We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens.

Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).

With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.

The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.

Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?

At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.

The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc.

Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.

Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to.

Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation.

There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.)

This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway.

(Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)

The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.

The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.

Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.

What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches

I seem to recall a survey in South East Asia asking people about their internet use, and there were more Facebook users than internet users...

Ah, here: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

"11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet."

I remember a rash of such loaded survey questions going around my country a few years ago, it looked like it was specifically designed to be answered with answers that could be used to slander my nation with "N% of these people think this" results. It's usually not disinterested parties investing the time and resources to run these survey, rather, it's usually people for whom the investment will pay off if they can get the results they want.

That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression.

The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such network, they go as far as creating their own little net to protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names might be different) in their own little net to keep democratic force in check.

Internet is democratic, there should be no question about that.

The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.

With all due respect the problem with the internet is that you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is.

You and many others believe the Internet is what the internet is capable of. It's not. The Internet is exactly what it is to the vast majority of people that use it. And that's Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok...

It doesn't matter that the internet could be what you want it to be, not that it once was. But it's not now, and history isn't on your side - ask usenet or IRC.

So here we are and yet again technologists are shocked or in denial after believing that the existence of a technology would somehow overpower the interests of the powerful and the system they've built - instead of realizing it will be co-opted by them.

The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.

If you are a technologist and failing to rigorously think through the negative cases and faults of your tech, or how your tech can be used against the interests of people or society you are a failure of a technologist. It doesn't matter if you're building an ML model, crypto, or a TikTok app.

As an example, where does crypto end?

1. High efficiency money laundering, permitting sanctions evading (like Russia would love to do right now on a massive scale), and the medium for illegal business like digital extortion / ransomware

2. Just as regulated as the existing banking/credit system, centralized in a few exchanges, failing at any anonymity, no better than existing banking and CCs, while using up massive resources.

Neither is any good and yet tons are in denial that that's where we'll end up.

Technology does not exist independent of society at large as much as we'd like it to.

> The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.

To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.

While I do agree a technology should be designed with good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too idealistic.

Most technology that we utilize today were invented not actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge. Further more, technology itself is not static, instead, it iterates too, sometimes by different people in different organization at different place across different time.

Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.

Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.

Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the Internet don't exist.

> To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.

No I don't belive a technology can only be used for it's intented purpose. In fact exactly the opposite - almost every technology will be used for purpose other than what you intented it to be used for. So understand what common, or motivating alternate purposes you are enabling with your tech and make sure you evaluate the consequences of them.

An example (not ideal because it is not how history happened): Inventing/discovering atomic enery also invents the atomic bomb. Don't jump start spreading the atomic energy everywhere touting its benefits unless you understand you'll also be spreading atomic bomb tech everywhere. Don't be surprised later when it happens and say "it's not supposed to be used that way". "They've corrupted the ideals we had of cheap clean energy for everyone".

> but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.

Noone has absolutely/complete control over anything. (And a side point, frequently when arguments describe absolutes they are often standing up straw men)

> Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.

This I strongly disagree with. You cannot an should not "only hope you've designed something good". You should also have evaluated in designing something good that you're not also designing something bad. That is your responsibility as well.

Don't make an information harvesting platform and then be dismayed when people use it to harvest information you don't think should be harvested. Don't make cell hacking software then be shocked that authoritarian govts use it to hack their citizens' phones. Don't put backdoors in software then be apalled that the "wrong" people use them.

> Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy,...

It is now. And I sincerly hope it continues to do so in the future. History, all of the above and the linked article on TikTok shows that "[letting] the progress of things take care the rest" means that it likely will not continue to do so in the future without diliberate concerted effort to ensure it does. When most of the internet looks and behaves like TikTok.

It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.

Clients host the content they access.

The real IP address of people hosting any particular content is discoverable.

Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list of targets.

Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.

This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a disproportionate level of political influence in the UK because he dominates media through which people watch and read about sports.

And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.

Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.

I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and, as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.

The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple people.

Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves.

The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both hurts and deepens the hole.

Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time. The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have been exploiting it for years.

Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused to take sputnik because why the fuck would you inject something into your arm because Putin told you to?

You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)

They're making no comment about why RT resonates, just that those people it does resonate with "are the problem".

By media I was referring exclusively to mainstream newspapers/sites, TV, etc. I realize that the way I used the term was slightly ambiguous.

We are the problem. Not the misinformed masses.

Is it really so irrational? How many people have the technical know-how and access to equipment to personally verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption? (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not conspiracy theorists who wonder if the vaccine will secretly kill us or render us infertile.

There are often good reasons to trust the official narrative. There are often good reasons to distrust it too, but placing trust in people and institutions is often not so irrational.

Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made that very easy. But trust is still something that needs to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have trustworthy institutions, I don’t think it’s something we can easily replace with technology.

Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without really verifying it. It's impossible to do so. Can any single person truly know how everything in their computer works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be manipulated.

I'd argue it's deeply unhealthy to have any trust at all in governments that have shown themselves to be authoritarian or oppressive.

The question is which institutions and people do we place trust in? When they contradict each other whom do you believe? Should we believe them sometimes but not others?

That's where people get irrational and antivaxxers are just one example of that.

Yes, it's blindingly self evident that you cant run your own vaccine trials.

The internet original was little else than implicit promises of such things, if not explicit. “It routes around censorship” and all that…

For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.

your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.

This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s

That freedom doesn't exist in two of the three countries involved here.

You seem to be implying that people just don't know, when it's exactly what they're talking about?

There isn't one at all here, so why is there any debate at all on the freedom of speech being violated?

You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".

Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in a way that states can't block, but it seems people are working on that...)

As I see it no corporation can be state agnostic unless you want a corporation more powerful then states themselves and you don’t want that either because a corporation is not beholden to the people.

In other words, you may have a legal freedom to express your opinions but nobody is forced to give you the platform to do so. It can become arbitrarily difficult to actually disseminate your opinions at the extreme. E.g. I may vehemently disagree with Trump's opinions, but I have to admit that I feel deeply uncomfortable with private entities controlling whether he gets heard or not.

At the same time, I don't have a good solution if I'm fully honest. Private entities absolutely should have the freedom to determine what they want published on their platforms. Maybe we need (as a society) realize that the social media has become a de-facto utility that needs to be provided as such, regulated as such and taken away from the hands of private entities?

It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your provider or registrar getting the word out becomes practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little ghetto that nobody reads.

At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy.

That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.

At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.

And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?

Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time.

EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).

Why? Neo-nazi sites have a long history of getting banned everywhere.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow...

It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion and virtue signaling.

eg. in belgium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU...

Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.

More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous.

World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany.

All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace.

The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win.

By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge.

During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters.

What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is.

The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them.

But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented.

The internet is not to blame.

The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).

It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted.

The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively.

The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now.

If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it.

Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast.

I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.

There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches.

The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far.

I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet.

It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.

People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know.

and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona.

I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network.

There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.

What has died is the idea of the internet. It is thoroughly balkanized now.

We're here on this internet talking. Things are different on other internets.

The original design was that individual state level actors couldn't sever access to the internet without significant investment.....

We just balkanized the internet in a different direction (walled gardens)

Platforms on the internet are not the internet, as much as people like to conflate them for the sake of the narrative.

Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

Perhaps that was before your time?

Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc.

It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies.

Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.