As a supporter of that "dodge", allow me to defend it (though I don't really disagree with your comment in general).

Freedom of speech as a principle has a fundamental tension. One person's freedom to speak must be balanced with another person's freedom to exclude that speech from their private life. Private folks having the ability to go places where they can ignore the people they've chosen to ignore is an important part of why free speech works at all. For instance, we don't need laws against Holocaust deniers, we can simply choose to frequent places where they are excluded.

Freedom of speech as a law is the release valve for this tension. If every private individual and organization in the country has chosen to ignore a person's views, that person is still free to make themselves heard with the government. They can write letters and go to meetings with no fear of punishment for the unpopularity of their beliefs. They can't be legally kept from starting their own private organization where they are not ignored and advertising it to attract others.

Personally, I just find this all to be a very good solution to a difficult problem, so I'm skeptical when I see suggestions that it should be done differently. In this case, the suggestion is that the freedom to exclude (as a principle - there is no law in this direction) should be more tightly regulated. Maybe that's a good idea because of the unique circumstances of the internet, but I'm not yet convinced that it's better than the current regime, which has existed for a long time, and which I think works pretty well.

Except we can, and we did, and society was better for it. So as it turns out, the "right to exclude" is more of a guideline than a rule, riddled with dozens of exceptions. And "the current regime has existed for a long time" is not very predictive of long-term societal shifts.

So it is here. You are right that there is fundamental tension between the right of free speech and the right of exclusion.

But one of those is a right so fundamental that it appears first when you ask people to list freedoms. The other is something we regularly cede in large and small ways when we live with other humans in a society. Where the two oppose, there is only one way the arc of history can go.

Our grandchildren will be just as puzzled by the "right to exclude" argument as we are when it is made by the generations before us.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't disprove the OP's assertion. Doing business with someone is not the same as speech, and business in general is far more regulated than private life ever was.

As a counterpoint, (in the US) there's still nothing preventing people from excluding minorities from their homes and friendships, and even private organizations are allowed to discriminate by race or sex, and do. (Golf clubs are infamous for this.) Businesses that are "open to the public" are not allowed to; that's the compromise we made, and it's worked out well IMO. If you're a black person, it'd be really awful if you desperately needed a medication, and the one pharmacy in town refused to sell it to you. But being excluded from someone's home or golf club isn't really hurting you.

Similarly, if you run a business, there's many other regulations you must follow: collecting sales tax, using commercially zoned property if you have too many customers, various regulations on how you can treat employees, etc. And part of this is not being allowed to discriminate based on race or sex, unless you have a really really good reason for it (like you're filming a movie about JFK for instance; a black woman isn't going to get far complaining that you didn't audition her for the part). You don't have so many restrictions on your private property.

FWIW, I don't necessarily disagree with that hope/belief, but I have some questions about how such a thing would work in practice. Clearly, some private organizations (like churches and political parties) rely on the ability to discriminate based on belief. But perhaps there's a clue there for how such a regulation could be drawn - those are not for-profit enterprises.

This scenario is not that far-fetched because: 1) There has been more consolidation into fewer large companies​, with less competition 2) Many companies share board members with similar opinions and sympathies and have leadership with similar sympathies. 3) Because of social media, it is easy to get a large group of people to put coordinated pressure on a company. 4) This scenario would just be an extreme example of the "no platform" movement which we already have, and which has already successfully pressured individual companies to dissociate with people or opinions.

It is respect for the principle of free speech in the general population that protects us from this scenario. If you are OK with this scenario for some opinions, be aware that throughout history, what is an unpopular opinion has changed, sometimes relatively rapidly.

I'm not in favor of people being banned, but of ideas being flagged - not censored. For example, I don't want to do any kind of business with anyone who is advocating policies that I have a strict moral disagreement with. The nature of that moral disagreement could vary. Popular sentiment should be employed not to determine whether a given piece of media is acceptable or not, but to categorize it; and the strength of those categorial associations can then in turn inform the decisions of advertises, researchers, and so on.

the tagging is a function of the popular will rather than the output of an algorithm or assignment by committee, and the the tags are associable with discrete media rather than individuals.

What things are too vile, then?

I think those things that are "too vile" are better tracked than outright banned.

I'm not sure exactly what technical measures should be employed in relation to such cases - perhaps machine-curated honeypots whose attempt to access is itself a crime.

CP raises extremely tricky moral questions. I mentioned photographic examples above because they include real people. But there's a tricky question of what happens in relation to creative works not based on reality such as drawings. It's easy to conceive of art that that would automatically be deemed illegal or at least prurient if it were photographic, but since art can be created from imagination without any real person needing to serve as a subject it's very difficult to figure out an appropriate response.

We could say that the simple lack of actual human victimization should OK the production of such content, but form a practical point of view it's possible to create hyperrealistic art works that are almost indistinguishable from a photograph, and computers are making it easier and easier to produce renderings that approach photographic quality, a trend which will only continue because of the huge economic incentives to instantiate virtual puppets rather than pay people to work. I'm sure this has been employed to produce crude CP already (based on its use in non-contraband porn). It's difficult to make an argument for expressive freedom when the only expression involved in its creation is that of the desire for activity that's illegal, but on the other hand nobody would think of arresting someone for a painting that depicted one person stabbing another notwithstanding the possibility of the inspiring idea being illegal.

This issue matters since it's a demonstration of art's power to subvert norms by realizing the creation of an image depicting a reality where desirous activities occur, but with the added complexity of leveraging mechanical assistance to produce something that's indistinguishable from a recording of real activity, at least to the casual or untrained observer.

(by the way, anyone thinking of dismissing these concerns with a 'think of the children' cliche - don't bother. I know numerous people who were abused and exploited in child pornography. It's not a rhetorical argument when it is something that happens to real people and which continues to impact their adult lives, and if you attempt to dismiss it on rhetorical grounds you are in effect asserting that the bad experiences of some people don't matter compared to some hypothetical liberty interest in consuming depictions of their exploitation.)

Then we ban it. We're not banning the speech; we're banning the child abuse. Take a look (figuratively, not necessarily literally) at loli/shota hentai - that's legal (at least here in the USA) because real people are not being harmed. Actual CP with actual children is banned because real people are being harmed. It's not suppression of free speech; it's protection against abuse.

Scott Adams himself mentions the same: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/159566176596/am-i-shadowbanned-...

If you tag people with whom you have a strict moral disagreement to avoid doing business with them, this is actually what national socialists did back in the 1930s with their own Jewish community. It is a slippery rope.

It is extremely dishonest of you to attempt to alter the terms of my argument like this and just goes to show how weak your own position is.

That's not how it works. The "public square" is supposed to be open to all opinions. If you want protection, you have to retreat into the cloister of a private establishment that disallows this. In the past, it was not possible to bypass the public square, and thus to avoid exposure to the sentiment of anyone who cared to stand there and hand out his papers or cry his opinion. This was a necessary part of travel between private establishments that used their limited property rights over a small piece of land to exclude such stumping within that small parcel only.

The internet is blurring the lines of the public square. We no longer need to traverse the public streets where all views are free to be expressed; via the internet, people are instantly teleported from cloistered space A to cloistered space B. People are starting to feel it is their right to go about their businesses without being exposed to things they dislike, which, whether they realize it or not, is a very worrisome disavowal of the principles undergirding our freedoms. The effect of this on discourse, democracy, and all of our freedoms should not be understated.

Ironically, rather than unifying mankind and increasing sympathy and understanding, we are using network technology to maximize comfort by crafting artificial "safe spaces" where patrons never even have to be exposed to thoughts they dislike. That's bad.

The divide has never been more palpable than during the last election cycle. Nearly half the country was so misinformed that they didn't even believe the outcome was possible, and hostility and misunderstanding are reaching frightening heights, in some cases escalating into violence (post-election rioting, Berkeley).

Whatever is creating those circumstances needs to be fixed, and my belief is that a generation that is used to muting and blocking anything they dislike and spending most of their time in hyper-sanitized environments safe for corporate sponsorship and being coddled in public spaces to minimize corporate liability is no small part in this.

We don't have to fling to one extreme or the other. There is a moderate position here. And remember, this is about the importance of free speech as a social principle. If we don't cherish our rights, they'll vanish. I'm not necessarily advocating any specific legal changes.

HN is a boutique site that targets a specific niche. I would guess it has a few thousand active users. It's developed and designed specifically to facilitate discussion on issues that fit its niche and target audience.

Facebook, Twitter, et al, on the other hand, are platforms that function much like public utilities. They are used by the masses to disseminate speech of all kinds. They target a generic user base and suggest that they can all use the site to follow their individual interests.

Beyond the mere target audience of "everyone", Facebook and Google have massive amounts of control. The penetration of Google and Facebook is probably almost exactly equal with the penetration of internet service (and to some extent, both have projects that take them beyond that sphere). If you use the internet, the likelihood is that significant amounts of your usage are under the direct control of these corporations.

Facebook boasts over 1 billion daily active users. That is 1/8 of the earth's population. That is MASSIVE -- far further reaching than any monopoly in the pre-internet age. Facebook is also the platform that people depend on most heavily for self-expression. It's a central hub that many people visit multiple times each day; some groups and businesses are now run entirely out of Facebook. Functionally, it is not unlike the pre-internet public square, and it's a frequent crossroads for almost all internet users. As with past public squares, it's possible to avoid it if you're trying really hard, but you essentially have to be a digital recluse.

This applies similarly to Google for search, email, and mobile.

As such, it's scary when such powerful platforms that present with such generic mission statements and see such widespread adoption start erasing political speech because they deem it "offensive" at the corporate level.

That is a ridiculous amount of control, and it's something we've never experienced before. Even the broadcasters of the 20th century were limited by the reach of radio waves to specific metros, and they usually had several easily accessible competitors (that people would actually use, unlike FB's direct competitors). We used to worry about the large influence of these people so much that it was illegal to own more than a certain number of major media outlets in the same market (that restriction was removed in 2003, IIRC). [We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine to compel broadcasters to accurately present both sides of the political issues.]

People recognized the damage to the public square posed by moving the discussion off to corporate-controlled broadcast media and wanted a way to check the power of the broadcasters. We seem to have forgotten about that risk, just at the moment when the central control of a small handful of people is most potent.

Imagine that printing press manufacturers had the ability to stop press owners from setting certain things to the page. That reflects the reality of the publishing mediums we depend on today. That should be worrisome.

I'm stopping short of suggesting a legal solution, but just speaking to this as an important social principle, we should all be disgusted with the conduct from the major online platform providers. Such general, widely-used platforms are betraying the public and our principles and values in favor of open dialogue by working to distort the landscape of public opinion and curtail the speech of the political, philosophical, or moral enemies of the corporate overlords.

Google has used page rank from the very beginning to show popular pages. Since then, there have been a zillion other teaks to search ranking. (Not to mention that Gmail's spam filtering was an attractive early feature.)

Facebook started out excluding people who didn't go to a particular college, and later, the friend graph helped people avoid communication with strangers.

More recently, Snapchat showed that auto-deletion of photos is something people really like, even if it's technically "impossible" to do perfectly securely.

So it's not just about big companies being in control. Filtering is a really popular feature. Companies that did it well attracted users and became big.

The issue that demonstrates the loss of free speech as a social value is that a large number of people enthusiastically pursue and endorse the censorship of legitimate political discourse on the networks that have general applicability and have become the de-facto publication platforms of the modern world.

Facebook, Twitter, et al are not really networks by themselves, at least not in most respects; they're platforms for networks. You use them to build your own communities; communities of your friends, family, businesses, etc. The platforms don't present with any ideology because they present as applicable to every ideology. If they're going to make such representations, it's not unreasonable to expect them to adhere to them with some consistency.

Additionally, when 1/8 of the world's population depends on Facebook for its news and information, and Facebook presents itself as a place that's appropriate for all users, I think it is completely legitimate to hold them to a reasonably strict standard of fairness. Regardless of the legal situation, we can and should be doing this socially.

If we enshrine free speech as a social value, we should all be concerned when good-faith political discussions are removed from these platforms, no matter how repugnant we find the actual views expressed. All views must be allowed to compete on the marketplace of ideas. Forcing legitimate policy positions into hushed tones only builds a tension that leads to a violent snap.

The core question is whether Facebook, Google, et al have reached a level where their corporate-enforced censorship policies have a real effect on the aggregate political dialogue. I think that it's undeniable that they do at this point.

I feel this paragraph goes to the heart of your argument so I'd like to dissect it a bit.

Enshrining free speech as a social value is essentially arbitrary, and that's fine - because values are what we really care about and choose to establish the rest of our utility criteria.

But having adopted free speech as a value, it does not follow that all speech must then be upheld. It's interesting that you use the phrase 'good-faith political discussions' here, because that has significant ramifications for judging what we find repugnant.

Let's suppose for a moment that I really can't stand people in the XYZ group. Under the doctrine of free speech, I might write all kinds of things to promulgate my opinions, from asserting that the XYZs are boring and stupid, to opining that XYZ people are going to hell, and so on.

But what if I say that XYZ people shouldn't be allowed to post on the internet? Well now I'm not upholding free speech any more, in fact I'd be asserting an intention to deny it to one group of whom I don't approve. Am I really discussing my views in good faith in that case? What if I say they should be killed? OK that doesn't go directly to free speech, but since it's impossible for people express themselves freely if they're not alive I'm certainly limiting their free speech indirectly.

What I'm arguing here is that there's a qualitative difference between my saying 'I think you are bad (in some way) and I dislike you' and calling for people to have their rights curtailed because they occupy a category that I find repugnant. In the first case I'm expressing my emotional hostility, but in the second case I'm making a positive proposal that their freedoms should be reduced relative to mine.

I'm quite opposed to fascism and similar authoritarian ideologies, and lately I keep running into people who raise this free speech argument, and ask if I am not being worse than the fascists myself for arguing that their views should be driven out of mainstream discourse and marginalized or shut down as efficiently as possible.

But to mind mind, people who espouse such authoritarian ideologies are not arguing in good faith. They're not saying things like 'it's so bad that [this group] won't sign onto my ideology, oh well live and let live.' They're saying things like '[this group] is morally/ culturally/ physically deficient and should not be allowed to participate in society, or maybe even in life.'

To put it in a single sentence, I do not feel inclined inclined to defend the liberty interests of those who have expressed an intention to do harm to me - not necessarily me personally, but because of my membership in various social categories of which they disapprove. To use historical examples, it's not like if some Jews went to Nazi rallies thy were welcomed with open arms as converts to some new intellectual current; their Jewishness (or membership in some other 'degenerate' category) made them ineligible to participate in the Nazi project.

I fail to see how you can justify giving free speech protections to those who make no secret of their desire to limit other people's liberties. I don't hate Richard Spencer because he's white, male, and has a particular haircut, I hate the fact that he's actively exhorting people to join him in a project get rid of people who are not white enough.

I'm a-OK with people punching Richard Spencer precisely because he has dedicated himself for the last several years to promoting a narrow and aggressive policy of racial supremacy that includes reducing the liberty of others by killing them or driving them out of their homes. If he were to popup in public tomorrow and announce that he'd renounced fascism and that people should be judged on the quality of their behavior towards others then I would no longer support people punching him as randomly and as often as possible. But while he's advocating systemic violence against others, he is not to my mind arguing in good faith because he is not willing to uphold that free speech principle for everyone else.

The other argument I hear from some people is 'well the solution to hate speech is more speech.' That's bullshit spoken by people who don't actually know what it's like to feel that their safety is at risk. Obviously I don't reach to interfere with someone's free speech every time I hear something I dislike - a person might be crazy or just angry and offensive by announcing the fact of their prejudice or suchlike, and in most cases they're best refuted, mocked, or ignored.

but where someone is knowingly and systematically arguing [out-group] are inherently terrible people - not the same thing as saying that people in [group] have inherently terrible ideas - then I'm not willing to guard a place on the platform for those who are using that position to push others off the platform. I simply do not owe anything to people who are actively promoting harm against others.

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to invalidate your position so much as to more fully define my own.

This is a bad characterisation; it was much easier to ignore stuff you didn't like before the internet. The internet is also not to blame for politics - while it helped intensify things, it wasn't the 'safe spaces' that gave you Trump, but the hysterical fearmongering that the conservatives had been doing for almost a decade beforehand.

I'm not sure how you think people were 'forced' to see views they didn't like before the internet.

Some types of public demonstrations or forums require permits and the like, but the public square is still available to anyone with a point to make, and if you're in the same physical area/space, you're going to see it, like it or not.

As the bulk of our discussion offloads from public spaces or common community gathering places to curated digital gardens where no one knows the difference if you unfollow their feed, we lose the forces that make it difficult to ignore each other. That makes it much easier to stay closed-minded.

You say it's easier to remain close-minded, yet we are in a prosperous time with greater freedom across the board for all. Try being a minority fifty years ago, and see if you still think that people were more open-minded back then.

I wouldn't necessarily characterize what I was discussing as fraternization, but no, I don't think that's bizarre at all when compared against today's culture of sitting indoors looking at a screen bare minimum of 8 hours per day.

>Similarly, the advent of the internet doesn't mean that people no longer interact physically.

Obviously, this is not absolute. But it is seriously limited. If you wanted to have an active discussion of policy issues, what were your options pre-internet? Three-way calling (I think this came out in the 90s anyway)? You could write letters and stuff but that's quite the lag time. Serious discussion that kept human attention spans engaged had to happen in person.

>You say it's easier to remain close-minded, yet we are in a prosperous time with greater freedom across the board for all.

First, are these necessarily mutually exclusive? Second, isn't this discussion specifically about how our freedoms are jeopardized by the closed-mindedness that arises from cultural disregard for the social principle and value of free speech?

>Try being a minority fifty years ago, and see if you still think that people were more open-minded back then.

I'm not saying that people were more open-minded in an absolute sense, though I think it's easy to say that the mainstream political discourse was more civil. I'm saying that the way technology and telecommunication has changed our interaction is causing us to lose regard for the principles of free speech and open dialogue.

You seem to be reading this from a very narrow perspective that's not ultimately relevant to the discussion at hand.

You only need to go back a few decades to get to a point where you could simply handwave away an opinion because the speaker was black or a woman. You can't get much more contemptuous of free speech than just ignoring someone out of hand. Your 'principles' don't exist in the actual past; they're a fantasy world that has never existed.

Even the idea that 'you can't bypass the public square' is simply not true, neither physically nor philosphically. Cities have been divided along class lines since forever, with little in the way of mixing. Even in a small town, it's not like you had to go to the square.

> You seem to be reading this from a very narrow perspective that's not ultimately relevant to the discussion at hand.

You're saying technology is holding us back, I'm arguing it's not. But it's nice that you bemoan the lack of communication, then try this dismissal. So much for 'open dialogue'...

No, as I said, you're reading this from a very narrow perspective. Free speech is NOT about whether we choose to ignore someone. It's about whether we allow them to speak at all. In fact, choosing to ignore someone is the option consistent with free speech.

Today, instead of just ignoring content we dislike, we see publishing platforms cutting off the audience when the statements don't comply with their corporate agendas, and we have a bunch of self-righteous people approving of it, as long as the targeted people are not on their side.

That's the social value we are losing. Everyone should be concerned that real political speech is being suppressed, even if it's not happening to their side. Instead, people are actively encouraging it.

Because we no longer hold most of our political discourse in physical rooms where it's much harder to simply dismiss or ignore someone who is also present, and because we no longer have to go across an open area where anyone is able to distribute their content or peddle their ideas, the internet is contributing to the rise of a generation that has no idea how to disagree civilly.

>Even the idea that 'you can't bypass the public square' is simply not true, neither physically nor philosphically. Cities have been divided along class lines since forever, with little in the way of mixing. Even in a small town, it's not like you had to go to the square.

You're thinking too literally; I'm not referring to an actual square/hub. I'm referring to public space, where signage can be placed by anyone, where people can stand on the sidewalk and give out their fliers to people who aren't looking for them, they can get permits from the city and do a march on a public street, etc. The surrounding people can't just make these things go away by pressing "Hide". That's the point I'm making.

While these things are still possible, our reliance on the internet for socialization, shopping, work, and a lot of things that we used to have to go out into public space to do has limited the applicability and, I believe, has seriously contributed to a decline in civility/understanding. I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on that because I don't see you providing any actual points to discuss.

>You're saying technology is holding us back, I'm arguing it's not.

You're not talking about technology at all. You're saying that more people have civil rights today, ergo everyone is more open and enlightened. I don't think this necessarily follows. You haven't discussed how technology actually impacts our dialogue at all, as far as I recall.

>But it's nice that you bemoan the lack of communication, then try this dismissal. So much for 'open dialogue'...

It's not a dismissal, first. It's my opinion. I think that you're reading it from a narrow perspective that's not really relevant, which I've discussed in more detail here. How is that invalid commentary?

And yes, "open dialogue" includes people saying they don't think your argument is working or that your perspective is narrow. That's a very important part of it, in fact, and that's the point I'm making here. People today are used to dismissing those they don't agree with and moving on because the internet makes it really easy, and then it makes it easy to go find more people who will just keep feeding you whatever you want to hear, validating your opinions.

So, to be perfectly clear, this dialogue is still open, and nothing about this betrays any values related to free speech or open dialogue. I'm not trying to get HN to block your comments because I disagree with them. I'm not trying to get you ostracized or punished for disagreeing. I wouldn't be supportive if your comments were blocked. I'm not sure what else to say about the topic at hand, but if I can think of something worthwhile I'd be happy to offer it.

All of this sounds like an open dialogue to me. Open dialogue doesn't mean that people will agree or that you will be in an echo chamber. It just recognizes the importance of real, substantive political discussion, which includes allowing people to blatantly say they think we're wrong, and that people shouldn't be punished for their good faith efforts to pursue a dialogue, no matter how seriously we disagree.

I think the fact that I need to explain this means that technology is keeping us too isolated. We don't have enough experience having discussions with people we don't agree with, and learning to work and sympathize with them. I do posit that pre-internet, this isolation was less severe. I know you keep mentioning class and racial divides, which are totally legitimate issues, but they're not directly related to the problem of political hegemony; people in the same classes and races can and do disagree.

The central flaw of libertarianism is that it depend on property rights to essentially be worthless to work in the real world, as any scarcity allows for a libertarian dictatorship based solely on the idea that property rights are sacred, and need to be protected by the state.

Could you reiterate this statement for me? I wasn't able to fully grok the meaning.

Edit: Spelling.

i.e. you end up with a clash between the right to own/control property and any other right unless you have a post scarcity society with limitless resources.

I am not arguing that we should all go communist im arguing that Marx have point when he claimed that capitalism will devolve back into something similar to mercantilism* if property is allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few clans/corporations[1].

I know im being a heretic but someone have to as the current naive idea that freedom is not linked with real world resources can only lead to the erosion of any real meaning of the word freedom.

[1]in Smiths day corporations looked a lot like AT&T or Google today and Smith was a critic of the power concentrated within corporations like the British East-india Company(the target of the Boston tea part btw.)

And if we look in particular at government censorship of Wikipedia or some articles in it we find quiet a few Western countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_censorship_of_Wikip...

Edit: I mean extreme right wing, like KKK, nazi stuf ect.

The law is as follow:

1) No Nazi symbolism outside of a historic context. 2) No inciting racial hatred. 3) No expression of hatred against a protected minority (the wealthy are not a protected minority).

These are very easy to prove, but none of them apply to normal left wingers. There are Islamist left wingers that fall into these categories because of their anti-semeticism or anti Christian sentiments.

4) No denying crimes against humanity.

This DOES apply to left wingers. If you deny Stalin's genocide against the Ukrainians that would be illegal. It also equally applies to holocaust deniers. I don't know how often it comes up though.

5) No speach which undermines democratic values and seeks to opress others.

I don't think that this is ever actually used. Though it might apply against left wingers.

Denial of crimes against humanity, though, I see as a big mistake. I know, I know, we've all beaten the Holocaust to death... But when it comes to anti-capitalist and anti-comunist thinkers there is a great deal to talk about.

For example, anti-communists will tell you that Mao commit genocide during the great leap forward. Reasonable people disagree.

I, as an anti-capitalist, will tell you, that the quality of food sold in primarily black neighborhoods in the US is much lower than elsewhere in the country, that millions of blacks die as a result, and that this is an act of genocide against blacks. Obviously, a lot of white Americans would disagrees with me, and I think it would not be a good thing if they all went to jail for doing so...

Wait, you're right https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%9Blnick%C3%A1_strana it was banned as a threat to democracy. That lasted long...

Just use a URL shortener and print up links to pass around. Sneakernet still can't be tracked

I don't really need to spend my time and energy spreading holocaust denial and ISIS beheading videos ;)

https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/country/DK

They're blocking http://thepiratebay.org, that's straight up censorship.

No, that's anti-piracy judgements.

How does that change the fact that Denmark censors http://thepiratebay.org?

> that's anti-piracy judgements

Not the same as censorship.

So you're saying that "Denmark censors http://thepiratebay.org" is not a fact that can be measured?

I have no idea of internet state-level censorship though, are there any specific

Can we both agree that both of these things shouldn't happen and ThePirateBay and Wikipedia shouldn't be censored by any country?

In Denmark it all started out with blocking child porn sites, then it was expanded to copyright infringement, then it was expanded to companies operating illegally (counterfeit goods stores, illegal gambling, alternative medicine stores) and most recently the government started blocking "terror propaganda" [1] - which means they have begun censoring political speech.

This is in spite of a constitution forbidding censorship, with the counterpoint being that since it's technically private companies doing the censorship, it doesn't violate the constitution. Even though ISPs will be taken to court if they don't censor sites [2]

[1] https://www.information.dk/indland/2016/10/statsligt-debatto...

[2] https://www.version2.dk/artikel/dansk-internetudbyder-traekk...

My landline provider gives me access, but my mobile provider (TDC, same provider as the one tested on the linked site) does not give me access, saying that a court has banned access to the site, but not quoting any specific case.

Basically - we see the same thing we already saw with free market. It is not free by itself. Countries and companies can use it to establish monopolies.

Freedom is not for free. It is something we need to define, establish and then continuously fight for it.

- Where do people get the Russian news and why do they care about what Russia has to say? I mean, I don't follow Polish news (or French news, or German news, etc.); so why would people get their information from the Russian outlets?

- You said that the Russian news/comments are factually wrong. What do you use as a reference (which sources would give you factually correct information and how do you verify that it is factually correct)?

Those are honest questions; I am not defending the Russian outlets in any way - I am just curious about how people perceive different news media

By the way, do you know what a main evil scheme Kremlin uses to brainwash the citizens, to set them against the West? It's not some made-up, fake news. They made a few websites instead, where anyone can read translated articles about Russia, published in Western media. And that's it. As you understand, it's much harder to find something pro-Russian there to translate, than vice versa.

On a serious note, I think that the only way to fight with the streams of fakes (regardless the country) is a restriction of anonymity on the Internet.

Please stop suggesting that.

There's zero evidence that removing anonymity works and in that process we lose our online privacy. And I think anonymity is precisely what we need to preserve freedom.

Also people are simply jackasses, real names or not. If you don't believe me, engage in conversations on Facebook about politics sometimes. There's nothing that shakes my faith in humanity faster.

I think, the main problem is that Internet was not designed for the masses originally. In 90s you could find there mostly scientists, programmers, hackers, writers etc. Here, in Russia, everything was concenrated in Fidonet and we had our own Eternal September [1] (2000-...) when dial-up access become cheaper. So, what to do now? To be honest, I don't know. I'm not promoting segregation either. I think it's pointless to make a modern version of Usenet/Fidonet/... for closed groups of like-minded people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Thank you! These are my thoughts exactly. I mean, I remember the Soviet times, when the Russian intellectuals, having zero confidence in the official news, used to listen to foreign radio stations over AM radio – Voice of America and BBC World Service (and perhaps Deutsche Welle too) being the most prominent among them. What happened that now the Western media loudly complains about RT? One might even think that the situation has now been reversed, and that the Western world somehow trusts RT more than they trust their mainstream media. But this does not make any sense!

RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.

As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.

RT's journalist Gayane Chichakyan, for example, has become a kind of a legend among some American podcasters for asking straight and inconvenient, but certainly valid questions at State Department’s press conferences.

And while comedy shows such as The Daily Show or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are almost indistinguishable from each other in their messages, RT's Redacted Tonight (https://www.rt.com/shows/redacted-tonight-summary/) is radically different and gives the voice to the comedy of the very far left.

I think I understand the concept of lies by omission. Perhaps RT does that. And yet, I am not sure that giving a one-sided account of events is worse than not bringing them up at all. Like that accusation of Wikileaks’ selectively targeting the democrats and being silent about the republicans — I am not convinced that this one-sidedness in any way invalidates what Wikileaks had to say about the democrats. Likewise, if RT does not report on the stories that can be damaging to the Russian side, this should not make their other stories, potentially damaging to the other sides, somehow invalid.

We get a lot of comments in main Internet portals which present Russians as victims of NATO aggression in case of Ukrainian conflict. It always misses the point of who invaded who.

There is a lot of comments threatening Poland with nuclear conflict, in particular after US Army established its presence here.

These are examples. But it looks like a lot of comments have particular key and great consistency.

As for invasion and NATO aggression, I think it’s worth reminding oneself that there are several opposite narratives battling each other and pushing different agendas — God knows whose. Russia is certainly meddling in Ukranian affairs (and it’s revolting) — but invasion? Isn’t it an act of war? Aren’t countries at war with each other if one country invades another? As for NATO, both NATO and Russia seem to be saber-rattling, each side responding to the demonstrations of the other by further threats. This is plain madness!

I just wanted to point out that Internet due to its global nature is vulnerable to attack on truth by actors with enough money and defined agenda. This kind of attack can be similar to spam/ddos attack in its nature. So basically exploiting Internet freedom.

If we don't build in mechanisms to prevent this, we will loose anyway. Even if it was possible to keep Internet free.

I see that the only positive result of my comment is that it motivated you and several Russian readers to create accounts here and take part in discussion. I hope we will have much more opportunity to participate in IT related topics. You guys are some of the best people in the field and we will all benefit from your expertise.

Here's an investigation that discovered them operating in the Baltics: https://en.rebaltica.lv/2017/04/sputniks-unknown-brother/

Long story short, they open a news portal where tracking the ownership is almost impossible and where there is absolutely no hindsight on how do they monetize what they do, they attract readers by appealing to the Russian minorities, trying to create some sort of panic between them and hoping to create a chain reaction.

For your second question: I myself don't know too much about this in regards to the internet, but I have read in a couple of white papers that

1: a large majority of Russians (esp. those in rural areas) have TV as their main source of news. Print is only a minority (has small relevance).

2: Most TV is controlled by the government and if they are not they don't criticize the government as there is a fear of being shut down.

3: The Russian media is said to state false Fact as well as to distort Facts/Events. I don't have the time to link specific sources but you can find what I said if you research freedom of press on google and google scholar. There are also renown sites with lists such as a freedom of speech index. Russia ranks 148.

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=en&q=russia+freedom+of+...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616690320001763... http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1081180011291722...

Digitally they live as Russians, they don't use facebook but use VK etc. Because they don't understand the language the only local TV/newspapers/media they consume is Russian. The local Russian media is mostly funded by the Kremlin and has their agenda aligned accordingly.

In total, it's hard not to see this as preparation work for Putin to come save all these Russians by occupying us once again.

--

[1] Certainly there is the Russian troll army unit who roams the local news comment sections. However they aren't that clever. They are mostly easy to spot, have been spreading the same crap for 15 years, and are often called out.

[2] It's not just that old people don't learn the local languages. A huge number of Russians flat out refuse to teach their newborn children the local languages, insisting on Russian. The continued existance of Russian kindergartens/schools is ensuring that the division among the local populace won't go away.

Not to start a debate, but why would they want to integrate into a culture that quite explicitly hates them?

Also, you make a sarcastic remark regarding not kicking people out as if that is what everyone does and doesn't require special mention. It just so happens that moving people forcibly around has been the modus operandi of various Russian regimes. [1] They come invade us, and then gather up the intellects and other elite members of the community and ship them off to Siberia in cargo trains. Not only that, but wives are separated from their husbands, children from their parents, families split apart and sent to different parts of the Siberian woods to make sure they won't find anyone to speak their native language with. Then people who already speak Russian are massively transported into the country to help with the Russianification efforts. [2]

To make matters worse, it's not like all of this is only some historic event that is looked at in shame like Germany and the nazis. Putin and his regime, and the local non-integrating Russians think that Soviet Union was the best thing ever and that its fall was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

There have been monstrous attempts by Russia at obliterating the Baltic cultures. The remaining non-integrating Russians are pawns in this culture war. I do think that we have been more than fair in offering them an opportunity to integrate into the community and to leave the atrocities of the past behind us. When they refuse, but also don't go back to Russia and keep praising the historic invading Russians as heroes. Well it's dissapointing, insulting, and frankly for our little nations it's also a case of fighting for the survival of our cultures.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Eston... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification

Please forgive my insolence in asking this, but why do you feel that survival of a culture is important? I have heard these sentiments frequently from people from various former Soviet republics (the Baltic states and Ukraine being the prime example), and they have always puzzled me, because I, though Russian, can not imagine myself fighting for the Russian culture. I am quite content with the global cultural heritage of the Western civilization that I have accumulated over my life to be specifically protective of the "Russian culture". I fully appreciate that mine is not a popular position here, but I prefer not to be engulfed in whatever nationalist tendencies our country manifests, and am curious to learn why would anyone give in to the nationalist tendencies in other countries.

NOTE: I am not using the word "nationalist" in the perjorative sense that it frequently has, but in a purely descriptive sense. The notion of struggling for survival of a culture rather than simply letting it evolve into whatever it evolves seems nationalist to me.

In practice, I would say that USA has achieved more cultural assimilation with the last 25 years than Russia could in the ~250 years of occupation. In essence Hollywood has won the hearts of the people in ways that force never could.

There are those who don't like the USA influence either, because it does reduce our own identity. For me, it's not as big of a problem as long as we have control over the changes made.

To sum it up, it's about free will & independent thought.

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[1] A cynic might say that the USA influence isn't by choice and that it's merely an illusion of choice. That while the Western cultural assimilation doesn't share methods with other attempts, it's hard to resist due to the volume & production quality of the Western media.

Russia will provide funding to various conspiracy nuts, contrarians and such, who then write and/or translate shitty "news" articles that are then consumed by people that want someone to confirm their bias.

They also pay people (located in Russia, mostly) to post pro-Kremlin opinions on the internet, and if you are not aware of that, it may seem like there's a lot of people that disagree with the "mainstream media" that are "lying to us".

Another thing they do is try and control the expat organizations of Russian speaking minorities in the West (and Central Europe too). These people are often relying on Russian language news so they are easier to influence.

They also like to finance eurosceptic political parties (e.g. National Front[1]), to try and break-up the EU.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(France)#Russia...

Now, having watched RT from time to time over a certain period, I learned to distinguish between the shows that blatantly push the Kremlin agenda, and others that do not necessarily do so and are more interested in being a non-mainstream platform of inquiry into the world affairs, and of criticism of the world policies rather than being a carrier of the Russian point of view.

Also, I couldn't help wondering about what it is that ostensibly makes RT so different from other media networks. It seems to me that if RT is propaganda (which it very well may be) then so is CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox, or even BBC. I don’t know. Perhaps, despite all my attempts to resist, I am infected by the Russian propaganda beyond cure.

Two recent examples of BBC 'impartiality'

https://twitter.com/maitlis/status/854308223838371840

https://twitter.com/bbcnickrobinson/status/85500451929767936...

With an election in just a few weeks time, two major BBC 'journalists' who support the right-wing, pro-Establishment British Conservative Party, brazenly attacking the left-wing (anti-Establishment) Labour Party candidate.

The BBC is a state broadcaster that has always been pro (British/Western) Establishment, but always in the past with a veneer of impartiality (more delusional right-wingers even absurdly accuse it of being left-wing).

Now, with the possibility of the first moderately left-wing British Prime Minister in decades, and public faith in established media at an all time low anyway, top BBC staff aren't even trying to hide their right-wing political bias any more.

1) Different kinds of propaganda. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are businesses that reflect the biases of audience, owners, employees, etc. RT bias is support of the Kremlin.

2) Different levels of commitment. Fox, MSNBC, CNN are businesses pursuing their own interest. Their purpose is making money. RT was set up purely for propaganda. It's purpose is spreading propaganda. The "alternative news" is merely a method to deliver the propaganda.

Fox opposed Trump but then flipped to suit their interest. RT will never oppose Putin.

If Putin decided he wanted to genocide Jews (a totally unrealistic example just to illustrate the point), RT would come up with a reason why it's unavoidable, justified, and the US's fault anyway. If Trump came up with the same idea, even Fox news would probably oppose it.

The same happens in Romania. In fact, I've called out a couple of such profiles on FB already, during the recent anti-Government demonstrations. If you're careful enough it's easy to spot them, one of them for example had shared pro-Assad news (which us Romanians don't care that much about), some traditional music that now only appeals to those 60+ and some nationalistic-sounding articles about Romania.

Peak Internet:

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h...

Walled garden devices are pretty irrelevant though because unless that wall blocks the internet, there is little effect. Current walled gardens are about application security and not about actual content-- the most locked down iPhone can still access the open internet -- so device walled gardening has nothing to do with information access generally.

Also the obsession with "stopping fake news" coming from the American left is what's causing Google and Facebook to respond -- they couldn't care less about fake news -- they are responding to market pressures. Google and Facebook aren't leading the charge against fake news in the US -- leftist activists are the ones screaming the loudest because they are still fuming about Trump.

In Europe, its governments that are pressuring companies to censor things -- for example the so-called right to be forgotten. Governments are the problem not the companies -- at least in Europe.

Why would Facebook or Google care about fake news? They don't -- until a major portion of their constituencies start howling about it. Fakebook and Google weren't unilaterally concerned about content veracity -- until a large segment of people started complaining about it.

I disagree, on iOS specifically you have no practical way to install/sideload your own applications and thus what you can and can not do is wholly controlled by Apple. Applications determine what parts of the Internet you can actually use.

My impression of "Fake News" is that it is a new push for political correctness and censorship in news publications, while it does not improve things like the quality, transparancy and trustworthiness of sources and references of news.

It could also be interpreted as a push for platform control; if you want to influence people using our platform, fucking pay for it!

The policies of nationalists aren't all friendly in principal to the global agendas of these outfits. On imported labor for instance.

But things like the US 1st Amendment is an actual laws that can be enforced by courts, and American courts have mostly developed good jurisprudence about it. That includes applying it mostly to governments -- for reasons that sanerj goes into in detail.

The "mostly" is interesting here. There was a case of a woman handing out leaflets in a town where all the land was owned by one company. The US courts ruled (rightly, I think) that the company was not allowed to stop her.

Today, private enterprises like YouTube and Facebook are being used as if they were public services and are in a position to censor. So I don't rule out something like the company-town rule forcing internet giants respect free speech.

But realistically, I don't see todays political culture doing that even-handedly. In fact I see it being far more likely to force these companies to censor.

But from a technological perspective, even if 2016 is the high water mark of the "centralized" internet, a new internet is forming. That which you lament is the natural result of a centralized system. It's something that the early creators of the internet have warned about since its inception. But now as the incumbents centralize control, a new generation of technologists (helped by many of those early creators) are constructing the underpinnings of "Web 3.0", a decentralized internet built on Ethereum, IPFS, WebTorrent, BigchainDB, SOLID et al.

There is plenty left to do, it is still a newborn child... nobody knows where this goes. But come 2030, I agree we'll look back on 2016 as the high water mark of the centralized internet. But instead of longing for how things were in the 1990s and 2000s, we'll say "good riddance".

All that said, the battle needs to happen on the political front at the same time, which makes EFF, FFTF, and ACLU so important.

i've done some work in this space, but it is a hard path. we need more people working and innovating in creating viral alternatives to the present system. not only in technology, but in business. we don't need an economic landscape composed of kingdoms and fiefs, we need economic democracies: cooperatives and other worker-focused businesses. we need stronger communities. more strong connections to each other.

It'd be great if everything was decentralized, everyone encrypted all their messages, used tor to mask their activities. At some point though, these would require the average person to learn a lot about the network and systems they use, otherwise they risk not using it correctly and invalidating the point. If these services are provided to them, they don't have to think about all these factors when using the network, they can specialize, allowing it to be more accessible. It seems that the people vote has been on more accessible, but it is starting to look like the foxes are running the hen house for the internet these days.

That being said, what Turkey is doing is scary.

> The government has not officially commented on the outage. But the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry told the state-run agency, "Instead of coordinating against terrorism, (Wikipedia) has become part of an information source which is running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena."

This shows a profound lack of understanding of how a basic site like Wikipedia works, which is either ignorant or malicious, and the latter sounds likely in this day and age.