, it isn't.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  Why not? Do you think that the customs of your tribe and island are the laws of nature?
  - rektide 4y ago
    First we're talking about open versus closed societies, not tribes. The repression of spirit closed societies impose on their members is a humanitarian concern, imperils the soul, eats away at becoming ourselves. Open society all the way. Society has to be allowed to consider itself. Second, this isn't laws of the land. It's the internet, the unplace where different places can meet & connect. Your suggestion proposes that it's the pro-speech folk forcing themselves upon the world. Not so. What's actually happening in this story is the small authoritarian lowest-common-denominators of the world are imposing their views on all interconnectivity, on everyone else. They are constraining everyone else. And tech bosses keep letting it happen, keep letting ourselves be bullied. And the governments of open societies are not stepping up to illuminate & push these issues as the threats to open society that they are. Two absurd inconsistencies. Human rights are amazing. The suppression of humanity is dreadful. That's the "tribe" you are defending.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      These are all your opinions and personal values. I agree with all of them on a personal level. Where I think we disagree is that this is some kind of "pro speech" vs. "anti speech" battle. I see it more as a global US led Imperium attempting to impose their opinions and personal values on people throughout the world regardless of what those citizens or governments think. I'm in the US, me and my countrypeople shouldn't get a say in what happens in Hong Kong. Just like China shouldn't get a say in what happens in the US. Why isn't that enough?
      - rektide 4y ago
        This is a atopical line of inquiry & ignores what is happening. It's an ad-hominem argument against the US. Open society is far more than the US. 43% of the nations of the world are democratic according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_regime_type https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_regime_ty.... And it continues the filter of seeing this as open society being an imposition. If you have a closed society & the open society of the internet doesn't fit your society, you shouldnt be on the internet. Your closed society doesn't want to participate, then fine, if it must: go elsewhere.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        You've decided "Open society" == good. This is a value judgement not a law of nature. "if you have a closed society... you shouldn't be on the internet" Again, according to you. what lengths would you be willing to go to impose this on other people?
        andsoitis 4y ago
        In a more open society, members can choose for themselves, i.e. they have more autonomy. In a more closed society, more choice is taken away from you.
        rektide 4y ago
        I don't want anyone in a closed society and I'd go through great lengths to help people trapped in close societies have access to open connectivities like the internet. If a society wants to be closed though, your society has the onus of responsibility to enforce closing. Your society can't impose that position on everyone. Hence me saying the society probably shouldnt be on the most open connected free connectivity on the planet, one created by open society & which enables open social values. > You've decided... It looks like you have decided here friend. I never openly said that, although heck the words I use build a pretty lopsided case. I think everyone should decide for themselves though, and come to their conclusions. To me the choice seems obvious & it's hard to see what is to respect about closed, but I'm open. I'm open to learning.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Do you think that the customs of China's tribe and island are the laws of nature? For that matter, in the era of nearlight communication around the planet, how important even are things like "island" anymore, and how is "tribe" defined?
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine
      - rektide 4y ago
        Should your tribe & China tribe have say over what every company online does? Should they have sway over what US companies do? Seems like you are saying no, that you seem to agree with the frustration shared by the article.
      - bacchusracine 4y ago
        >No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine Isn't that the point? The problem is that the customs of others is infringing on the customs of others. If some places insist on a policy for their people, that is fine for their people. But what we have here is an insistence that those people can control how other people outside of their place and people can see and access technology.
  - clouddrover 4y ago
    No, not the laws of Nature, just Better. And made better through centuries of hard work and sacrifice. It's what it takes.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      I also agree they're better (probably coincidence that I was raised in a society and education system praising them nonstop). But to what lengths are you willing to go to impose them on people who don't want them? edit: If we're comparing china, i'm not sure you want to use length of time the society was built as a metric demonstrating chinese inferiority lol
      - clouddrover 4y ago
        It's pretty funny that you equate the oppressive actions of an authoritarian regime with what the people want. It's even funnier that you've failed to understand that the whole point of the article is that an authoritarian regime is imposing itself on others. You contradict yourself but convince yourself you're being rational. That's the problem with being an unprincipled apologist. You end up compromised.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better." It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. We Westerners have a philosophical concept inherited from our ancestors that describes that attitude: "hubris."
      - clouddrover 4y ago
        > China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time Yes, and China ended up very far behind. China's progress has come through Westernization. China needs more of it. > It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. Billions more know better.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    I becomes an issue in the global world and tolerance and intolerance... EG Danish cartooons of religious figures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      So who should decide how this issue is handled? The Danish? product managers at facebook? techbros?
      - mhoad 4y ago
        We actually have already had this debate already and came to a whole bunch of conclusions on the topic https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
        gadders 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        Definitely not the people who say that a non-believer of Islam cannot depict the prophet Muhammad. That's both a trample on my rights as an individual to do what I want, and a trampling of my rights to not participate in religion.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  > Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. Turns out that they grew up and they don't really care about the same values that we do. Tough shit, indeed.
  - rektide 4y ago
    The point of this article isnt to disagree with their insular close mindedness & lack of ability to process criticism or satire. The point is that because of economics we keep letting their conservative close minded views dictate what happens in the Western Democratic world. These conservative authoritarian approaches should have no quarter here, go against the values & rights the creators & owners of these sites arose from & should be supporting. It's a sad development & China should be the one having to eat tough shit.
    - surgical_fire 4y ago
      > The point is that because of economics Economics is all that matters in this world. It feels even silly to have to spell it out when we are on a website funded by the pinnacle of capitalism, where money overrides principles day and night. China will not have to eat any tough shit while the economics is on their side. And before you object, I ask you to consider the device you are using to reply to me. I know where mine came from.
      - Paianni 4y ago
        > I know where mine came from. I doubt it, the sources of materials and stages of manufacturing for most advanced electronics are spread all over the world. I know my motherboard was made in Taiwan, my processor from Malaysia/Germany, but that's just the start.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - clouddrover 4y ago
        > Economics is all that matters in this world. It isn't. Ukraine is a current demonstration of that.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  at $8/month it is, to him a place with 1/3rd of the population has a hard on for one specific theoretical form of expression that they don't even use that much? easy ignore. Midjourney also retrains from all prompts free or paid, making it easier to get better results from simpler prompts. Access to that population of human nodes is definitely more important than placating some ideological position of a smaller group.
- gadders 4y ago
  Douglas Mackey got jailed in the US for political satire. The moral high ground of the US is eroding rapidly.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Can you please explain which portion of his messages encouraging voters to "vote by SMS" constitute satire?
    - gadders 4y ago
      You seem unfamiliar as to how memes work. Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        it turns out "it's just memes, bro" is a poor defense against Conspiracy Against Rights charges. > Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that. If you are aware of an instance of someone being convicted by a jury of their peers of Conspiracy Against Rights for sharing "vote early, vote often," be sure to let us know.
  - myko 4y ago
    That is factually incorrect: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/31/far-right-influencer-convicted-in-voter-suppression-scheme-00090042 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/31/far-right-influence...
    - gadders 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        You are calling it a «meme», the judges recognized it as «fraudulent actions cross[ing] a line into criminality». The color does not count.
- SN76477 4y ago
  I've observed that integrity and honesty have no concern for satire or mockery.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. Pretty funny reading the differences between this thread and the one from yesterday where Canada fined Google for not censoring information. In that one, people were all "Tough shit, Google has to follow the laws of countries they serve in! Not everyone is American, stupid Americans!" Turns out, countries will have laws you disapprove of too!
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    There is a difference between Canada requiring Google follow the laws in Canada while operating in Canada, and China requiring stuff be censored globally to operate in China. If you are unable to see that difference, that's on you.
    - drstewart 4y ago
      Follow the laws of countries you operate in. If you can't or won't, that's on you
spaceheater 4y ago
If you are in the US better be careful or else you would charged with `malign influence campaign` by the land of the free government. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/us-charges-russians-americans-for-malign-influence-campaign https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/us-charges-russians...
- rcme 4y ago
  Yes, that's good advice. Be careful not to act on behalf of adversarial governments.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    I think we would all agree on that, but don't you see a risk that this labeling could be abused pretty easily to punish dissidents or any other enemy of powerful people?
    - rcme 4y ago
      It's not a "labeling." These people are being charged with a crime and will have their day in court to defend themselves.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Is someone charged with drunk driving just "labeling"? What about manslaughter? First degree murder? Treason? Someone being charged with a crime is a completely different thing to someone "being labeled" and trying to downplay the severity of the former to try and extend it to this hypothetical is telling.
    - blululu 4y ago
      The Espionage Act has been on the books for a century now and it was definitely used to punish dissidents. In some sense nothing new. But don’t be naive. There are plenty of countries waging various forms of attack against America at all times and there should be laws to thwart these attacks. The implementation and enforcement is key. Simply relying on abstract principles is the core danger of such a law, hence the need for a court that is itself accountable to the electorate. Either way the risks are abstract. The implementation is the key.
shadowgovt 4y ago
FWIW, information regulation has been an aspect of how things are done online since at least Web 2.0. Google has an intricate fabric of policy-modifiers to tweak what people can and cannot see based on their geolocation, up to and including the details of national boundaries. Twitter, pre-Musk, had "banned in Germany" / "banned in France" flags on tweets and accounts that were even API-accessible (which was kind of neat; they served as a proxy signal for "Not saying this guy's a Nazi, just saying Twitter has found it legally expedient to suppress his ability to broadcast his thoughts to people in Germany"). ... but the services that we'd expect to be mature enough to support those levels of nuance are starting to fall over on their asses, and that's concerning. Midjourney's a bit of an outlier (and, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but given Hotz's attitude on the topic I think it'd be worth it to follow the money on them). But Twitter, in particular, has seen a massive backslide. I always thought their ultimate goal was untenable (one flat, mass public forum is probably not a viable model for human interaction), but under Musk's dictat it has utterly imploded.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Those double standards are pretty funny. Compare western musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk to the weibo version (use VPN) https://weibo.com/elonmusk https://weibo.com/elonmusk Behind language and technical barriers you can create pretty divergent versions of yourselfs.
- iosono88 4y ago
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- codetrotter 4y ago
  > weibo version (use VPN) Loads fine for me without VPN.
- huevosabio 4y ago
  I bet the weibo version is just a managed account by a pr person.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Yeah; ahem: "How did you spend the Spring Festival this year? Check out the bunnies' suggestions! [Lighting emoji], [music emoji], [microphone emoji] #tesla#新春party开来[call] #特别亲过年# , New Year’s "rabbit" music [rabbit emoji] Tesla is willing to drive through every happy journey with you, bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, full of electricity for four seasons [Gift emoji ]Follow @ Tesla also brought the topic word #特别亲过年# forward this post on Weibo to post your "special" New Year moments, and draw 2 fans to send"
- eunos 4y ago
  GOP congress seems love western musk so much.
  - MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
    I don't know anything about that, but I wonder if this is why he's parading his conservative side lately.
theknocker 4y ago
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tjpnz 4y ago
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time_to_smile 4y ago
"Tech Bosses" are dictators and I'm always surprised that most people have absolutely zero intellectual challenge suspending the values of democracy for 8-12 hours a day. Virtually all of the rights we learn about in grade school are suspended in the workplace. And while employees do have the ability to quit, they a.) still have to find some other dictator to work for and b.) are much more heavily impacted by a loss of income than the employer is the individual loss of skill. So the dictators we work for day in and day out are aligned with other dictators. You aren't entitled to free speech in your office, so why would you expect to the people running your office to care about your free speech after hours? edit: I'm still surprised that people are incapable of question the ideology that shapes your worldview. The very concept that "well you're working for someone else so the of course suspension of liberties is okay" is doctrine that you have been lead to believe since birth precisely because it benefits those people in power.
- skinkestek 4y ago
  Working for money is doing something others want you to do in exchange for money. In the west typically 2/3 of your day is free, as are weekends (and I see plenty of people commenting during work hours too). I am a worker myself, but maybe because I have a past in actual physical labour I realize how much of a brat I have become now, being able to walk around, grab coffee, chat, stare mindlessly out the windows and browse HN while being paid handsomely to create software.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It's a normal human tendency to consider our own particular situation as representing the "average" or "normal". It's quite common for people who live privileged lives (such as most people here) to not recognize that they are living privileged lives. It's very good to remember how lucky most of us are, and how unusual our circumstances are.
    - skinkestek 4y ago
      I think of it many times a year, how lucky I am to no longer need to showel manure or move wet grass using a pitchfork to earn a fraction of what I do today. And even back then I was lucky.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you're not always looking for independent alternative sources of information and cross-checking claims from different sources while also looking for internal self-consistency then of course you're going to end up with a skewed perspective on reality engineered by some group of professional propagandists. Whether these PR specialists are working for governments or corporations in China, Russia or America is sort of besides the point. There is a set of skills that's needed to objectively classify information that's found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books). Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons. The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.
- overthrow 4y ago
  Certain groups? I think everyone in government, in all parties, would oppose that education - because their own propaganda would become less effective too. Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, or the pitfalls of a two-party system?
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    They did specify government "authoritarians". It's not much of a stretch to think that they don't believe "everyone in government" is an authoritarian.
  - pydry 4y ago
    >Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting They tend to be more fine with this sort of thing if the fix isn't on the cards politically. E.g. you will see some nuclear attacks on the idea of raising the minimum wage from the media when it is being debated in Congress, while that same media will often fawn over political pipe dreams like basic income. The Russian bots will pull this trick where they set up, e.g. a facebook page for "proud Texan cowboy dads" and then funnel innocuous stuff they will agree with 99% of the time and then 1% of the time push stuff that really matters to them ("why are we sending yet more money to Ukraine when proud Texans at home are suffering!"). This isn't controversial to state. I think it's clear that they do this - what is controversial to state is that this is exactly what the rest of the "legitimate" media does exactly the same thing on behalf of the oligarchy who own it.
deleted 4y ago
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timcavel 4y ago
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kneel 4y ago
Tech companies can choose to obey laws of a foreign country to gain access to their populace. I don't really see the controversy, US first amendment rights don't apply beyond our borders. This article is an incredulous take considering the increase in censorship within the US media-sphere which actually violates the law.
- falcolas 4y ago
  The problem, IMO, isn't that they blocked a tweet in India based on a request from India. The problem is that Twitter blocked a tweet globally based on a request from India.
- simiones 4y ago
  First of all, from a purely legal perspective, the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech. Secondly, the article is saying that tech companies are starting to censor speech in the USA that dictators in China or authoritarian leaders in India don't like. It is positing a slippery slope where you may one day soon be banned from Twitter globally for posting an image of Winnie the Pooh, which would be done in order for Twitter to gain and maintain access to the Chinese market.
  - bmelton 4y ago
    > the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech Yes, but the first amendment _does_ bear on whether or not a private company can or can't be compelled by the state to censor speech, which is what OP was referring to.
  - kneel 4y ago
    Ok fair enough. Doing 3 minutes of research on this topic lead me to the Indian posters page, in which he doesn't even remember the context of his tweet and has reposted the screenshot. He has dozens of tweets discussing censorship, they're all up and available. Tbh this just sounds like incompetence rather than malevolence, which considering Musk's bungling overhaul of Twitter shouldn't surprise anyone.
potamic 4y ago
See people, this is why free speech must be absolute. The moment you let someone become the gatekeeper, they will absolutely use that leverage for their own benefit, at your expense. What is worse? Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Show me one country where free speech has ever been absolute. At a minimum "fighting words" and libel/slander usually have criminal or civil penalties against them. Then there's stuff like IP law where reproducing certain speech can have civil or even criminal penalties. Statements like "free speech must be absolute" are basically zero content because they don't engage with the nuance of the debate, but they sure sound good.
  - splitstud 4y ago
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  - potamic 4y ago
    We most certainly don't, but it's an interesting thought exercise whether it's a better model than everything else we have seen so far. Of course, it asks for very different trade-offs. For instance, you should be willing to forgoe libel/slander laws and allow people to smear the shit out of each other. It means people will need to figure out for themselves whom to listen to, but honestly, I don't think the situation is any different today. It also means scrutinising things like copyright and questioning whether they are a net value to society. These policies have since forever been driven by corporations to serve their own interests. There's good arguments to be made that their concerns about loss in revenue are largely overblown. You can implement policies that restrict monetisation of copyright content without putting restrictions on what individuals can express. Of course these are fairly naive ideas, and there are likely many more problems we haven't touched here, but the point is that there are options. It is worth thinking about them because the alternative as we see doesn't seem to be working out. There's a trend around the world where countries are moving more and more towards authoritarianism. At the same time, the wealth gap is ever increasing and I don't think these two are unrelated. I think the common people are getting an overall raw deal on this planet and really need to think through what policies will benefit them most.
quantified 4y ago
"Tech Bosses" is two examples, hardly the universe and misleadingly steering an assumption that it's just in tech. Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while. Hollywood, especially Disney, otherwise censors itself to be able to show movies.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  This article is another example that reeks of American nationalism.
- tarruda 4y ago
  > Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while Source?
  - wincy 4y ago
    They’re talking about the movie The Dictator and the North Korea hack of Sony.
    - umeshunni 4y ago
      The Interview, not The Dictator. The Dictator was the Sacha Baron Cohen movie.
  - setgree 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview > In June 2014, the North Korean government threatened action against the United States if Sony released the film. As a result, Sony delayed the release from October to December and reportedly re-edited the film to make it more acceptable to North Korea. In November, the computer systems of Sony were hacked by the "Guardians of Peace", a North Korean cybercrime group. The group also threatened terrorist attacks against theaters showing the film. This led to major theater chains opting not to release the film, and Sony instead releasing it for online digital rental and purchase on December 25, 2014, followed by a limited release at selected theaters the next day.
- 4y ago
coldtea 4y ago
Tech bosses in the US are also letting the US government, 3-letter agencies, and "activists" also sensor what americans see.
- yamazakiwi 4y ago
  I'm more worried about the media corporations themselves than "activists". What are activists censoring?
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - yamazakiwi 4y ago
      I find the idea of labelling Rupert Murdoch as an activist very interesting.
twelfthnight 4y ago
Flip side is when Google left China in 2010 it opened the door for Baidu, which is completely state controlled and gave the CCP more power. Is that better? I think what we're finding is that the world is interconnected and authoritarianism anywhere is bad for everyone. It's complicated. Also, think it's important to note that the CCP is not China. Many Chinese citizens don't like the CCP but are powerless to resist.
damnesian 4y ago
Social media are entertainment platforms. Unfortunately, they have also become de facto news delivery platforms by sheer percentage of eyeballs. It's a bit like what happened with screwdrivers: people kept touching them to live electrical lines, so the wood handles with metal ferrules disappeared and the handles were redeisigned to insulate human hands from electrical shock. But no one is trying to fix social media so it can deliver news better- rather they are being retooled to compel users to instead consume more content more quickly. Which leaves the mind with even less time to question and consider. It's a recipe for disaster.
deleted 4y ago
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itg 4y ago
I guess it's only OK when Americans get to censor what the rest of the world sees.
- cynicalsecurity 4y ago
  While America is holding the global power, you can freely write you shitty opinion on the internet and get away with it. If China or Russia would replace America, you will be mining uranium in a gulag / re-education camp, counting days until you'll be dead, comrade. You choose.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    False dichotomy. It's not like China would magically start having international hegemony over the media and the internet if the US didn't. Almost the entire world is subject to social media rules and values that are mostly coming from the US, and a pretty specific part of the US too.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  It's the rest of the world's own decision to use US websites. If I went to a China-based forum, yeah I'd expect censorship about Xi Jinping. But using Midjourney??
  - valdiorn 4y ago
    funny, because the one thing AI image generators famously can't or won't do is create pornography. Guess which country is super sensitive about porn? It's not China. It's not anywhere in Europe...
    - pb7 4y ago
      I don't know, which one? >It's not China. >Any kind of sexually graphic content has long been illegal in China, whether it’s visual or literary.[0] [0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3092512/chinas-porn-censors-shut-down-12000-websites-first-half-2020 https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3092512/china... >It's not anywhere in Europe... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/a-uk-wide-internet-porn-ban-comes-into-effect-in-july.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/a-uk-wide-internet-porn-ban-... https://cybernews.com/editorial/anti-porn-laws-in-europe-bring-serious-privacy-issues-yet-theyre-fashionable-as-ever/ https://cybernews.com/editorial/anti-porn-laws-in-europe-bri... https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/france-to-finally-restrict-access-to-online-pornography/ https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/france-to-fin... https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-business-europe-germany-european-union-8b9d9a7d5c1f59dc7440a64690f40268 https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-business-europe-ger...
valdiorn 4y ago
hahaha, welcome to feeling what it's like living in "the rest of the world". Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban! Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves. If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves. An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service. Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world. Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Or just stop banning content entirely.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That wasn't even viable for 4chan.
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      But why not? They weren't threatened with legal action (and if they were, the correct solution would be to undo the law that they were threatened with). They were attacked by the same moral busybodies who have been clutching their pearls over violent video games since at least I was a kid. The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
mariodiana 4y ago
Related to this issue, an article in Harper's Magazine, from 2015, discussed the threat China poses to the United States, via the American businesses who have interests over there: "The New China syndrome: How Beijing shakes down foreign businesses" https://archive.harpers.org/2015/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2015-11-0085712.pdf https://archive.harpers.org/2015/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2015... The article focuses on the idea of indirect lobbying: namely, China pressuring U.S. businesses to lobby in favor of China's interests, or risk losing the privilege of doing business in China. (Length: 6 pages)
new_nana 4y ago
Why
epups 4y ago
They are also letting US intelligence agencies decide what Americans see, sometimes with direct electoral consequences. I think it's past time we decide on an Internet Bill of Rights so that we can fight against any type of unreasonable censorship.
Vikerchu 4y ago
I did care, until i realized it was talking about facebook. Idk what they are propagating, it's a private platform.
new_nana 4y ago
Why do they lump India into this? Modi is democratically elected leader unlike Putin and Xi. Just because one doesn't likes ideology of opponent, one cannot dismiss them as dictator!
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  Do you know just how many dictators were democratically elected? When they start cheating the game you label them a cheater, not only once they win.
dopamean 4y ago
Of the nine bulleted benefits at the beginning of the article at least five can be achieved when giving two weeks notice. Eliminate all stress from your job: the moment I've decided to leave a job, even if I haven't found the next one yet, I feel any stress dissipate almost immediately. Knowing that something unpleasant can end and that I'm going to take steps to end it is a relief. Get paid the same. Extend your benefits for longer. Vest more stock. Get your bonus: you can achieve all of these things by simply waiting to give notice. Wait until after you've vested to the amount you want. Wait until after you've received your bonus. And obviously you get paid the same regardless of when you give notice so this is a weird benefit to cite. Take unused vacation time: I've always taken a bunch of vacation before giving notice. Arguably that's less offensive than telling everyone, "hey my last day is in eight weeks and for a quarter of that time I'll be on vacation." I'm sure there are companies that will wait several months for a new hire to start because they want a long petering out period with their current gig but I've never worked anywhere that would allow that for anyone other than executive or very, very high level engineer. This also seems risky because what if something happens to that job in the two to three months notice you gave? If this had been posted three weeks ago I would have thought it was an April Fools joke.
- harrymit907 4y ago
  Why is your comment under this article?
  - dopamean 4y ago
    I had a bunch of tabs open and went back to the wrong one when I wanted to comment. Now I cant delete it :(
croes 4y ago
You mean like European users aren't allowed to see female nipples on FB because of prudish US rules?
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Those aren't government rules. But it's still a valid complaint.
- octopoc 4y ago
  It's not called nipplebook for a reason, although that would be a perfect idea for a European startup
- UberFly 4y ago
  You can see nipples plenty of other places. Some shops used to sell porn on their magazine racks, some didn't.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Nipples aren’t porn. Being topless on the beach or breastfeeding are common, normal and not porn. Yet their depiction is forbidden because US companies control most social media.
- pb7 4y ago
  While I empathize, there's a big difference: Meta is a US company so it's going to follow the cultural rules of the US.
augment002 4y ago
Tech Bosses in this case meaning Elon Musk, who has proven himself to be completely unprincipled and untrustworthy. Every time he talks about valuing truth and free speech, he is lying.
hunglee2 4y ago
What Americans see is already censored - by Americans. If you want to know what a whichever prescribed political leader is saying, you are not going to get it from the local media establishment, you're going to have to go to official transcripts from the government of that prescribed political leader, and no doubt risk ending up on an FBI database as a result. This is true for all government systems, the more you dig into it, they are all just different flavours of a system of control, less Perl vs Python more PHP7.3 vs PHP7.4
- milsorgen 4y ago
  They alter transcripts. The examples I have seen have been done to fix "flubs" of the Presidential Administration but a simple 'fix' done with care can subtly alter the message for future readers and I believe sets a dangerous precedent. However, for all I know this has been common practice for some time, but I have only seen evidence of this occuring recently.
  - hunglee2 4y ago
    who is 'they'? I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position. Different matter of course if official transcriptions were altered by unauthorised parties
    - UberFly 4y ago
      "I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position." Can't you see how this "officially endorsed position" editing would be a dangerous thing? Transcripts should be an exact representation of what occurred.
      - hunglee2 4y ago
        why - please explain? What actually needs to be known is exactly the official policy, this is more important than the exact words used. Right now, we are reliant on media to reinterpret what was said, with the inevitable decontextualisation and reframing that comes along with it. This is the practice of propaganda
whitemary 4y ago
Bosses are dictators.
hot_gril 4y ago
"The ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire." - Midjourney CEO David Holz
at_a_remove 4y ago
Oh, how the tables turn. It's delicious when it does. Watch people backpedal! See them do linguistic backflips! Now try to put the tiger back into the cage! It's always the same sad circus when power shifts and suddenly what was okay to do to "those bad guys" is fearsome and troubling when it happens to them.
andsoitis 4y ago
Money talks.
yosito 4y ago
As someone who has spent the last 15 years living abroad in various countries, and socializing with local people, I've begun to realize that the things you see online are heavily controlled by many factors. Dictators are one party that I feel strongly shouldn't have the power to censor what I say do. But I also don't want Mark Zuckerberg or Capital One bank or Digital Ocean to censor what I can see, but they all do it and I don't think that's any better.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Browsing through the replies in this thread, it's apparent why we have tech boss censorship and always will - most people, sadly, actually do want censorship and defend and even advocate for it.
animalright10 4y ago
To me, I think the issue is that people hear what they want to hear. It has nothing to do with censorship. Internet is huge, if ppl want unbiased view, they can get it, but for most ppl, echo chamber is better.
srj 4y ago
It says tech bosses but this seems to just be about twitter.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  Agreed. It's pretty myopic to think that foreign censorship laws only impact tech companies.
psychphysic 4y ago
The only solution is to flit around. Even editorially independent media is invariably heavily biased one way or another. Given the way people consume news you can be bias through the use of a subtly misleading but otherwise accurate headline, or a boring headline, or just not have it as a leader or bulletin. There is so much News these days that you could report on everything absolutely fairly and still have a strong bias just because of what you decide is worth showing people more often.
jmyeet 4y ago
This problem is way larger than tech companies and isn't new. Some examples: - Richard Gere got canceled for speaking out against China's human rights abuses to the Tibetans at the Academy Awards in 1993 [1]; - The Neil Armonstrong biopic "First Man" didn't have a scene of planting the American flag [2]; - These are examples of a long history of Hollywood bowing to Chinese pressure and interests [3]. Modifying a movie for the Chinese market is one thing. Modifying the global release of a movie to keep China happy is something else. Now look at the mainstream media just this year. Some examples of stories that got zero or significantly delayed coverage include: - The train derailment and environmental disaster at East Palestine, Ohio. For a good week you wouldn't even know this was happening if you weren't on Tiktok. Consider the irony of that situation; - The massive French strikes and protests got almost no play in US media; Now consider the bias in media coverage: - Western media in general is unforgivably biased when it comes to Israel [4]. A common technique is deliberate use of active vs passive voice [5]. Example: Shireen Abu-Akleh was "killed" [6]. A more accurate headline would've been "Middle Eastern and American citizen journalist assassinated by Israeli sniper while wearing a blue press helmet and vest". - Media coverage is unbelievably biased towards the police in cases of brutality and death at the hands of police. Guests on TV will often be former or current police. What about civil rights lawyers or victims rights advocates? Remember this when the media writes stories about the bias in tech companies. While there might be truth to that, never forget that the media too is incredibly biased. [1]: https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/04/11/how-hollywood-destroyed-richard-geres-career-because-he-chose-to-speak-for-the-tibetans/ https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/04/11/how-hollywood-destroyed... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/06/if-anyone-can-maga-it-is-nasa-how-first-man-put-a-rocket-up-the-politics-of-space https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/06/if-anyone-can-m... [3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-movies-censorship-erich-schwartzel https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-mo... [4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem-al-aqsa-media-coverage-israeli-violence-palestinians/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem... [5]: https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-media-bias-serves-israels-occupation https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-media-bias-serves-israel... [6]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61403320 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61403320
Reltih 4y ago
[flagged]
Reltih 4y ago
[flagged]
diebeforei485 4y ago
To be clear, the "Tech Bosses" censored the Hunter Biden laptop story at the behest of US government affiliated people. This is nothing new.
blatant303 4y ago
Including the U.S. government.
BirAdam 4y ago
Not a new problem. Powerful people and groups always have an interest in controlling narratives. They have also made effort to do so, and they always will.
w10-1 4y ago
Each of us builds capabilities used for both good and evil. The modern extent of government power and private influence would be unthinkable even decades ago. Personal rights have failed to keep up, in part because it requires constitutional or legislative action that's basically impossible because of politics or jurisdiction (international). As a practical result, we can't really absolve ourselves of responsibility by saying that it's legal, or that it's for another country to decide, or that it's necessary to gain access to a market. No one doubts that IBM/ACM was morally culpable for providing systems they knew would be used for "organizing" undesirables by the Nazi's. It's much less clear whether doing devops at twitter helps or hurts Modi, or if that's a bad thing. But it helps to have some smell tests. Mine are: - Everyone worldwide should be treated with the same respect - American or not. - It's better for speech and commerce to be free, when it's aiming for true understanding and mutual benefit. - Every technology should be openly assessed for who it benefits or harms, who decides its use, whether it can be safely managed, and whether it corrupts or improves those it affects. Analytically, the notion of commercial franchise is quite helpful: twitter has the franchise for a current event stream, Modi has a franchise over legislation in India, etc. All tech companies build their own franchise (with moats, etc.), and may coordinate in mutually-reinforcing teams. Franchises are not only bargaining power but also a whole ecosystem self-organizes around them. The stronger and more relevant the franchise, the bigger the payday, and the more enticing it is to take over. That creates very strong incentives to hold your nose (and be used as a tool), or to steer well clear (and be, well, irrelevant). I salute those who struggle with these difficult questions.
tellitnow2 4y ago
[flagged]
toss1 4y ago
>>Midjourney CEO David Holz announced last year that his program would explicitly forbid users to create images of China’s Xi Jinping. Users who attempt to do so are threatened with a ban. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” Holz posted on Discord, according to The Washington Post. He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” It is not about the ability of people in China to use their tech that is more important than our ability to to generate satire — it's Holz' ability to make money. And if he thinks that some people's ability to use it at all is more important than all user's ability to use it freely (without CCP's blessing on every pixel), I'd suggest he needs to rethink freedom vs authoritarianism. Fork that.
riazrizvi 4y ago
It's understood there is no universal truth, so the news here is not that these platforms are becoming distorted where they were not before. It's that social media platforms in the democratic US are increasingly moderating content to align with dictators for, one assumes, money. Perhaps it's to increase platform reach in those countries, but what is the side-effect going to be on US politics with an online media landscape that now skews more heavily toward #dictator? Will US states legislatures begin to request the same 'moderation services' to support their own anti-democratic agendas? If so the country will change, the economic environment will change here, and not for the better.
- Retric 4y ago
  There is a universal truth. However, a great many people have vested interests in convincing people otherwise. The most you can say is people prioritize truths differently. What you ate this morning matters very little to anyone but yourself.
  - riazrizvi 4y ago
    Write a book and share this universal truth, translate it into all the languages, you'll make a fortune. Last I checked, a half-billion authors are still trying to establish it. EDIT: I see you edited your comment about 'universal truth' after I answered it. I love the irony. Hail to the internet.
    - Retric 4y ago
      There’s little money in Math.
      - riazrizvi 4y ago
        I see. You are asserting axiomatically consistent systems are 'universal truths' in the context of things that people say online. However, math is about processing statements, and does not make an assertion about the truth of those statements in the real world, just on whether they were processed correctly.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Is it any surprise though? When for-profit entities operate in overseas territories and wish to remain in business there, of course they are subject to their laws. This is why non-profit entities and decentralization are important. You can't have it both ways.
lovvtide 4y ago
Nostr
swayvil 4y ago
If you didn't see it for yourself, or you didn't hear it from a friend, then you are probably sucking fantasy. One way of getting around this crap epistemology (to a degree) is science, of course. But who has the time for that?
readonthegoapp 4y ago
Truth. Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least. RT (Russia) and the so-far-left-they-went-hard-right crowd (Taibbi, etc.), PressTV (Iran), etc. And they label 'government-funded' channels but not 'corporate-funded' channels, even when those corporations are bigger than governments. Corporations "set the conditions within which the U.S. government operates, and control it to a large extent" -- but are kind of seen as not important actors -- they're made invisible. https://www.accountancydaily.co/corporations-dominate-worlds-top-100-economic-entities https://www.accountancydaily.co/corporations-dominate-worlds... Global corporations are increasingly wealthier than many countries, with Walmart, Apple and Shell richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden, according to research by the campaigning group Global Justice Now, which found that 69 of the world’s top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015 We definitely need to rein in corporations like YouTube/Google/Alphabet, and not just Big Tech -- but real players like Walmart, ExxonMobile, etc.
- throwaway29812 3y ago
  > Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least. No they didn't, they stopped actively promoting them. Not the same thing. Are you online demanding VK and other Russian social media give equal reach to MSNBC and CNN? If you're not, you should.
  - readonthegoapp 3y ago
    I guess you could say that removing all their content and/or shutting down complete channels and/or accounts is 'just not actively promoting them' -- but you wouldn't really be telling the truth then, would you? Regarding VK and Russian social media, I'm a US-American, so i'm mostly concerned with what US companies do -- because they're much more destructive, and I can do a lot more about them.
    - readonthegoapp 3y ago
      i was just reminded of another way YouTube and other organizations censor info that is not friendly to the US government/elite -- mark certain videos or channels as 'Mature', like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKG8S7K0wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKG8S7K0wM ...The message: Video unavailable This video is unavailable with Restricted Mode enabled. To view this video, you will need to disable Restricted Mode.
Nasrudith 4y ago
I am reminded of earlier useful idiots complaining about "corporations being more powerful than governments" over them not bending the knee towards their whims. Well this is exactly what governments being more powerful than corporations looks like. Of course useful idiots also never learn.
RickJWagner 4y ago
This coming from Daily Beast, which is rated: Left - https://www.allsides.com/news-source/daily-beast-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/daily-beast-media-bias Skews Left - https://adfontesmedia.com/daily-beast-bias-reliability/ https://adfontesmedia.com/daily-beast-bias-reliability/ Very Liberal - https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-daily-beast-bias-rating/ https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-daily-beast-bias-rating/
IYasha 3y ago
Unfunny how Midjourney allows you to generate images of BuyDen, PooTeen, McRon, but not Jeen-pin...

464 points by moose_man 4y ago

> “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” Holz posted on Discord Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. > He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” No, it isn't.

snapcaster 4y ago
Why not? Do you think that the customs of your tribe and island are the laws of nature?
- rektide 4y ago
  First we're talking about open versus closed societies, not tribes. The repression of spirit closed societies impose on their members is a humanitarian concern, imperils the soul, eats away at becoming ourselves. Open society all the way. Society has to be allowed to consider itself. Second, this isn't laws of the land. It's the internet, the unplace where different places can meet & connect. Your suggestion proposes that it's the pro-speech folk forcing themselves upon the world. Not so. What's actually happening in this story is the small authoritarian lowest-common-denominators of the world are imposing their views on all interconnectivity, on everyone else. They are constraining everyone else. And tech bosses keep letting it happen, keep letting ourselves be bullied. And the governments of open societies are not stepping up to illuminate & push these issues as the threats to open society that they are. Two absurd inconsistencies. Human rights are amazing. The suppression of humanity is dreadful. That's the "tribe" you are defending.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    These are all your opinions and personal values. I agree with all of them on a personal level. Where I think we disagree is that this is some kind of "pro speech" vs. "anti speech" battle. I see it more as a global US led Imperium attempting to impose their opinions and personal values on people throughout the world regardless of what those citizens or governments think. I'm in the US, me and my countrypeople shouldn't get a say in what happens in Hong Kong. Just like China shouldn't get a say in what happens in the US. Why isn't that enough?
    - rektide 4y ago
      This is a atopical line of inquiry & ignores what is happening. It's an ad-hominem argument against the US. Open society is far more than the US. 43% of the nations of the world are democratic according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_regime_type https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_regime_ty.... And it continues the filter of seeing this as open society being an imposition. If you have a closed society & the open society of the internet doesn't fit your society, you shouldnt be on the internet. Your closed society doesn't want to participate, then fine, if it must: go elsewhere.
      - snapcaster 4y ago
        You've decided "Open society" == good. This is a value judgement not a law of nature. "if you have a closed society... you shouldn't be on the internet" Again, according to you. what lengths would you be willing to go to impose this on other people?
        andsoitis 4y ago
        In a more open society, members can choose for themselves, i.e. they have more autonomy. In a more closed society, more choice is taken away from you.
        rektide 4y ago
        I don't want anyone in a closed society and I'd go through great lengths to help people trapped in close societies have access to open connectivities like the internet. If a society wants to be closed though, your society has the onus of responsibility to enforce closing. Your society can't impose that position on everyone. Hence me saying the society probably shouldnt be on the most open connected free connectivity on the planet, one created by open society & which enables open social values. > You've decided... It looks like you have decided here friend. I never openly said that, although heck the words I use build a pretty lopsided case. I think everyone should decide for themselves though, and come to their conclusions. To me the choice seems obvious & it's hard to see what is to respect about closed, but I'm open. I'm open to learning.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Do you think that the customs of China's tribe and island are the laws of nature? For that matter, in the era of nearlight communication around the planet, how important even are things like "island" anymore, and how is "tribe" defined?
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine
    - rektide 4y ago
      Should your tribe & China tribe have say over what every company online does? Should they have sway over what US companies do? Seems like you are saying no, that you seem to agree with the frustration shared by the article.
    - bacchusracine 4y ago
      >No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine Isn't that the point? The problem is that the customs of others is infringing on the customs of others. If some places insist on a policy for their people, that is fine for their people. But what we have here is an insistence that those people can control how other people outside of their place and people can see and access technology.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  No, not the laws of Nature, just Better. And made better through centuries of hard work and sacrifice. It's what it takes.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    I also agree they're better (probably coincidence that I was raised in a society and education system praising them nonstop). But to what lengths are you willing to go to impose them on people who don't want them? edit: If we're comparing china, i'm not sure you want to use length of time the society was built as a metric demonstrating chinese inferiority lol
    - clouddrover 4y ago
      It's pretty funny that you equate the oppressive actions of an authoritarian regime with what the people want. It's even funnier that you've failed to understand that the whole point of the article is that an authoritarian regime is imposing itself on others. You contradict yourself but convince yourself you're being rational. That's the problem with being an unprincipled apologist. You end up compromised.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better." It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. We Westerners have a philosophical concept inherited from our ancestors that describes that attitude: "hubris."
    - clouddrover 4y ago
      > China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time Yes, and China ended up very far behind. China's progress has come through Westernization. China needs more of it. > It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. Billions more know better.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I becomes an issue in the global world and tolerance and intolerance... EG Danish cartooons of religious figures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    So who should decide how this issue is handled? The Danish? product managers at facebook? techbros?
    - mhoad 4y ago
      We actually have already had this debate already and came to a whole bunch of conclusions on the topic https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
      - gadders 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Definitely not the people who say that a non-believer of Islam cannot depict the prophet Muhammad. That's both a trample on my rights as an individual to do what I want, and a trampling of my rights to not participate in religion.
surgical_fire 4y ago
> Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. Turns out that they grew up and they don't really care about the same values that we do. Tough shit, indeed.
- rektide 4y ago
  The point of this article isnt to disagree with their insular close mindedness & lack of ability to process criticism or satire. The point is that because of economics we keep letting their conservative close minded views dictate what happens in the Western Democratic world. These conservative authoritarian approaches should have no quarter here, go against the values & rights the creators & owners of these sites arose from & should be supporting. It's a sad development & China should be the one having to eat tough shit.
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    > The point is that because of economics Economics is all that matters in this world. It feels even silly to have to spell it out when we are on a website funded by the pinnacle of capitalism, where money overrides principles day and night. China will not have to eat any tough shit while the economics is on their side. And before you object, I ask you to consider the device you are using to reply to me. I know where mine came from.
    - Paianni 4y ago
      > I know where mine came from. I doubt it, the sources of materials and stages of manufacturing for most advanced electronics are spread all over the world. I know my motherboard was made in Taiwan, my processor from Malaysia/Germany, but that's just the start.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - clouddrover 4y ago
      > Economics is all that matters in this world. It isn't. Ukraine is a current demonstration of that.
yieldcrv 4y ago
at $8/month it is, to him a place with 1/3rd of the population has a hard on for one specific theoretical form of expression that they don't even use that much? easy ignore. Midjourney also retrains from all prompts free or paid, making it easier to get better results from simpler prompts. Access to that population of human nodes is definitely more important than placating some ideological position of a smaller group.
gadders 4y ago
Douglas Mackey got jailed in the US for political satire. The moral high ground of the US is eroding rapidly.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Can you please explain which portion of his messages encouraging voters to "vote by SMS" constitute satire?
  - gadders 4y ago
    You seem unfamiliar as to how memes work. Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      it turns out "it's just memes, bro" is a poor defense against Conspiracy Against Rights charges. > Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that. If you are aware of an instance of someone being convicted by a jury of their peers of Conspiracy Against Rights for sharing "vote early, vote often," be sure to let us know.
- myko 4y ago
  That is factually incorrect: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/31/far-right-influencer-convicted-in-voter-suppression-scheme-00090042 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/31/far-right-influence...
  - gadders 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      You are calling it a «meme», the judges recognized it as «fraudulent actions cross[ing] a line into criminality». The color does not count.
SN76477 4y ago
I've observed that integrity and honesty have no concern for satire or mockery.
drstewart 4y ago
>Tough shit. China will just have to grow up. Pretty funny reading the differences between this thread and the one from yesterday where Canada fined Google for not censoring information. In that one, people were all "Tough shit, Google has to follow the laws of countries they serve in! Not everyone is American, stupid Americans!" Turns out, countries will have laws you disapprove of too!
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  There is a difference between Canada requiring Google follow the laws in Canada while operating in Canada, and China requiring stuff be censored globally to operate in China. If you are unable to see that difference, that's on you.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    Follow the laws of countries you operate in. If you can't or won't, that's on you

spaceheater 4y ago

If you are in the US better be careful or else you would charged with `malign influence campaign` by the land of the free government. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/us-charges-russians-americans-for-malign-influence-campaign https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/us-charges-russians...

rcme 4y ago
Yes, that's good advice. Be careful not to act on behalf of adversarial governments.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  I think we would all agree on that, but don't you see a risk that this labeling could be abused pretty easily to punish dissidents or any other enemy of powerful people?
  - rcme 4y ago
    It's not a "labeling." These people are being charged with a crime and will have their day in court to defend themselves.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Is someone charged with drunk driving just "labeling"? What about manslaughter? First degree murder? Treason? Someone being charged with a crime is a completely different thing to someone "being labeled" and trying to downplay the severity of the former to try and extend it to this hypothetical is telling.
  - blululu 4y ago
    The Espionage Act has been on the books for a century now and it was definitely used to punish dissidents. In some sense nothing new. But don’t be naive. There are plenty of countries waging various forms of attack against America at all times and there should be laws to thwart these attacks. The implementation and enforcement is key. Simply relying on abstract principles is the core danger of such a law, hence the need for a court that is itself accountable to the electorate. Either way the risks are abstract. The implementation is the key.

shadowgovt 4y ago

FWIW, information regulation has been an aspect of how things are done online since at least Web 2.0. Google has an intricate fabric of policy-modifiers to tweak what people can and cannot see based on their geolocation, up to and including the details of national boundaries. Twitter, pre-Musk, had "banned in Germany" / "banned in France" flags on tweets and accounts that were even API-accessible (which was kind of neat; they served as a proxy signal for "Not saying this guy's a Nazi, just saying Twitter has found it legally expedient to suppress his ability to broadcast his thoughts to people in Germany"). ... but the services that we'd expect to be mature enough to support those levels of nuance are starting to fall over on their asses, and that's concerning. Midjourney's a bit of an outlier (and, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but given Hotz's attitude on the topic I think it'd be worth it to follow the money on them). But Twitter, in particular, has seen a massive backslide. I always thought their ultimate goal was untenable (one flat, mass public forum is probably not a viable model for human interaction), but under Musk's dictat it has utterly imploded.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Those double standards are pretty funny. Compare western musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk to the weibo version (use VPN) https://weibo.com/elonmusk https://weibo.com/elonmusk Behind language and technical barriers you can create pretty divergent versions of yourselfs.

iosono88 4y ago
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codetrotter 4y ago
> weibo version (use VPN) Loads fine for me without VPN.
huevosabio 4y ago
I bet the weibo version is just a managed account by a pr person.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Yeah; ahem: "How did you spend the Spring Festival this year? Check out the bunnies' suggestions! [Lighting emoji], [music emoji], [microphone emoji] #tesla#新春party开来[call] #特别亲过年# , New Year’s "rabbit" music [rabbit emoji] Tesla is willing to drive through every happy journey with you, bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, full of electricity for four seasons [Gift emoji ]Follow @ Tesla also brought the topic word #特别亲过年# forward this post on Weibo to post your "special" New Year moments, and draw 2 fans to send"
eunos 4y ago
GOP congress seems love western musk so much.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  I don't know anything about that, but I wonder if this is why he's parading his conservative side lately.

theknocker 4y ago

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tjpnz 4y ago

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time_to_smile 4y ago

"Tech Bosses" are dictators and I'm always surprised that most people have absolutely zero intellectual challenge suspending the values of democracy for 8-12 hours a day. Virtually all of the rights we learn about in grade school are suspended in the workplace. And while employees do have the ability to quit, they a.) still have to find some other dictator to work for and b.) are much more heavily impacted by a loss of income than the employer is the individual loss of skill. So the dictators we work for day in and day out are aligned with other dictators. You aren't entitled to free speech in your office, so why would you expect to the people running your office to care about your free speech after hours? edit: I'm still surprised that people are incapable of question the ideology that shapes your worldview. The very concept that "well you're working for someone else so the of course suspension of liberties is okay" is doctrine that you have been lead to believe since birth precisely because it benefits those people in power.

skinkestek 4y ago
Working for money is doing something others want you to do in exchange for money. In the west typically 2/3 of your day is free, as are weekends (and I see plenty of people commenting during work hours too). I am a worker myself, but maybe because I have a past in actual physical labour I realize how much of a brat I have become now, being able to walk around, grab coffee, chat, stare mindlessly out the windows and browse HN while being paid handsomely to create software.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's a normal human tendency to consider our own particular situation as representing the "average" or "normal". It's quite common for people who live privileged lives (such as most people here) to not recognize that they are living privileged lives. It's very good to remember how lucky most of us are, and how unusual our circumstances are.
  - skinkestek 4y ago
    I think of it many times a year, how lucky I am to no longer need to showel manure or move wet grass using a pitchfork to earn a fraction of what I do today. And even back then I was lucky.

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you're not always looking for independent alternative sources of information and cross-checking claims from different sources while also looking for internal self-consistency then of course you're going to end up with a skewed perspective on reality engineered by some group of professional propagandists. Whether these PR specialists are working for governments or corporations in China, Russia or America is sort of besides the point. There is a set of skills that's needed to objectively classify information that's found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books). Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons. The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.

overthrow 4y ago
Certain groups? I think everyone in government, in all parties, would oppose that education - because their own propaganda would become less effective too. Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, or the pitfalls of a two-party system?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  They did specify government "authoritarians". It's not much of a stretch to think that they don't believe "everyone in government" is an authoritarian.
- pydry 4y ago
  >Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting They tend to be more fine with this sort of thing if the fix isn't on the cards politically. E.g. you will see some nuclear attacks on the idea of raising the minimum wage from the media when it is being debated in Congress, while that same media will often fawn over political pipe dreams like basic income. The Russian bots will pull this trick where they set up, e.g. a facebook page for "proud Texan cowboy dads" and then funnel innocuous stuff they will agree with 99% of the time and then 1% of the time push stuff that really matters to them ("why are we sending yet more money to Ukraine when proud Texans at home are suffering!"). This isn't controversial to state. I think it's clear that they do this - what is controversial to state is that this is exactly what the rest of the "legitimate" media does exactly the same thing on behalf of the oligarchy who own it.

deleted 4y ago

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timcavel 4y ago

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kneel 4y ago

Tech companies can choose to obey laws of a foreign country to gain access to their populace. I don't really see the controversy, US first amendment rights don't apply beyond our borders. This article is an incredulous take considering the increase in censorship within the US media-sphere which actually violates the law.

falcolas 4y ago
The problem, IMO, isn't that they blocked a tweet in India based on a request from India. The problem is that Twitter blocked a tweet globally based on a request from India.
simiones 4y ago
First of all, from a purely legal perspective, the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech. Secondly, the article is saying that tech companies are starting to censor speech in the USA that dictators in China or authoritarian leaders in India don't like. It is positing a slippery slope where you may one day soon be banned from Twitter globally for posting an image of Winnie the Pooh, which would be done in order for Twitter to gain and maintain access to the Chinese market.
- bmelton 4y ago
  > the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech Yes, but the first amendment _does_ bear on whether or not a private company can or can't be compelled by the state to censor speech, which is what OP was referring to.
- kneel 4y ago
  Ok fair enough. Doing 3 minutes of research on this topic lead me to the Indian posters page, in which he doesn't even remember the context of his tweet and has reposted the screenshot. He has dozens of tweets discussing censorship, they're all up and available. Tbh this just sounds like incompetence rather than malevolence, which considering Musk's bungling overhaul of Twitter shouldn't surprise anyone.

potamic 4y ago

See people, this is why free speech must be absolute. The moment you let someone become the gatekeeper, they will absolutely use that leverage for their own benefit, at your expense. What is worse? Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?

AlexandrB 4y ago
Show me one country where free speech has ever been absolute. At a minimum "fighting words" and libel/slander usually have criminal or civil penalties against them. Then there's stuff like IP law where reproducing certain speech can have civil or even criminal penalties. Statements like "free speech must be absolute" are basically zero content because they don't engage with the nuance of the debate, but they sure sound good.
- splitstud 4y ago
  [dead]
- potamic 4y ago
  We most certainly don't, but it's an interesting thought exercise whether it's a better model than everything else we have seen so far. Of course, it asks for very different trade-offs. For instance, you should be willing to forgoe libel/slander laws and allow people to smear the shit out of each other. It means people will need to figure out for themselves whom to listen to, but honestly, I don't think the situation is any different today. It also means scrutinising things like copyright and questioning whether they are a net value to society. These policies have since forever been driven by corporations to serve their own interests. There's good arguments to be made that their concerns about loss in revenue are largely overblown. You can implement policies that restrict monetisation of copyright content without putting restrictions on what individuals can express. Of course these are fairly naive ideas, and there are likely many more problems we haven't touched here, but the point is that there are options. It is worth thinking about them because the alternative as we see doesn't seem to be working out. There's a trend around the world where countries are moving more and more towards authoritarianism. At the same time, the wealth gap is ever increasing and I don't think these two are unrelated. I think the common people are getting an overall raw deal on this planet and really need to think through what policies will benefit them most.

quantified 4y ago

"Tech Bosses" is two examples, hardly the universe and misleadingly steering an assumption that it's just in tech. Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while. Hollywood, especially Disney, otherwise censors itself to be able to show movies.

heywhatupboys 4y ago
This article is another example that reeks of American nationalism.
tarruda 4y ago
> Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while Source?
- wincy 4y ago
  They’re talking about the movie The Dictator and the North Korea hack of Sony.
  - umeshunni 4y ago
    The Interview, not The Dictator. The Dictator was the Sacha Baron Cohen movie.
- setgree 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview > In June 2014, the North Korean government threatened action against the United States if Sony released the film. As a result, Sony delayed the release from October to December and reportedly re-edited the film to make it more acceptable to North Korea. In November, the computer systems of Sony were hacked by the "Guardians of Peace", a North Korean cybercrime group. The group also threatened terrorist attacks against theaters showing the film. This led to major theater chains opting not to release the film, and Sony instead releasing it for online digital rental and purchase on December 25, 2014, followed by a limited release at selected theaters the next day.
4y ago

coldtea 4y ago

Tech bosses in the US are also letting the US government, 3-letter agencies, and "activists" also sensor what americans see.

yamazakiwi 4y ago
I'm more worried about the media corporations themselves than "activists". What are activists censoring?
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago
    I find the idea of labelling Rupert Murdoch as an activist very interesting.

twelfthnight 4y ago

Flip side is when Google left China in 2010 it opened the door for Baidu, which is completely state controlled and gave the CCP more power. Is that better? I think what we're finding is that the world is interconnected and authoritarianism anywhere is bad for everyone. It's complicated. Also, think it's important to note that the CCP is not China. Many Chinese citizens don't like the CCP but are powerless to resist.

damnesian 4y ago

Social media are entertainment platforms. Unfortunately, they have also become de facto news delivery platforms by sheer percentage of eyeballs. It's a bit like what happened with screwdrivers: people kept touching them to live electrical lines, so the wood handles with metal ferrules disappeared and the handles were redeisigned to insulate human hands from electrical shock. But no one is trying to fix social media so it can deliver news better- rather they are being retooled to compel users to instead consume more content more quickly. Which leaves the mind with even less time to question and consider. It's a recipe for disaster.

deleted 4y ago

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itg 4y ago

I guess it's only OK when Americans get to censor what the rest of the world sees.

cynicalsecurity 4y ago
While America is holding the global power, you can freely write you shitty opinion on the internet and get away with it. If China or Russia would replace America, you will be mining uranium in a gulag / re-education camp, counting days until you'll be dead, comrade. You choose.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  False dichotomy. It's not like China would magically start having international hegemony over the media and the internet if the US didn't. Almost the entire world is subject to social media rules and values that are mostly coming from the US, and a pretty specific part of the US too.
hot_gril 4y ago
It's the rest of the world's own decision to use US websites. If I went to a China-based forum, yeah I'd expect censorship about Xi Jinping. But using Midjourney??
- valdiorn 4y ago
  funny, because the one thing AI image generators famously can't or won't do is create pornography. Guess which country is super sensitive about porn? It's not China. It's not anywhere in Europe...
  - pb7 4y ago
    I don't know, which one? >It's not China. >Any kind of sexually graphic content has long been illegal in China, whether it’s visual or literary.[0] [0] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3092512/chinas-porn-censors-shut-down-12000-websites-first-half-2020 https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3092512/china... >It's not anywhere in Europe... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/a-uk-wide-internet-porn-ban-comes-into-effect-in-july.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/a-uk-wide-internet-porn-ban-... https://cybernews.com/editorial/anti-porn-laws-in-europe-bring-serious-privacy-issues-yet-theyre-fashionable-as-ever/ https://cybernews.com/editorial/anti-porn-laws-in-europe-bri... https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/france-to-finally-restrict-access-to-online-pornography/ https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/france-to-fin... https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-business-europe-germany-european-union-8b9d9a7d5c1f59dc7440a64690f40268 https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-business-europe-ger...

valdiorn 4y ago

hahaha, welcome to feeling what it's like living in "the rest of the world". Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban! Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves. If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves. An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service. Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world. Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.

commandlinefan 4y ago
Or just stop banning content entirely.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That wasn't even viable for 4chan.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    But why not? They weren't threatened with legal action (and if they were, the correct solution would be to undo the law that they were threatened with). They were attacked by the same moral busybodies who have been clutching their pearls over violent video games since at least I was a kid. The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago

mariodiana 4y ago

Related to this issue, an article in Harper's Magazine, from 2015, discussed the threat China poses to the United States, via the American businesses who have interests over there: "The New China syndrome: How Beijing shakes down foreign businesses" https://archive.harpers.org/2015/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2015-11-0085712.pdf https://archive.harpers.org/2015/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2015... The article focuses on the idea of indirect lobbying: namely, China pressuring U.S. businesses to lobby in favor of China's interests, or risk losing the privilege of doing business in China. (Length: 6 pages)

new_nana 4y ago

Why

epups 4y ago

They are also letting US intelligence agencies decide what Americans see, sometimes with direct electoral consequences. I think it's past time we decide on an Internet Bill of Rights so that we can fight against any type of unreasonable censorship.

Vikerchu 4y ago

I did care, until i realized it was talking about facebook. Idk what they are propagating, it's a private platform.

new_nana 4y ago

Why do they lump India into this? Modi is democratically elected leader unlike Putin and Xi. Just because one doesn't likes ideology of opponent, one cannot dismiss them as dictator!

Nasrudith 4y ago
Do you know just how many dictators were democratically elected? When they start cheating the game you label them a cheater, not only once they win.

dopamean 4y ago

Of the nine bulleted benefits at the beginning of the article at least five can be achieved when giving two weeks notice. Eliminate all stress from your job: the moment I've decided to leave a job, even if I haven't found the next one yet, I feel any stress dissipate almost immediately. Knowing that something unpleasant can end and that I'm going to take steps to end it is a relief. Get paid the same. Extend your benefits for longer. Vest more stock. Get your bonus: you can achieve all of these things by simply waiting to give notice. Wait until after you've vested to the amount you want. Wait until after you've received your bonus. And obviously you get paid the same regardless of when you give notice so this is a weird benefit to cite. Take unused vacation time: I've always taken a bunch of vacation before giving notice. Arguably that's less offensive than telling everyone, "hey my last day is in eight weeks and for a quarter of that time I'll be on vacation." I'm sure there are companies that will wait several months for a new hire to start because they want a long petering out period with their current gig but I've never worked anywhere that would allow that for anyone other than executive or very, very high level engineer. This also seems risky because what if something happens to that job in the two to three months notice you gave? If this had been posted three weeks ago I would have thought it was an April Fools joke.

harrymit907 4y ago
Why is your comment under this article?
- dopamean 4y ago
  I had a bunch of tabs open and went back to the wrong one when I wanted to comment. Now I cant delete it :(

croes 4y ago

You mean like European users aren't allowed to see female nipples on FB because of prudish US rules?

jonny_eh 4y ago
Those aren't government rules. But it's still a valid complaint.
octopoc 4y ago
It's not called nipplebook for a reason, although that would be a perfect idea for a European startup
UberFly 4y ago
You can see nipples plenty of other places. Some shops used to sell porn on their magazine racks, some didn't.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Nipples aren’t porn. Being topless on the beach or breastfeeding are common, normal and not porn. Yet their depiction is forbidden because US companies control most social media.
pb7 4y ago
While I empathize, there's a big difference: Meta is a US company so it's going to follow the cultural rules of the US.

augment002 4y ago

Tech Bosses in this case meaning Elon Musk, who has proven himself to be completely unprincipled and untrustworthy. Every time he talks about valuing truth and free speech, he is lying.

hunglee2 4y ago

What Americans see is already censored - by Americans. If you want to know what a whichever prescribed political leader is saying, you are not going to get it from the local media establishment, you're going to have to go to official transcripts from the government of that prescribed political leader, and no doubt risk ending up on an FBI database as a result. This is true for all government systems, the more you dig into it, they are all just different flavours of a system of control, less Perl vs Python more PHP7.3 vs PHP7.4

milsorgen 4y ago
They alter transcripts. The examples I have seen have been done to fix "flubs" of the Presidential Administration but a simple 'fix' done with care can subtly alter the message for future readers and I believe sets a dangerous precedent. However, for all I know this has been common practice for some time, but I have only seen evidence of this occuring recently.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  who is 'they'? I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position. Different matter of course if official transcriptions were altered by unauthorised parties
  - UberFly 4y ago
    "I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position." Can't you see how this "officially endorsed position" editing would be a dangerous thing? Transcripts should be an exact representation of what occurred.
    - hunglee2 4y ago
      why - please explain? What actually needs to be known is exactly the official policy, this is more important than the exact words used. Right now, we are reliant on media to reinterpret what was said, with the inevitable decontextualisation and reframing that comes along with it. This is the practice of propaganda

whitemary 4y ago

Bosses are dictators.

hot_gril 4y ago

"The ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire." - Midjourney CEO David Holz

at_a_remove 4y ago

Oh, how the tables turn. It's delicious when it does. Watch people backpedal! See them do linguistic backflips! Now try to put the tiger back into the cage! It's always the same sad circus when power shifts and suddenly what was okay to do to "those bad guys" is fearsome and troubling when it happens to them.

andsoitis 4y ago

Money talks.

yosito 4y ago

As someone who has spent the last 15 years living abroad in various countries, and socializing with local people, I've begun to realize that the things you see online are heavily controlled by many factors. Dictators are one party that I feel strongly shouldn't have the power to censor what I say do. But I also don't want Mark Zuckerberg or Capital One bank or Digital Ocean to censor what I can see, but they all do it and I don't think that's any better.

commandlinefan 4y ago
Browsing through the replies in this thread, it's apparent why we have tech boss censorship and always will - most people, sadly, actually do want censorship and defend and even advocate for it.

animalright10 4y ago

To me, I think the issue is that people hear what they want to hear. It has nothing to do with censorship. Internet is huge, if ppl want unbiased view, they can get it, but for most ppl, echo chamber is better.

srj 4y ago

It says tech bosses but this seems to just be about twitter.

cbsmith 4y ago
Agreed. It's pretty myopic to think that foreign censorship laws only impact tech companies.

psychphysic 4y ago

The only solution is to flit around. Even editorially independent media is invariably heavily biased one way or another. Given the way people consume news you can be bias through the use of a subtly misleading but otherwise accurate headline, or a boring headline, or just not have it as a leader or bulletin. There is so much News these days that you could report on everything absolutely fairly and still have a strong bias just because of what you decide is worth showing people more often.

jmyeet 4y ago

This problem is way larger than tech companies and isn't new. Some examples: - Richard Gere got canceled for speaking out against China's human rights abuses to the Tibetans at the Academy Awards in 1993 [1]; - The Neil Armonstrong biopic "First Man" didn't have a scene of planting the American flag [2]; - These are examples of a long history of Hollywood bowing to Chinese pressure and interests [3]. Modifying a movie for the Chinese market is one thing. Modifying the global release of a movie to keep China happy is something else. Now look at the mainstream media just this year. Some examples of stories that got zero or significantly delayed coverage include: - The train derailment and environmental disaster at East Palestine, Ohio. For a good week you wouldn't even know this was happening if you weren't on Tiktok. Consider the irony of that situation; - The massive French strikes and protests got almost no play in US media; Now consider the bias in media coverage: - Western media in general is unforgivably biased when it comes to Israel [4]. A common technique is deliberate use of active vs passive voice [5]. Example: Shireen Abu-Akleh was "killed" [6]. A more accurate headline would've been "Middle Eastern and American citizen journalist assassinated by Israeli sniper while wearing a blue press helmet and vest". - Media coverage is unbelievably biased towards the police in cases of brutality and death at the hands of police. Guests on TV will often be former or current police. What about civil rights lawyers or victims rights advocates? Remember this when the media writes stories about the bias in tech companies. While there might be truth to that, never forget that the media too is incredibly biased. [1]: https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/04/11/how-hollywood-destroyed-richard-geres-career-because-he-chose-to-speak-for-the-tibetans/ https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/04/11/how-hollywood-destroyed... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/06/if-anyone-can-maga-it-is-nasa-how-first-man-put-a-rocket-up-the-politics-of-space https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/06/if-anyone-can-m... [3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-movies-censorship-erich-schwartzel https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1081435029/china-hollywood-mo... [4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem-al-aqsa-media-coverage-israeli-violence-palestinians/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem... [5]: https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-media-bias-serves-israels-occupation https://www.newarab.com/opinion/how-media-bias-serves-israel... [6]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61403320 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61403320

Reltih 4y ago

[flagged]

Reltih 4y ago

[flagged]

diebeforei485 4y ago

To be clear, the "Tech Bosses" censored the Hunter Biden laptop story at the behest of US government affiliated people. This is nothing new.

blatant303 4y ago

Including the U.S. government.

BirAdam 4y ago

Not a new problem. Powerful people and groups always have an interest in controlling narratives. They have also made effort to do so, and they always will.

w10-1 4y ago

Each of us builds capabilities used for both good and evil. The modern extent of government power and private influence would be unthinkable even decades ago. Personal rights have failed to keep up, in part because it requires constitutional or legislative action that's basically impossible because of politics or jurisdiction (international). As a practical result, we can't really absolve ourselves of responsibility by saying that it's legal, or that it's for another country to decide, or that it's necessary to gain access to a market. No one doubts that IBM/ACM was morally culpable for providing systems they knew would be used for "organizing" undesirables by the Nazi's. It's much less clear whether doing devops at twitter helps or hurts Modi, or if that's a bad thing. But it helps to have some smell tests. Mine are: - Everyone worldwide should be treated with the same respect - American or not. - It's better for speech and commerce to be free, when it's aiming for true understanding and mutual benefit. - Every technology should be openly assessed for who it benefits or harms, who decides its use, whether it can be safely managed, and whether it corrupts or improves those it affects. Analytically, the notion of commercial franchise is quite helpful: twitter has the franchise for a current event stream, Modi has a franchise over legislation in India, etc. All tech companies build their own franchise (with moats, etc.), and may coordinate in mutually-reinforcing teams. Franchises are not only bargaining power but also a whole ecosystem self-organizes around them. The stronger and more relevant the franchise, the bigger the payday, and the more enticing it is to take over. That creates very strong incentives to hold your nose (and be used as a tool), or to steer well clear (and be, well, irrelevant). I salute those who struggle with these difficult questions.

tellitnow2 4y ago

[flagged]

toss1 4y ago

>>Midjourney CEO David Holz announced last year that his program would explicitly forbid users to create images of China’s Xi Jinping. Users who attempt to do so are threatened with a ban. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” Holz posted on Discord, according to The Washington Post. He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” It is not about the ability of people in China to use their tech that is more important than our ability to to generate satire — it's Holz' ability to make money. And if he thinks that some people's ability to use it at all is more important than all user's ability to use it freely (without CCP's blessing on every pixel), I'd suggest he needs to rethink freedom vs authoritarianism. Fork that.

riazrizvi 4y ago

It's understood there is no universal truth, so the news here is not that these platforms are becoming distorted where they were not before. It's that social media platforms in the democratic US are increasingly moderating content to align with dictators for, one assumes, money. Perhaps it's to increase platform reach in those countries, but what is the side-effect going to be on US politics with an online media landscape that now skews more heavily toward #dictator? Will US states legislatures begin to request the same 'moderation services' to support their own anti-democratic agendas? If so the country will change, the economic environment will change here, and not for the better.

Retric 4y ago
There is a universal truth. However, a great many people have vested interests in convincing people otherwise. The most you can say is people prioritize truths differently. What you ate this morning matters very little to anyone but yourself.
- riazrizvi 4y ago
  Write a book and share this universal truth, translate it into all the languages, you'll make a fortune. Last I checked, a half-billion authors are still trying to establish it. EDIT: I see you edited your comment about 'universal truth' after I answered it. I love the irony. Hail to the internet.
  - Retric 4y ago
    There’s little money in Math.
    - riazrizvi 4y ago
      I see. You are asserting axiomatically consistent systems are 'universal truths' in the context of things that people say online. However, math is about processing statements, and does not make an assertion about the truth of those statements in the real world, just on whether they were processed correctly.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Is it any surprise though? When for-profit entities operate in overseas territories and wish to remain in business there, of course they are subject to their laws. This is why non-profit entities and decentralization are important. You can't have it both ways.

lovvtide 4y ago

Nostr

swayvil 4y ago

If you didn't see it for yourself, or you didn't hear it from a friend, then you are probably sucking fantasy. One way of getting around this crap epistemology (to a degree) is science, of course. But who has the time for that?

readonthegoapp 4y ago

Truth. Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least. RT (Russia) and the so-far-left-they-went-hard-right crowd (Taibbi, etc.), PressTV (Iran), etc. And they label 'government-funded' channels but not 'corporate-funded' channels, even when those corporations are bigger than governments. Corporations "set the conditions within which the U.S. government operates, and control it to a large extent" -- but are kind of seen as not important actors -- they're made invisible. https://www.accountancydaily.co/corporations-dominate-worlds-top-100-economic-entities https://www.accountancydaily.co/corporations-dominate-worlds... Global corporations are increasingly wealthier than many countries, with Walmart, Apple and Shell richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden, according to research by the campaigning group Global Justice Now, which found that 69 of the world’s top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015 We definitely need to rein in corporations like YouTube/Google/Alphabet, and not just Big Tech -- but real players like Walmart, ExxonMobile, etc.

throwaway29812 3y ago
> Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least. No they didn't, they stopped actively promoting them. Not the same thing. Are you online demanding VK and other Russian social media give equal reach to MSNBC and CNN? If you're not, you should.
- readonthegoapp 3y ago
  I guess you could say that removing all their content and/or shutting down complete channels and/or accounts is 'just not actively promoting them' -- but you wouldn't really be telling the truth then, would you? Regarding VK and Russian social media, I'm a US-American, so i'm mostly concerned with what US companies do -- because they're much more destructive, and I can do a lot more about them.
  - readonthegoapp 3y ago
    i was just reminded of another way YouTube and other organizations censor info that is not friendly to the US government/elite -- mark certain videos or channels as 'Mature', like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKG8S7K0wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKG8S7K0wM ...The message: Video unavailable This video is unavailable with Restricted Mode enabled. To view this video, you will need to disable Restricted Mode.

Nasrudith 4y ago

I am reminded of earlier useful idiots complaining about "corporations being more powerful than governments" over them not bending the knee towards their whims. Well this is exactly what governments being more powerful than corporations looks like. Of course useful idiots also never learn.

RickJWagner 4y ago

This coming from Daily Beast, which is rated: Left - https://www.allsides.com/news-source/daily-beast-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/daily-beast-media-bias Skews Left - https://adfontesmedia.com/daily-beast-bias-reliability/ https://adfontesmedia.com/daily-beast-bias-reliability/ Very Liberal - https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-daily-beast-bias-rating/ https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-daily-beast-bias-rating/

IYasha 3y ago

Unfunny how Midjourney allows you to generate images of BuyDen, PooTeen, McRon, but not Jeen-pin...