I would focus on the regional peoples' politics rather than the technocracy or American politics.
I firmly believe your thrust is irrelevant to the core issue, if not solely for the immediacy of a democratic threat.
I'm not an expert on this, but my family and I have been following this revolution for the past few months. To me, it's a promise to the people that things can get better.
From what I understand, not being an expert either but having spent quite a few months in Uganda in the last few years, Museveni has been the president since 1986 and brought a lot of stability to the country, aka brought peace after lots of conflict under Idi Amin. Some people have expressed gratitude for that and fear that Uganda will go back into the violence it faced before and yet seem very tired of the way Museveni has been running the country and want new leadership. Recently, there has been stronger opposition and in the last few years, a popular musician, Bobi Wine, decided to get involved in politics and declared to run for president.
I imagine, if I were in government, I might be afraid of the US, China, Russia, or other countries bringing their political influence into the country through the internet. I might fear revolutions like the ones that happened in Tunisia and Egypt and other countries. I may also just fear my own citizens and what they want. It's hard for us in the US to know how much of the political discourse here is from the citizens vs external sources vs government sources, and I could imagine even harder sometimes in other countries to figure that out.
That's the tricky part with this decision, it could be to stop foreign influences, it could be to stop local influences, it could be to amplify government influences, or a combination of all three.
Incidentally Uganda was previous battleground of US campaign against Huawei with reference to Wine.
>Huawei technicians have been helping governments in Uganda and Zambia spy on their political opponents, a new report says https://www.businessinsider.com/huawei-workers-helped-africa...
Snarky, but interest reading dissecting the agenda behind WSJ article. Choice quote:
>The WSJ doesn't say how it obtained the documents, though it does reveal that Wine was recently in Washington DC where he had briefed the US government on events in Uganda and had received offers of assistance.
https://www.theregister.com/2019/08/15/huawei_uganda_report/
TLDR; Washington upset Huawei prevented them from meddling in domestic Uganda affairs. Huawei lawful interception implementation erodes US influence operations abroad. No surprise tech sovereignty is gaining momentum in any place that is able.
Makes me think just how antiquated the idea of geography-based government could be when we have instant communications with people around the world. I think national, regional, and local governments really have no idea how to deal with internet interactions that cross geographical jurisdictions.
Would they be? Consider what just happened in the USA: All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.
Now imagine if some similar subversion were attempted in another country, say Ecuador? Would these social media companies be as willing to silence a faction in another country?
What if it were to happen in a more important country, say Australia? South Korea? Japan? Germany? At what point should these companies be interfering through censorship, and at what point are the issues too blurred or difficult to figure out who's right and who's wrong? Sir Richard Wharton in Yes, Minster once quipped: "Once you start interfering in the internal squabbles of other countries, you're on a very slippery slope."
Naturally, these companies will resist the push towards becoming arbiters of Truth (until they actually BECOME such arbiters, then god help us all).
So non-American governments will have no recourse but to plead with Youtube, and then block them when the answer is "no".
I see no reason for any government or any party to trust the social media, mobile OS platforms and messaging anymore. A new set of tools is about to loom hopefully.
Yes. People never handled daily small talk with their friends and family via the Letters page of e.g. The Times, so it was never antisocial to change newspaper, to boycott a newspaper entirely, or to go without any daily paper at all.
The issue is publishing services with discoverability where anyone can see or subscribe to your feed, those are more like a letters page and service providers have a clear interest in what they are publishing for you.
That, and of course financially complying with pressure from the Chinese government to be tough on whatever independence movement it struggle with now — Catalonia was of course free to chant it's independence.
I merely noticed that much of the censorship and cultural policing on large platforms such as GitHub, or even the new Linux code of conduct seems to be mostly applicable to situations that pertain to the U.S.A. exclusively.
It's quite interesting how many international websites would forbid me from posting scenes from Dutch television programming because the adult U.S.A.-man is apparently more damaged by nudity than the præpubertal Dutchman.
https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/pro-trump-anti-covi...
I suspect at the beginning there is a kind of identification and a contrarian reflex (“you won’t prevent me from speaking so I will say the vilest things just to test how far you’ll bend”). But people doing that end up taking it seriously after having steeped in it for a couple of years. Still, surely they realise that the people they support don’t care a bit about them and live on the other side of the world.
GNOME is of the U.S.A. and well known for its livid codes of conduct; KDE is of German origins, and seems to be more lax in this.
Even with Linux, Linus, a Finn living in the U.S.A., has long resisted it and even referenced this difference between Finnish and U.S.A. culture, but eventually relented.
Is there an open-source project, US or not, that the Code of Conduct saga hasn't touched?
The entire world cannot now use Parler (disclosure: I've never downloaded or used it) because a hundred or so people broke into a US government building for 2 hours.
Where did this happen?
Because I saw some specific tags blocked calling for a VP to be killed blocked (vs some generic "kill all humans" hyperbole)... and specific account blocked after its owner triggered an attack on the Capitol that resulted in 5 casualties (and breaking the rules of the platform for 4+ years)
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Are you trying to say people who were pro-talking about killing Pence and storming the Capitol are a significant population?
Because last time I checked there were still tens of millions of conservatives on Twitter who aren't banned
We're now in the unprecedented situation where individual people can out-broadcast even nation states with the help of social media companies, most of which have their head offices in the USA, limiting their dependency upon and reachability from other governments of the world. It's a decent situation all around because having such companies headquartered in a repressive regime would have damaging effects worldwide. But we still run into some problems:
1. Their morals are local, but their reach is international. This has caused a lot of friction in the past, and that friction will only increase going forward.
2. They're being pressured to bow to local "truths" or risk being banned in a number of nations. These "truths" generally come to light from local issues, and while they can be easy to decypher in autocratic regimes, they absolutely will NOT be so easy to arbitrate in functioning democracies. We'll eventually reach the point where every social media company will need a team of sociologists and political strategists in order to figure out what's behind every government's complaints over what's being broadcast by their citizens, and how best to respond (making them higher arbiters of truth than even the government). The national self-determination issues alone are staggering.
The endgame of this is increased government regulation and increased pressure for a single national "truth", which must be defended vigorously in order to keep the government functional. The increased conflict between these American companies and local governments will increase to the point where eventually the companies will win and essentially set the policy of truth worldwide, which leaves us in a very centralized and fragile state when it comes to corruption, especially since companies - unlike governments - have only profit as a motive, and do not answer to the people.
You said this:
> All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.
Where is this large population? Who is this large population?
Thus entire comment you typed is an distressingly large stretch if you can't identify the population you're using as a diving board to truly go into the deep end here.
Although social media companies have allowed more of us to broadcast to an unprecedentedly large audience, we're not actually ready for the Pandora's box this opens in terms of free speech, corporate rights and obligations, and national sovereignty. The near-term solution will be selective censorship by companies and blocking by governments unhappy with the censorship choices (for both good and bad reasons). But as the decade drags on, we'll be forced to recognize our lack of psychological adaptability to this kind of influential power that can destabilize societies to such a degree (by individual, group, AND state actors), and try to come up with a least-worst solution that we're probably not going to like.
It's not like this is completely new; larger countries with information dissemination advantages have used that power to destabilize smaller countries for centuries, most recently in South America and the Middle East. But it's quite another thing to be on the receiving end, by anyone able to harness a sufficient audience (i.e. not just state actors), and find yourself unable to effectively defend against it.
Definitely not buying that was the original population mentioned: it doesn't follow your original claim and it doesn't follow your reply.
> All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.
Parler users are not a significant portion of the population.
They were not blocked by "all social media companies", their app was removed from an app store.
If you're trying to implicate the people who were using Parler... again small population and the over lap between banned from social media and using Parler is far away from a "significant portion of the population". And many are of a certain political leaning, they are not representative of that population.
This while comment chain was built on an event "banning a significant portion of the population population" that doesn't exist. End of story.
I'm not interested in discussing doomsaying based on made up events.
Nothing said in this thread is a novel thing, it's the same tired what-ifs that ignore the "what-happened". When your argument doesn't even stand without leaning on made up events and slipper slopes, it's not worth much.
Once again it's been proven that, even after facing the worst case so far, presidents using their platform to threaten nuclear war... people still have to resort to embellishments and straight up fabrications to support doomsday theories that just haven't panned out.
Twitter did not falter in their dedication to avoid censorship until people's blood were quite literally on this person's hands before finally taking a stand.
It's probably been a difficult 4 years for some people at Twitter turning cheek after cheek, they're earned their extra 11 days of rest.
Today, right across Africa, governments are studying the possibilities of restricting foreign internet services. Both as a way of controlling the information their populations get to view, but also as a means of addressing high youth unemployment among educated workers by giving their domestic internet firms the room to take root. This is actually an interesting sideshow in the more global tendency towards balkanization. But take my word for it, young startup type guys from Entebbe-Kampala, (and, with AfCFTA, even places like Dar and Nairobi), will be very active trying to press their advantage.
The political side of this shutdown is predictable, but the interesting action is the long game. I think these kinds of shutdowns are dry runs for the sort of internet world African leaders are quietly pressing for in their future.
There are probably some reasonable generalisations that are fair, but sometimes I feel people generalize a bit too much when it comes to Africa.
A headline of "Local President admits focus on internet censorship is driven by personal greed, not economic protectionism?"
I'm from Ghana, a country that's been touching the line of internet censorship from time to time, and I see nothing wrong with their statement.
It's laughably naive to imply that they're censoring outside services to prop up the local tech scene when they can hardly be assed to get kids a proper education without using it as a political bargaining chip.
Like saying they're playing 4d chess when they're not interested in checkers unless it suits them...
You're forgetting that authoritarian governments do not have to address these things by eliminating the root cause. They can just silence the opposition with arrests or execution [0]. Uganda is so famous for this to the point that there is an entire movie [1] about Idi Amin.
If you actually cared about youth unemployment you could address it with simple economic measures first and you would seek funding from western investors, not get rid of them.
Implementing tariffs in an industry that you are never going to be a world leader in is just plain stupid. Ugandan app developers can just develop for the Google and Apple store and get access to a bigger audience instead of restricting themselves to Uganda only.
It only works out in China because their internal market is bigger than EU+USA combined. It could work out for India (unlikely unless they address corruption). Uganda only has 44 million people it just doesn't make sense.
I was not equating blocking the app stores with addressing youth unemployment.
Silencing the opposition didn't quite work for Idi Amin, because the opposition became part if the military which topped him and tge next president.
>I think this illustrates how unbalanced and agenda-driven these media and social graph services have become who bring in foreign values to local elections.
Considering the existing rulers fail to live up to their responsibilities that's not necessarily a bad thing.
>This interference used to be called neo-imperialism not too long ago by the same people who now advocate for these narratives.
The countries who accept them can often be more successful than those who refuse them. Hong Kong is a pretty good example. Democratic values and capitalism forced down the throat of people. This became a threat to the authoritarian regime in the Chinese mainland and the rulers have to make concessions to their population. They built special economic development zones and simply copied the ideas that worked out in Hong Kong and were compatible with Chinese values at the time. Western investors suddenly had a reliable business partner in Hong Kong and a large "proxy" workforce that was manufacturing goods on the mainland which got shipped to Hong Kong and could be sold to the west. The story ends with China becoming a world leading economy, not because of the west but rather because the west forced the government to listen to the people.
Now of course most of the governments that would do this would be authoritarian and would look to control their own narrative, I think this illustrates how unbalanced and agenda-driven these media and social graph services have become who bring in foreign values to local elections.
This interference used to be called neo-imperialism not too long ago by the same people who now advocate for these narratives.