Comment by nomilk
6 days ago
It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.
Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc?
In some cases yes. Tor for instance was created by the USG and is not easily controlled by the USG.
That is a problem with no other country caring as much about free speech, not with the US having an anti-censorship program.
We have free speech here in the UK. We can record police doing their job and publish it without getting shot in the head. For now.
1 reply →
[dead]
Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie.
[flagged]
6 replies →
Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government.
If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda.
That's what Iran, China, and Russia are saying too, right ? :o)
Yes Europe is in a really bad spot propaganda-wise. See Germany’s latest crusade against online «hate speech» — ie. unapproved political views.
I wish more people volunteered to moderate online communities. Especially political ones.
It’s taking way too long for normal people to realize they have a stake and imperative to be part of these communities. Speech is shaped here, and many God awful decisions have to be made at scale.
There is no cost to holding the position you stated, and no one wants to get their hand dirty, or see how the sausage is made. You have to regular decide if this comment is actually hate speech, actual debate, or someone “asking questions”. Who knows what the actual false positive/negative rates are.
The sheer amount of filters, regexes and slur lists needed to stay abreast of toxicity and hate speech are absurdism at its best.
Nothing happens without an informed citizenry. The foundations of speech online are collapsing and weak. There need to be more citizen view points from the ground, deciding how they want this domain to operate.
That does not compute.
35 replies →
Don't you know, democracy means censorship, freedom of information means fascism, and most importantly we have always been at war with America.
1 reply →
Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information?
If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or…
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
7 replies →
That depends on what "education" entails. If it's one source only chances of it being propaganda is high.
Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
5 replies →
What if educating people takes decades and lies can be prompted in a few minutes?
2 replies →
For real... the species is not going to last long if a subset of it gets to control the information flow of the other part... literally unsustainable