As a Russian, it pisses me off. It's like saying "black people shouldn't moan, because white people suffer too".
In my opinion there's a point: if the dominant ethnicity is being enslaved, imagine what could happen to powerless minorities.
In other words, if countries that call themselves free are becoming less free day after day, it becomes obvious to imagine that not-as-free countries will follow the same route, maybe even faster.
they simply started from a different position in the global-freedom scale.
EDIT: apparently from the downvotes someone believes that Russia is a special place were all the bad things happen, while in the west when the US government spies their allies it's progress. If an American company, Apple for example, obey to the free government of the US of A when they ask for more control over the content on their platform, what make you think that they will fight against other more repressive governments? (they have in fact put this specific app down on their store, as per Putin's request) information warfare and content control are the weapons of the future, it is quite naive to think that there will be good governments that won't use it and bad governments that will abuse it. Everyone will use it to their own advantage. what's happening today is just the tip of the iceberg, wait for the day when the internet won't be globalized anymore as it is today and we'll have hundreds of local internets hardly connected to each other, allowing only some highly monitored link to "friendly" nets.
To be frank, America has lost a strategic asset in the form of being an attractive place to come for the best and brightest to try to realize something unfettered; and we're not doing a damn thing to export anything that creates any semblance of assurance that the American experiment's results are any better than anywhere else's.
The bar has been lowered so far it isn't even funny.
https://www.state.gov/russias-pillars-of-disinformation-and-...
The group that is against censorship is likely still angry with companies like Facebook, twitter, apple, and it makes more sense that it is those people who continue to make jabs about past censorship. One do not need to pay people to be angry.
Here is a question: Does the hkai use above has a history of advocating free speech outside of articles that cover Russia? Is it consistent with someone who has not accepted that powerful companies should hold such power on society?
We have LIMITED FREE POLITICAL SPEECH...big difference...the dark right prefers to lie to people and claim we have unfettered free speech.
> I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers
I will make an attempt at an explanation, or at least an unusual way to think about it. It's not that I find it difficult to "believe" it....it is very easy to "believe" it....just do it. However, forming a strong belief that it is actually true, based on sound logic and strict epistemology, this is far less easy, for me.
Firstly, consider the logic (if we interpret the statement literally): Because "A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers", then therefore it logically follows that "whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly[!] from Russian[!] and similar bots trying to divert attention".
Clearly, this logic is not free of flaws.
Now of course, your actual opinion on the matter is surely more complex, but then this raises the important (and typically "This is Water"-type unrealized) point that we use an amazingly crude language, on amazingly crude internet platforms, to debate (conceptualize, and form opinions upon) a problem space (reality) that is infinitely dimensionally complex, not to mention deceptive, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. And even worse: all of this is conducted upon a not very well understood and known to be incredibly flawed platform: the human mind.
If you think about it, is the very premise (axiomatic ~~belief~~ perception) that humanity can form highly comprehensive accurate individual and shared models of this mess in the first place not obviously delusional and hubristic?
Below we have:
> To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.
This is clearly a false dichotomy - are there really only two options here? There are many different ways to think about this, and I would be surprised if the person who wrote that comment wouldn't be able to whip up a whole bunch of other theories without breaking a sweat. And yet, they wrote that comment....and that comment was consumed (as ~correct) by other agents within the system, in turn distorting their internal model of reality (which is typically considered to be reality itself, another root cause problem), agents who will then go on to distort the models of other agents in one giant game of Telephone[1].
Day after day, year after year, generation after generation we (and here I include the much more competent than average minds here on HN) repeat this obviously (when looked at from the proper perspective, a perspective that seems to be available only in certain states of mind[2]) highly flawed behavior, and "shake our fists at God" (or the members of our outgroups) for causing these problems.
What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon: not only does it seem not possible to get people to stop behaving like this, it seems to be impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that there might be some truth to this characterization of it. Like, they might post a pithy comment ~"proving it wrong", but if one is to reply to that pointing out that it suffers from the very same phenomenon being described, the response tends to be either rhetoric (on less intellectual platforms) or solipsism &/or silence/disinterest (on more intellectual platforms).
It is a very difficult nut to crack, especially when no one else is able to be interested in cracking it.
Apple has decided to hold the power of being the gatekeeper of mobile apps. Every time they utilize that power they demonstrate the power relation that they hold over their captured audience. I could be cheering when I agree with their choice and get upset every time they do something which I disagree with, but in terms of power it the exact same thing. I rather choose to oppose the power itself.
But if there are other ways to install software, I don't really have any moral qualms with Apple moderating its own store. They can sell whatever they choose to sell, as far as I'm concerned. In the case of Parler specifically, I see no moral issue whatsoever because you can still access Parler through the browser. Apple and Google aren't blocking their users from accessing Parler, they're simply refusing to do business with them.
Calling this censorship or a violation of free speech is, to me, confusing the right to free speech with an imagined duty of other people and entities to provide you with a platform.
However could not the same be said about the app in the article? What does the app do that they can't do through the browser? If apple has no power in this relationship then the impact of the decision should be zero. It seems however that Apple do have some power or else the Russian government wouldn't have gone after Apple to censor the app.
Censorship is just an other word for power abusing their position to limit the powerless. It is not about forcing people and entities to provide a service, its to prevent people and entities that holds power to abuse that power in order to keep others powerless. If that translated in a specific case to being forced to provide a service, then there is always a second choice. They can open up and give up the thing that gives them power. In the case of apple that would be to provide alternative ways to install software without tricks that keeps apple in power. It is an active choice of Apple to be the door keeper for what the captured users can or can't do with their own devices.
If HN was the primary place where the wast majority of startups got funding, and HN moderator would delete comments in order to influence the conversation between investors and founders, such moderation would very quickly be seen as an abuse of power. It is one form of moderation that I have never seen on HN.
As it is, HN moderators has a rather limited power and rarely been exercising the little power they have. A way to describe this is that people wielding power do not always commit act of abuse, and all power is not equal. There is no true name policy on HN, no rules against people contacting each other outside of HN, no restrictions against people based on political, religious or other views. I can mention the competing communication platform discord and not get banned for doing so. People can read HN without creating accounts, and HN do not block VPNs or Tor.
As a tool for authoritarians, HN moderation is not an effective one. Possible by design. Their behavior has so far not been to utilize power in order to maintain power. There is not much left if you remove power and abuse from the definition of censorship, and so I would not describe HN moderation as it is now as censorship. Occasionally they do things like automatically reduce article weights based on specific political topics, which is a soft kind of censorship, but from what I have seen they have taken a bit more relaxed attitude and not done that so often any more.
But because it's privately owned, it isn't.
The way it hinges on who's name is on the receipt. Which is just a legal artifact. Seems unrealistic.
I mean, the more realistic take is : yes, our whole population is definitely using it to communicate. Before that solid fact any mere legalism is insubstantial.
And when you look at it that way it follows that there is definitely a snake in the cradle.
The argument is that the first ammendment protects the right to engage in private censorship.
In my mind, the core debate at the center of the issue is the assertion that corporations have the same rights as any other citizen. I think that is patently absurd but the Supreme Court disagrees.
So if the city officials sell public squares into private ownership you loose the right to protest. Its not sensorship!
Very convenient, I am sure it will never be abused.
Lets try a different example - what if oil companies pay twitter to boot off all climate activists, is that cool?
This is sarcasm right ? I mean when the party in power directly issues fiat's to social media to ban something, it is OK ?
This is because your right to free speech doesn't entail a right to any particular platform or channel. Others, including the government, are in no way obligated to help you broadcast your speech.
And then we would ask if the behavior in question interferes with the achievement of that good.
Thus we avoid the merely semantic tangles.
Now, i know this is crazy, what if someone 'encourages' them to make the correct decision regarding not helping you? Someone with loads of money and inflience, that doesn't like your speech? Like an oil company, sensoring an activist, is that still legal?
Parler was bankrolled by the 'powerless' heiress daughter of oligarch Robert Mercer.
We could all be cheering for the fact that the powerful went after those users, and then be angry when they go after users we want to protect, but I don't. I rather want to promote users ability to choose themselves if they want a filter that removes Parler members from their own devices.
On HN there is a setting which allow users to see dead comments. Its a user setting. There could be any number of dead comments and yet users can see them if they choose to do so. Such a simple choice makes a rather large difference in the power relation between HN moderators and HN user. Without it this whole discussion could not even exist as the parent comment is dead.
Given, it was Gab and Parker's problem for not going multi-cloud; but there is something specifically untenable to me about this whole "my entire infrastructure is now dead to you in 48 hours" sort of thing that Gab and Parler went through. Yes, it's a matter of contract law because they accepted the ToS as is, but I don't see anywhere that actually services alternative terms pipelines either.
To say nothing of the personal vendetta between the owner of Amazon and said candidate, the owner being the wealthyest man on Earth and directly controlling a big mouth-piece of the media (WashPo). The US is by definition an oligarchic state (the previous president was an oligarch, the current one was put in place by the oligarch enemies of the one before him).
Sounds like pure speculation.
Again, I'm surprised that almost no-one in here (to say nothing of the big media outlets) is not saying anything about the huge conflict of interest involving Bezos and the companies he owns and/or controls.
https://www.facebook.com/ProjectVeritas/videos/2445258202376...
Yep, I saw a few types of researches before. The US is, by all definitions, an oligarchy.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
It did NOT mean that for a particular person all street corners were suddenly unavailable. We have many de facto monopolies here: Google prioritizes medium.com nonsense over private sites, app stores are monopolies etc.
So while physical hosting and DNS providers should be available by law anyway, I think due to content discoverability and monopolistic issues the same applies to certain virtual market places.
What if no one wants to sell you a computer, car, house, food?
You're wrong; they do have freedom of association. They're free to choose whose products they do and do not carry, for example. They're also free to deny entrance to anybody for almost any reason (except for an enumerated class of prohibited reasons).
In Russia it is the government.
There is a long list of expensive products that outright flopped or the public received them in a rather lukewarm way. The same is true about, say, movies.
If companies can make such huge mistakes in their core business, surely they aren't any better in gauging public opinion in politics.