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By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather t
by schoen 2y ago
By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.
As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.
There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.
- UltraSane 2y agoIt turns out that flooding your own lies is far more effective than trying to censor information.
- labster 2y agoYep. The internet is an infinite copy machine. All you have to do is copy the lies an order of magnitude more than the truth, and Bob’s your uncle (whether you’re related to Bob or not).
- newsclues 2y agoThe crime of polluting information to control it was perhaps the most unforgivable sin of our Information Age.
- hn34381 2y agoLike with everything else, the internet didn't invent the crime, it just does it at scale. https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/09/08/patrick-w-oneil-when-fake-news-hit-abraham-lincoln/10812226007/ https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/09/08... "When fake news hit Abraham Lincoln"
- minusf 2y agoMade possible in turn by giving safe haven for user content on the big social networks. Turned out to be a double edged sword. When Rupert tried to lie about voting machines, he was fined couple of hundred mils. All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever.
- midhhhthrow 2y agoWill you also blame the telephone companies and mailman too?
- abirch 2y agoI think that when GP stated "All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever." they were referring to the people lying and not the social networks them themselves.
- mejutoco 2y agoThis is the old dichotomy: either you dont censor and are just a medium (like electricity) or you do censor some things and then you are responsible of what is published. Social media seems to want to censor while not being responsible.
- freejazz 2y agoIf somebody kept using the same phone line to trigger bombs, do you think that the phone company doesn't have an obligation to shut that line down? Let's say the police came to the phone company and said "we know that if you shut this phone line down, so and so wont be able to trigger the bomb they have planted in XYZ space." Do you think the phone company should do nothing? What about a courier that knows it is delivering bombs? We should look past that too? Which principles are you invoking exactly?
- HPsquared 2y agoLike a 51% attack.
- UltraSane 2y agoHmm. Insightful.
- wscott 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- cylemons 2y agoBut the lies can go in any direction. So the winner becomes who can lie more convincingly
- lfmunoz4 2y agoThink it is more subtle than that. Straight out lying back fires easily it is more of spinning the story, i.e, on January 6 did we have an insurrection or protest? You have to push the agenda of your side so you have to try to re-define words. What is the definition of insurrection and protest? Those definitions need to be twisted so it is more subtle. Another example is "I did not have sexual relationships with that women. Oh I thought oral isn't a sexual relationship, so I didn't lie"
- UltraSane 2y agoNot even. Russia has been amazingly successful with really obvious lies. Remember the furor over the Jade Helm exercise in 2015? When Gov. Greg Abbot asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the federal military? Turns out that was a Russia psyop that worked so well it emboldened Russia to go all out getting Trump elected a year later. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-helm-exercise-texas-was-fueled-russians-former-cia-/ https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...
- robgibbons 2y agoA counter point to this adage in modern times is that censorship seems to spread as a result of users sharing content across platforms with varying levels of moderation. I've seen many examples of "shorts" being shared on FB or Instagram which originated from TikTok and which feature heavy use of either euphemism (eg. "unalived" instead of "murdered") or even explicitly silenced language. Platforms which do not heavily moderate content will nonetheless still have heavily self-censored content as a result of users being conditioned by other platforms into self-censorship.
- RunningDroid 2y agoI can confirm that content censored to suit restrictive platforms finds it's way to less restrictive platforms (e.g. a screenshot of a Tumblr post censored for Meta may find it's way to Imgur) I have noticed that some users on Imgur will make an effort to de-censor content though (e.g. re-adding the censored text in a screenshot)
- wmf 2y agoI thought Gilmore was referring to the earlier idea that the Internet could survive a nuclear war. https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/ https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/
- schoen 2y agoI don't think there would have been a straightforward way to connect that to the effects of censorship.
- ChainOfFools 2y ago"interprets damage as censorship and..." where these terms are being treated as equivalent
- uoaei 2y agoInterpreting one thing as another thing does not imply the inverse. The order in the original quote matters.
- cratermoon 2y agoIn the context of knowing the internet (DARPANet) was designed to be resilient and route around damaged nodes, hearing "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" immediately connects the ideas.
- inopinatus 2y agoI have started quoting the robustness principle when people ask me what my politics are.
- thristian 2y agoThe robustness principle is really just another way of stating the Golden Rule.
- nimbius 2y agothis was the old internet. as it is seen in 2024: "the net interprets economic profit as imperative, and routes toward it." next-hops will frequently be FAANG, some faceless CDN, or the cloudflare protection grotto. Cost for the route has been supplanted in favour of cost for the shareholder.