4 ms·

There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good a

by dmos62 3y ago

There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help. It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old. I think stellar education together with good journalism is the wholesome way to address this, but obviously we don't have that. So we're playing catch up: ban the Nazi symbols, hand-slap liars, etc. If you don't have an educated and informed populace, how to even reach a practical consensus on what's acceptable? You can argue for absolutely zero regulation, but demonstrate that you understand the thousand ways that would be abused.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least) Except Hollywood doesn't represent "the west" or even western values, the same way how McDonald's doesn't represent the cuisine of most western nations. I don't think it even fully represents much western values at all since it started self-censoring it's own content that wasn't woke enough, and especially since they started pandering to China by removing POC and LGBT content. It's just another soulless cash-grabbing enterprise from the US that bends over to wherever there's money to be made regardless of any values.
bluecalm 3y ago
I think it's a problem with democracy: there is zero incentive to pursue the truth or get things right. As the decisions of governments rarely have direct immediate consequences for your life there also isn't a fast enough feedback loop to correct your mistakes. By mistakes I mean supporting politicians who don't have your interest in mind not even some higher good or whatever. In other words there is no reward for seeking the truth or trying to understand various issues and there is no penalty for being a moron. As long as it's the case it's just a war over who gets to have access to the most efficient propaganda machine to get the gullible masses on their side. I agree it makes sense for the legislators to ensure that's someone local instead of foreign power though. At least they are close enough to the pitchforks if it comes to that.
- dmos62 3y ago
  That's an interesting train of thought about incentives. I would have said that everyone has an inherent motivation to understand, but now that I think about it, this motivation goes away when group dynamics or poverty start affecting you. Democracy works as long as the majority is lucid, I think. There's no alternative when it's not though. Create financial accountability for long term impact of ruling class decisions? That probably has a million downsides.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    My view is that one way to improve the situation is to move as much power as possible to a local level. Quicker feedback loop, getting to know people you vote for, seeing them work for the community could improve things. I think it's no coincidence that the healthiest democracies are either very small mono cultural countries or ones with a lot of power at local level while universal tendency of power hungry autocracs is to centralise as much power as possible while starving local bodies. One example is absolutely disastrous rules of PiS in Poland for the last 8 years.
coldtea 3y ago
>There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it Funnily, both of the above points about Russia and US are basically accepted after manipulation of public discourse to further one's political goals in behalf of the latter. Arrived at through countless articles about "misinformation", "indepedent" think tanks and "fact checking" bodies, the BS stories about the 2016 elections and Steele Dossier, all major media outlets complicit, the "Twitter Files" style cooperation of state agencies with Big Tech, all the client states governments and media playing along, and so on. Russia is at best mediocre or insignificant in this, China is non-existant, and the US has every major force in this game, selling its own discourse, including on the EU side.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  The guy you replied to works at a left-wing NGO called "Center of Complex Interventions": https://centerofci.org/team/dominykas-mostauskis/ https://centerofci.org/team/dominykas-mostauskis/ I have never heard of them before, but given this background, his opinions are unsurprising and bound to be in line with the Thierry Bretons of the world.
  - dmos62 3y ago
    Haha, thanks for that.
mistermann 3y ago
> West sucks at it If one can't sense it's there it could also be a sign of how good it is.
Amezarak 3y ago
> There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help. This is precisely the same argument made by every opponent of free speech throughout history and around the world: bad actors will manipulate the public discourse for their own political ends, disrupting the public order. It's important to realize there is nothing new about this argument at all. The West generally settled for speech over order, and many people would now like to re-negotiate that settlement, using the Internet as justification. Mass media, for a time, created a sort of oasis for "public order" types. Instead of disinformation, gossip, and fake news spread through word-of-mouth - or later, the massively decentralized yellow press - which often led to bizarre political outcomes, riots, violence, and even insurrections and wars, one class of people temporarily/largely controlled a major means of information dissemination via radio and television. Over time it became increasingly centralized in only a few companies, and even allowed for a fairly high degree of government regulation, compared with historic means of information dissemination. I don't know how effective this was in creating actual political consensus, but it gave the impression to people cloistered in the same or similar classes that such consensus existed. The Internet has returned us to the pre-broadcast media norm, and a lot of people really don't like it,because suddenly there's a lot of views, a lot of true information, and a lot of false information they really don't like, and which they are exposed to regularly. So their solution is to use the government and political pressure to reset the Overton window to permit only the range of expression they find personally tolerable, for the sake of public order, which conveniently overlaps with their own political goals. (The good guys, of course, are always for public order, so when we manipulate the public discourse for our own political goals, it's a good thing: the same line of argument pursued in China, the EU, and the US.) > It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old. I don't think regulating Twitter is the same as regulating what an agent of the state says in their capacity as an agent of the state.
- dmos62 3y ago
  What you said makes a lot of sense. I agree that media is a great tool for opinion control. When you call this a dichotomy between free speech and order, I feel like you're downplaying just how important that "order" can be. Consider Latvia, a minuscule ex soviet republic with a significant Russian speaking demographic: for them it's very visceraly about national security (as in preventing another 2016 Crimea from happening), as opposed to public order, corporate interests or whatever. I grew up in the Soviet bloc. What's at play in the information space there is different than, say, in the US: the most geopolitically secure country (country slash continent) on Earth. I feel like the argument you're making would be much easier to make in the US. Edit: by the way, I'd call a teacher an agent of authority, not state.

by dmos62 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least) Except Hollywood doesn't represent "the west" or even western values, the same way how McDonald's doesn't represent the cuisine of most western nations. I don't think it even fully represents much western values at all since it started self-censoring it's own content that wasn't woke enough, and especially since they started pandering to China by removing POC and LGBT content. It's just another soulless cash-grabbing enterprise from the US that bends over to wherever there's money to be made regardless of any values.

bluecalm 3y ago

I think it's a problem with democracy: there is zero incentive to pursue the truth or get things right. As the decisions of governments rarely have direct immediate consequences for your life there also isn't a fast enough feedback loop to correct your mistakes. By mistakes I mean supporting politicians who don't have your interest in mind not even some higher good or whatever. In other words there is no reward for seeking the truth or trying to understand various issues and there is no penalty for being a moron. As long as it's the case it's just a war over who gets to have access to the most efficient propaganda machine to get the gullible masses on their side. I agree it makes sense for the legislators to ensure that's someone local instead of foreign power though. At least they are close enough to the pitchforks if it comes to that.

dmos62 3y ago
That's an interesting train of thought about incentives. I would have said that everyone has an inherent motivation to understand, but now that I think about it, this motivation goes away when group dynamics or poverty start affecting you. Democracy works as long as the majority is lucid, I think. There's no alternative when it's not though. Create financial accountability for long term impact of ruling class decisions? That probably has a million downsides.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  My view is that one way to improve the situation is to move as much power as possible to a local level. Quicker feedback loop, getting to know people you vote for, seeing them work for the community could improve things. I think it's no coincidence that the healthiest democracies are either very small mono cultural countries or ones with a lot of power at local level while universal tendency of power hungry autocracs is to centralise as much power as possible while starving local bodies. One example is absolutely disastrous rules of PiS in Poland for the last 8 years.

coldtea 3y ago

>There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it Funnily, both of the above points about Russia and US are basically accepted after manipulation of public discourse to further one's political goals in behalf of the latter. Arrived at through countless articles about "misinformation", "indepedent" think tanks and "fact checking" bodies, the BS stories about the 2016 elections and Steele Dossier, all major media outlets complicit, the "Twitter Files" style cooperation of state agencies with Big Tech, all the client states governments and media playing along, and so on. Russia is at best mediocre or insignificant in this, China is non-existant, and the US has every major force in this game, selling its own discourse, including on the EU side.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
The guy you replied to works at a left-wing NGO called "Center of Complex Interventions": https://centerofci.org/team/dominykas-mostauskis/ https://centerofci.org/team/dominykas-mostauskis/ I have never heard of them before, but given this background, his opinions are unsurprising and bound to be in line with the Thierry Bretons of the world.
- dmos62 3y ago
  Haha, thanks for that.

mistermann 3y ago

> West sucks at it If one can't sense it's there it could also be a sign of how good it is.

Amezarak 3y ago

> There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help. This is precisely the same argument made by every opponent of free speech throughout history and around the world: bad actors will manipulate the public discourse for their own political ends, disrupting the public order. It's important to realize there is nothing new about this argument at all. The West generally settled for speech over order, and many people would now like to re-negotiate that settlement, using the Internet as justification. Mass media, for a time, created a sort of oasis for "public order" types. Instead of disinformation, gossip, and fake news spread through word-of-mouth - or later, the massively decentralized yellow press - which often led to bizarre political outcomes, riots, violence, and even insurrections and wars, one class of people temporarily/largely controlled a major means of information dissemination via radio and television. Over time it became increasingly centralized in only a few companies, and even allowed for a fairly high degree of government regulation, compared with historic means of information dissemination. I don't know how effective this was in creating actual political consensus, but it gave the impression to people cloistered in the same or similar classes that such consensus existed. The Internet has returned us to the pre-broadcast media norm, and a lot of people really don't like it,because suddenly there's a lot of views, a lot of true information, and a lot of false information they really don't like, and which they are exposed to regularly. So their solution is to use the government and political pressure to reset the Overton window to permit only the range of expression they find personally tolerable, for the sake of public order, which conveniently overlaps with their own political goals. (The good guys, of course, are always for public order, so when we manipulate the public discourse for our own political goals, it's a good thing: the same line of argument pursued in China, the EU, and the US.) > It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old. I don't think regulating Twitter is the same as regulating what an agent of the state says in their capacity as an agent of the state.

dmos62 3y ago
What you said makes a lot of sense. I agree that media is a great tool for opinion control. When you call this a dichotomy between free speech and order, I feel like you're downplaying just how important that "order" can be. Consider Latvia, a minuscule ex soviet republic with a significant Russian speaking demographic: for them it's very visceraly about national security (as in preventing another 2016 Crimea from happening), as opposed to public order, corporate interests or whatever. I grew up in the Soviet bloc. What's at play in the information space there is different than, say, in the US: the most geopolitically secure country (country slash continent) on Earth. I feel like the argument you're making would be much easier to make in the US. Edit: by the way, I'd call a teacher an agent of authority, not state.