If you're not always looking for independent alternative sources of information and cross-checking claims from different sources while also looking for internal self-consistency then of course you're going to end up with a skewed perspective on reality engineered by some group of professional propagandists. Whether these PR specialists are working for governments or corporations in China, Russia or America is sort of besides the point.
There is a set of skills that's needed to objectively classify information that's found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books). Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons.
The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.
This state of information isn't the least bit new, but for some reason many of us are treating it like it is. Wealthy families, corporations, politicians, banks, and so on have always had their hands in what we get to see. The very idea that foreign enemy nations use propaganda has itself been used as a propaganda tactic many times.
What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic. People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so. In actuality, this is nonsense, given how many people manage to at least pass through high school, and how much time adults spend consuming entertainment. In their defense, it takes an inordinate amount of work to sift through the detritus that makes up at least 80% of prose on the internet; most articles simply can't get to the point, but I guess creative writing majors need something to do.
I truly think the best thing for the average person right now is to not take information-for-sale seriously. They are better off knowing less, not more. The idea that information has a linearly distributed benefit is a fallacy. The more information, the more vectors for pathological information.
Do you believe it is possible for one person to understand multiple topics in different fields as well as the experts in those fields? That seems like a massive unspoken assumption in your point of view here. If not, it seems like some level of trust in experts is the only possible way to know much about the world beyond the rudiments.
Yea, I always hear the "learn everything yourself, don't trust experts", and it makes little sense to me. I research an insane amount of things and read massive volumes of books, and videos on how to do things.... After this immense amount of learning I still know that I just know a drop in the bucket of what there is to know.
I would have to just spend all my time learning, and I'd never get shit done
Maybe what these people are trying to say poorly is "Try to learn enough about a topic that you can pick an actual expert out, rather than a bullshit salesman", but after talking to enough of these 'rugged individualist', I think what they are mostly saying (silently) is "Get ready to screw me over because I am massively over confident in my abilities"
Imagine if there is a government funded, independent company that does the in depth fact checking and analysis on the important, mass consumed information pieces. How much would that cost to operate for the government? A few mils per year? That's nothing for the gov and imagine how much value would this company bring to people/nation/world.
Maybe soon later we'll have an AI in place that would be checking whatever you're about to post/share and warn you, show you what you're posting from perspective you're not aware of etc.
Learn everything yourself is such an insanely reductionist strategy. Through a limited dalliance with spaced repetition learning techniques, I came to believe research that suggests there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory.
Unfortunately the number of facts you’d need to retain to be an expert in hold to maturity securities, vaccines, the military capabilities of Ukraine, the intricacies of section 230, and Delaware corporate law and how it relates to broken acquisitions (just to name five examples of things that most people on this site think they know a lot about) would exhaust the most capable mind’s capacity.
> there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory
Yep. Once you've tried to train yourself on too much data, your brain begins to hallucinate facts (more) similarly to an LLM. You'll be able to reject (most of?) these hallucinations, but you won't really have all the facts anymore.
I've tried to do this before and it doesn't end up with you being an expert in anything. It just ends up with you either being confused, or being confidently wrong. I hallucinate facts all the time.
This sounds plausible but directly contradicts the actual evidence about the best forecasters (according to David Epstein
"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World").
Nobody has to learn everything, and 99.9% of information being sold is not actionable for the average person. There's a world of difference between treating experts as priests and considering what experts have to say while not blindingly believing them.
I'm saying that they neither need to know very much nor offload all their reasoning to someone else.
Plenty of experts speak inappropriately on topics outside their realm of expertise. The culture should encourage people to recognize when this happens and choose whether to dismiss the expert. A perfect example is many doctors, in particular M.D.s, who profess often foolish or obsolete views on things like nutrition, something which is not within the expertise of an M.D. The same goes for scientists commenting on politics, or science outside their domain of research. Or 20-something journalists making predictions about fields in which they've never actually practiced in. A significant amount of misinformation would be inoculated against with the recognition of misplaced authority and abuse of power.
It's called not being so gullible, and it doesn't take that much general knowledge that the average human brain can't grasp it. I'm sorry if it comes off as the expectation that individuals be the experts in many fields themselves, because if that's where our imagination keeps taking us, then maybe there really is no hope.
> What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts
To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy.
The not-trusters seem most likely to fall for your wonderfully stated second idea, which I love,
> People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so.
The most vocal mainstream resistance seems extremely quick to accept & deeply believe alternate portrayals, ones that happen to fit the constructed narratives they want to believe. I think the mainstream actually does a much better job of having skeptical takes, but wow, our tolerance for the dreck demagoguery trash that people adopt has worn real thin.
> To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy.
Many of these "batshit crazy" folks appear to have been correct in hindsight.
Specialization in one area of information can be kind of rewarding. I like commodity news (oil, food, minerals, water, etc.) and tech manufacturing so I try to keep up on those areas. Mainstream media isn't really that great for this, in comparison to speciality business journals, various websites, government reports and so on.
Focusing on one area gives you a 'window on reality', but it's going to be limited, i.e. I really don't know what to think about all the culture war news, or general finance that's not specifically related to commodities and manufacturing, or anything in the 'true crime' world, or much in the way of electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. Still, knowing something reliable about how droughts and floods have affected rice production in China and why rice prices are rising makes me feel like I have at least some marginal grasp on what's going on in the real world.
It has taken me years to become expert level in just the things I do, there is vast range of knowledge I have, and yet because of the knowledge I have, I know that I barely know shit.
>we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic.
This is what happens in the US because of our political system that loves turning everything in to L/R, Us/Them means of thinking.
It's very expensive (a lot of work) to be so rigorous in verifying information. Forgoing trust is expensive, whether we're on this subject or talking about Proof of Work algorithms. It'd be great if we had trustworthy institutions who could distill the truth for us (hah!) but of course if such an institution accumulates public trust, that naturally makes them a target for capture by propagandists.
One of the points made in Manufacturing Consent is that it’s so much work to cut through everything and become well informed on a subject it’s a miracle if someone manages for one topic. It doesn’t matter if someone nobody is listening to publishes the truth for the more sophisticated propagandist.
> One of the points made in Manufacturing Consent is that it’s so much work to cut through everything and become well informed on a subject it’s a miracle if someone manages for one topic.
Sadly, the author of Manufacturing Consent became a great illustration of that point.
This is a genuinely fascinating[0] problem that's become more impactful with the ease of spreading messages and the importance of public opinion. I see both sides of it in how I want to believe[1] that I know truthful facts (which I attempt to accomplish with what I believe[1] to be healthy skepticism) and how effortful it can be to (attempt to[1]) achieve that.
[0] It feels a little wrong to say "fascinating" given the gruesome methods by which some choose to hold on to their control of information. It is nonetheless something which often captures my attention.
Sadly there is practically no profit potential in solving this problem and capitalism has a tendency to drive it to ruin.
People will pay you - both directly and indirectly - to shift the opinions of others. That can be wildly profitable. People are reluctant to pay for access to informative and genuinely objective news and information, though.
It either gets treated as a public good that is nurtured with public money or strict rules (e.g. fairness doctrine) or the river of information gets filled up with toxic sludge that becomes fertile breeding ground even for flat earth conspiracies.
Thanks to very-forgiving laws on things like how accurate advertising has to be, and tolerance for pages and pages of legal terms required to engage in so many common activities, in the US the average citizen has so much to worry about just in terms of "am I going to get ripped off if I buy this / sign this contract" that there's gonna be even less available mental energy or care to give to "is this person making sense in their interpretation of the news" and such.
I'm tired of this ludicrous insinuation that a free and independent press either doesn't exist or if it does it should never be trusted. I regularly read opposing viewpoints or even self criticism in the established media. Your claims are wild and impossible to disprove.
There is a free and independent press, but they're not the ones owned by Bezos and friends. This leads into OP's point - that you need to always be doing the work yourself of triangulating on the best approximation of the truth. If you give that up, then you're a prime candidate for manipulation.
Make no mistake, there are strong and concerted efforts by very powerful organizations to control what the masses see. And you will see some dissent even within places like the NY Times, but there are real bounds to expressible thought (all the news that's fit to print). Others have covered this ground for decades a lot better than myself.
> I'm tired of this ludicrous insinuation that a free and independent press either doesn't exist or if it does it should never be trusted.
I don't think all journalists deliberately serve some agenda, but it's very easy to find instances of reputable medias being incorrect or extremely biased. It's not that they should never be trusted, but it's important to remain critical even with reputable new sources.
It's not the free or lack of free press that's the problem. Fox's audience wants to be lied to, and there are countless people in the US and elsewhere that are honestly just done thinking about the complexity of the world. No free press can break through that.
"Eveyone that disagrees with me is stupid and easily manipulated, not smart like me"
I think alot of people watch Fox because its currently the only news channel that provides coverage of poor Democrat behaviour. That doesnt mean they agree with everything that is said.
To be fair, they’re guilty of not silencing a couple of their opinion hosts for a couple of days. Multiple anchors angrily shut down the story on-air on more than one occasion, and Tucker Carlson was so skeptical he made an enemy of Trump.
Maybe someone should have gone after the politicians and media and filmmakers that claimed Diebold stole the Ohio election for Bush and this could have been nipped in the bud.
>>I'm tired of this ludicrous insinuation...I regularly read opposing viewpoints
>The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
What specific claims are wild and impossible to disprove? I didn't see anything of that in the above statement. Only, don't rely on once source for your information. Also the article, paired with the tone of this site, causes me to second guess the premise because it looks like this site writes a lot of sensation pieces, similar to daily mail which does in fact, skew the facts to get people to be polarized. There is an article on Wikipedia banning source information from Daily Mail [1] that you would do well to read as this site seems to fall right under that spectrum.
> The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.
That is true, but this particular author is from F.I.R.E. - a nonprofit free speech advocacy group. You can probably assume that such a group would present a particular kind of opinion.
The media love to report on the media. There is no bad press and the self criticism praises as much as criticizes. 'How they got it wrong' is a common story you get to buy.
Yeah but that's not helpful for primary sources. For instance, if the NYT reports that WMDs have been found in Iraq and that a trustworthy source says so but Fox News says this is not the case, what do you consider the truth?
For national security reasons, you can't look at the evidence.
> For national security reasons, you can't look at the evidence.
If we can't look at the evidence, then it's probably highly distorted. Especially if it's for 'national security' reasons -- the ultimate 'ends justify the means' context. No matter what nation we are talking about.
I don't think your experience is mutually exclusive with theirs. Do you think "you're not always looking for independent alternative sources of information and cross-checking claims from different sources" as per OP's comment?
Certain groups? I think everyone in government, in all parties, would oppose that education - because their own propaganda would become less effective too. Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, or the pitfalls of a two-party system?
Except that they do talk about rcv and gerrymandering. And the two party system is intrinsically linked to our "preferred" voting method. If no one in power is talking about RCV how is it being implemented in various states?
It was one political party which proposed and supported the Freedom to Vote Act and the For the People Act which would have made political gerrymandering illegal across the country and increased access to voting and exactly one of our parties who stood against it. I know people like to pretend they are above politics and will "both sides" everything to death. But all you have to do is look at what is being proposed and who is supporting what with their votes to see past that FUD.
They did specify government "authoritarians". It's not much of a stretch to think that they don't believe "everyone in government" is an authoritarian.
>Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting
They tend to be more fine with this sort of thing if the fix isn't on the cards politically.
E.g. you will see some nuclear attacks on the idea of raising the minimum wage from the media when it is being debated in Congress, while that same media will often fawn over political pipe dreams like basic income.
The Russian bots will pull this trick where they set up, e.g. a facebook page for "proud Texan cowboy dads" and then funnel innocuous stuff they will agree with 99% of the time and then 1% of the time push stuff that really matters to them ("why are we sending yet more money to Ukraine when proud Texans at home are suffering!").
This isn't controversial to state. I think it's clear that they do this - what is controversial to state is that this is exactly what the rest of the "legitimate" media does exactly the same thing on behalf of the oligarchy who own it.
A non-skewed perspective on reality requires knowing everything. Even if this was possible, no one has the time to do it. Not even the propagandists.
What's important is identifying what is important to you, and understanding all of the factors and facts related primarily to that, and a few of the ones related secondarily to that. Then you can spot check some of these other factors and facts to determine their accuracy and validity.
I’m unsure why the word epistemology is omitted from these conversations so frequently. Fundamentally I feel that’s the underlying thing that’s difficult
That is what we're looking at, in a word. The quality of our knowledge-getting.
What we need is some kind of automated process for ensuring that the knowledge that the machine poops out is of the highest possible quality. Something that checks it every step of the way, from observation to cheeseburger.
Your story of zombies, elitism, and government conspiracy is intriguing.
I will also agree that propaganda is a thing.
BUT…
The real culprit is the HUMAN BRAIN.
1. Strong information and media literacy are correlated primarily to psychological well-being.
2. The work of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Zak, and countless experts in behavioral economics, media literacy, and psychology have done studies demonstrating how the brain makes cognition error regardless of a persons education or socioeconomic status when handling various types of input.
3. People’s reasoning abilities are deficient with respect to the laws of logic and probability which obviously impacts their ability to be information or media literate.
4. It’s not a problem that has an obvious financial benefit to the organization or person who solves it by providing training or engineering a pill for it.
> "People’s reasoning abilities are deficient with respect to the laws of logic and probability which obviously impacts their ability to be information or media literate."
My whole point, which most responses have ignored, is that the skills needed to test media claims for veracity are learnable, trainable, understandable, etc. I mean, not a single comment has addressed the notion of internal self-consistency, which in mathematical terms is called, 'contradiction'. A person who claims it's okay for them to steal from their neighbor, but not for their neighbor to steal from them, can safely be laughed out of the room.
If I may suggest a way to train yourself up on this, I’d like to suggest an approach which I learned from the writer Francine Prose in one of her composition courses.
The method is simply this: for half a year, every week, go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
Do this solidly 25 times and you will begin to see the outlines of exactly the set of skills that you need to objectively classify information that’s found on the Internet. This is a simple and highly effective training technique that uses the mass variety of news sites on the Internet for an educational purpose. Once you begin to see and compare the narratives underlying most “news”, they will be impossible to un-see
>go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
The problem with this is, if the three publishers have been funded by the same pharmaceutical company, NGO, or intelligence agency, they are likely to produce nearly-identical stories on $PARTICULAR_ISSUE.
Alright, and what do you suggest? There seems to be some wild push to make people never believe anything and degrade the role of the press as things are in an authoritarian system. Very interesting derailments in this comment section about an article that speaks poorly of authoritarians such as Xi.
Well I think parent's comment is now obsolete. The new truth is going to be a blurry middle ground between establishment media, independent media (substack, Twitter-based disclosures), and public scientific disclosures.
The unwashed masses that led J6 "did their own research" yet still qualify as brainwashed zombies. There's so much shit in the channels and so much polarization that appealing to people learning how to think critically will fix everything is one of the biggest myths of the 21st century. And in my opinion, this attitude is wildly elitist. Because lets face it, critical thinking is only something a small %age of humans are good at, and I don't include myself it that sub-population and I'm pretty goddamn smart, smart enough to know when I'm stupid.
>Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age
Not doable, because you require at least an IQ of 110 to see through the lies. Half of the population has a below average IQ, the number is significantly larger if one way to consider an IQ 110 to be the threshold and this means they are always gullible and susceptible to the propaganda of the government.
> The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.
While I agree with you, I don't think challenging this is wise.
A large number of people lack the fundamental intellect required for critical thinking. Give them a nugget of truth (or even a total falsehood) and they will extrapolate it to the point of an entire ideology (QAnon)...because they're smarter than the rest of us idiots, see. They have critical thinking skills!
Thanks to the internet anybody can appoint themselves a source of truth, which just results in chaos. A mentally-ill loudmouth can turn entire segments of the country against itself (and I'm not even taking potshots at anybody in particular). Fewer sources of information is better domestic policy for the masses.
Let the critical thinkers seek out third-party sources to do their own verification. Let the masses eat from a common trough so they don't cause a stampede.
The battle is lost already in many ways... We have let many companies become so embedded that if they backed out there would be no other options for the services and infrastructure they provide (this even includes news services, and especially includes social media services).
Right now ELon Musk is applying dangerously dictatorial tactics in turning Twitter from a free service into a paid service.. Years after the entire world has become invested into it as a new and communication tool... Many will say it's his right to do whatever he wants, but those are the same people too short sighted to understand how Nestle controls water in foreign countries... We are all plagued by that short sightedness and greed, while there are far better answers to things like this while still operating in a capitalistic system.
We all give far too much credit to the authoritarian elitist crowd. If you are born into so much money that you can fail multiple times and simply rebuild, you're NOT a genius. We need to stop deluding everyone with this supremacy narrative, because it's just fueling monopolies and inequality and destroying opportunity in our world.
Just being aware about how news is being manipulated, and scanning multiple sources to determine truth isn't enough... We need to place proper expectations on government to reign in companies and tax the wealthy properly, while also reducing lower and middle class tax rates, otherwise, this is all a new version of covert mental control and opportunistic indentured labor. Get rid of "bosses" that ideal is far too outdated for progress, Not even the president is properly respected by congress anyway, so we need to update our business models to a more democratic leadership ecosystem.
Something I've been chewing on is legitimacy by process vs. outcome (means vs. end). We have far too long said if the means are done fairly (Musk bought Twitter legitimately, Zuck founded and unilaterally controls Facebook mostly legally), then we have to accept the outcome, even if that outcome is detrimental to the wider society. We just have to stop accepting that. Corporate law, money, etc. are all made up and are sold to the wider population as net boons to society. Why can't we dissolve and/or nationalize companies when they cease to be beneficial or have distinct negatives?
Copyright, patents, LLCs, publicly-traded companies, etc., all nominally exist to benefit society at large. They're not supposed to be this game of "I called shotgun so suck it!"
This is so naive in the extreme. Who decides the ‘societal good?’ Some centralized moralizing force, that will no doubt be in disagreement with large swathes of the rest of the nation. Thinking that FB is some kind of powerful national threat that must be managed by the government seems absurd.
Many of the alternatives to "a majority vote decides what's good or bad" are even worse. Lots of ink spilled on the downsides of kings or on anarchy vs some sort of democratic system.
What the poster is proposing about cracking down on large powerful companies isn't even particularly troublesome Constitutionally in the US; but even then, as with any other sort of regulations, Constitutional restrictions on what the legitimate government can and can't do can be taken too far, or can get outdated.
Hacker News is one of the most communist leaning forums online, while at the same time strongly supportive of US government policy. How those two go together you'll have to ask somebody else. Any thread you read will have "regulation and government nationalization" as the answer. It's the modern day equivalent of "God will fix it"
HN is one of the most pro-capitalist forums ever. Literally created by venture capitalists to promote capitalism and further capitalists' aims. I visit this site because sometimes Reddit is too much of a progressive echo-chamber.
> Since I have you, what do you consider communism?
To start with, nationalizing mass media and the press.
> Literally created by venture capitalists to promote capitalism and further capitalists' aims.
Capitalism and communism go hand in hand. If you don't believe me, read the communistic manifesto. Marx writes again and again that they need capitalism first before they can introduce communism. The ideologies are not each other's opposite.
Media companies, including Twitter and Facebook and CNN, aren't that hard to replace. The replacement doesn't need to look exactly the same, or run at the same scale, or have all the same features, people will adapt just as they did to move to those platforms in the first place.
>>Don't you see that's the way to eliminate the power of the bots
That's the sales line.
The reality is that "verification" now means nothing more than you have an email and a credit/debit with a limit more than $8, and you can claim to be anyone you want.
Within hours, scores of fake "official" govt accounts are up [0]. If you don't think that is somehow beneficial to scammers and disruptive bots, I'd like to talk to you about some great oceanfront property in Kansas!
There is also the Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum account being unverified while the account of a prominent Nazi propagandist is [1].
The result is that anyone running a bot/troll account can put up any face they want and purchase amplified reach (not merely speech) for $8/month - an astonishing deal
Beyond effectively destroying the value of the Blue Check verification status to convey validation, it has now turned into a badge of shame that no serious person wants. Musk already knows this, and is trying to counteract it by leaving legacy valuable badges on certain celebrities, such as Stephen King, who explicitly denies paying [2]
The Blue Check has become a toxic symbol, and this is reflected in new terms o service [3], where you cannot turn it off, even by cancelling the subscription.
The economic reality is that Twitter's core value proposition was the presence of verified and active govt accounts, news accounts, and celebrity accounts. It was their content that people came to see and interact.
By allowing anyone to pay a small fee to impersonate anyone, Musk has made verification worthless and even toxic.
It literally renders nearly worthless the very thing Musk wants people to pay for.
And, beyond doing nothing to suppress bots, this enables them as never before.
How is a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' worse than a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from, say, Newsmax and OAN?
hahaha, welcome to feeling what it's like living in "the rest of the world".
Since the inception of the internet and social media, what is and isn't acceptable to post online has been governed by American culture standards. Murder and violence? Absolutely fine. My wife showing partial nipple on a picture of her breastfeeding on Facebook? Instant ban!
Personally, I think the only way for social media companies to play this and not lose, is to hand over the reigns of censorship to each country, to govern for themselves.
If India wants to ban some content; cool, Facebook gives them an API/dashboard, and they can remove that content themselves.
An American state wants to ban nipples and LGBT content? Cool. Florida government can dedicate some headcount to combating that, Reddit/FB/Google just give them some tools for self service.
Of course, the effect of that censorship is only applied to requests coming from IP addresses within that region, and doesn't affect the rest of the world.
Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce.
"Social media companies; stop letting random governments of the world hold you accountable for censorship. Put the onus on them, provide them the tools, and blame them for their own failing strategy that they can't enforce."
I mean, it seems like China does a pretty good (not perfect) job of censoring things. Not too long ago[1] Cisco (IIRC) and other companies were taking heat because they were providing China with tools that could be used for the "Great Firewall." Now we want to make it self-service...
The kick in the teeth about letting other countries censor / require censorship by U.S.-based companies is that we have been told over and over again that free trade and globalism was going to lead to a freer society.
Basically - full steam ahead on capitalism and trading with oppressive regimes, we'll have a good influence on them and wear down censorship, etc.
The opposite has happened. U.S.-based companies have become reliant on trade with those regimes to the point that they'll generally bow to censorship instead of pushing human rights.
(I'm very well aware that "American culture standards" are deeply imperfect, particularly as implemented by Facebook, et al. I'm not in favor of bowing to the most puritanical and hypocritical forces in the U.S., either...)
I think what you’re missing is that to many of us in the rest of the world, the US is the oppressive regime violating human rights and forcing other countries to bow down.
Or, govern this stuff under international treaty. Internet traffic _is not_ like truck traffic. It's more like radio (in some places it is radio). It's the Ross Sea, not I-95. What gives any one nation (or subdivision, like a certain US state known for its leading position at the Darwin Awards) the right to meddle with a global resource like that? Well, as a practical matter, they rarely do. Instead, they usually let the oligarchs who own the ruling elites (as well as the infrastructure) in each country do it: except when it's more convenient to use government as a hammer.
The radio spectrum is a finite resource that can only be (reasonably) consumed locally. The internet is for all intents and purposes infinite.
One of the purposes of government is to oversee the distribution of scarce resources in a way that avoids the tragedy of the commons.
This use case clearly applies to the EM spectrum allocation and clearly doesn't apply to the internet so I think comparing the internet and radio is a flawed analogy.
This. With all of this AI/image recognition stuff, it'd be relatively easy to allow people to maintain a list of filters and when someone posts nudity, profanity, etc., just obscure it in their feed and present a "this is something you asked us to filter out <keyword>, proceed with caution" or just hide it entirely. Put the individual in control, and force them to create a list (if they wish) on next app open with a timestamp of if/when they declined to set something.
As for the concern about disinformation, ignore the content and watch the action. If some guy in the hills of Arkansas wants to think "them dems are lizard people" but doesn't show any signs of taking action, who cares (rhetorical)? If they show signs of action, follow the usual path of legal recourse/escalate to the proper authority.
> This. With all of this AI/image recognition stuff, it'd be relatively easy to allow people to maintain a list of filters and when someone posts nudity, profanity, etc., just obscure it in their feed and present a "this is something you asked us to filter out <keyword>, proceed with caution" or just hide it entirely. Put the individual in control, and force them to create a list (if they wish) on next app open with a timestamp of if/when they declined to set something.
Or even without AI tools. All this stuff is a complete non-issue on my extended-friend-group WhatsApps and my family text message threads. It was never a problem when I ran a private forum for people I knew, years and years ago. Mixing private communication with people you know with a global broadcast system seems to be what causes the problem to exist in the first place. Ordinary actual-humans-you-know communication channels don't need some 3rd-party censor, and for the most part don't even call for end-user-tunable censorship tools, beyond being able to leave & form groups or maybe set images to click/tap-to-view or something. Nothing sophisticated, certainly.
But why not? They weren't threatened with legal action (and if they were, the correct solution would be to undo the law that they were threatened with). They were attacked by the same moral busybodies who have been clutching their pearls over violent video games since at least I was a kid. The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.
That's already available. Turns out, admin moderation is still necessary to make the website tolerable.
Besides, boards generally have just 150 threads running at once. If the majority of the live threads are just spammed crap, that makes everything worse. If there are 100 topics with lively discussion and 10 or so spam threads that haven't been culled yet, no problem. If there are 80 spam threads, then there's going to be a ton of churn as everyone competes for the other 70 threads. Each new one bumps another off the site. There'll be discussions started anew, with the same crap filling it up because people think they have to say it every time. This is what happens on fast-moving boards.
And one could ask "Why not change the number of live threads? Or never retire threads?"
To which I'd respond, "If you have to keep recommending changes to fix what your other changes cause, maybe the original change wasn't good."
1. Users themselves have to see the stuff to filter it. This kind of work has burned out scores of classifiers. There's some really, really horrible stuff out there
2. The job will be left to people to make content filters. And those people would need to look at the stuff to filter it. And face legal consequence to doing so. And probably not get much compensation
Who or what group would fill #2? It would either be a group that sought to profit from it, or a group funded by governments, or a group that wanted to be at the node point for the spread of such material, or a group that wanted to influence society (e.g. for spam, or a foreign government seeking to mess with a society, etc)
It is hard to fathom the sheer volume of horrible content our filters deal with unless you've done any sort of moderation. And usually if you're doing moderation you're well downstream of the worst bits.
It takes one mildly determined person and 30 dollars to rent a server farm to post 150 threads of garbage, and there goes everything else on the catalog.
edit: actually, in the world where there's _zero_ moderation then you probably wouldn't even need the server farm since there wouldn't be any risk of being IP flagged.
Filtering is a game of constant whack a mole. That's why mods and janitors are used to do it, because it would be overwhelming if it was on each and every user and, you'd spend the bulk of your time online seeing egregious content and updating your filters, as well as dealing with the stress of actually seeing that graphic stuff.
Images of child pornography are not protected under First Amendment rights, and are illegal contraband under federal law. Section 2256 of Title 18, United States Code, defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor.
>The correct solution here is to completely ignore those people and keep ignoring them.
Until they attack you with the law. You'll quickly find out that ignoring judges leads to bad outcomes.
Now, whatever they say could be total bullshit, and you could defend yourself and get paid damages, but not defending yourself at all is how you end up in deep debt or prison.
Meta are dominant in their sector across the globe. Of course they follow American standards, but their dominance insures the rest of the world goes by American standards.
Indeed there's no laws in the US that protect violent images whole covering the body, but that is the cultural standard which has been exported around the world.
I get that you're making a point that, why give control abroad to governments when I'm the US companies self censor?
First, what goes into the hands of companies versus the state also various culturally, and the US does have content laws other than the one you highlighted.
About the cultural standards, what would be normal in some other parts of the world? At least in the US, parents don't want porn showing up on kids' social media, and a sizeable number of adults at least don't want other people to see it on their screen. Big social media site like FB probably has to encode this as a "no nudity" rule.
I'm not sure about the violent images. There are definitely rules against showing bodily harm on FB, but I have no idea where the line is.
What would be normal? Like the poster above said, if my family goes to the beach and we take our shirts off, my girlfriend would be censored on Meta services but I wouldn't.
Notice that your comment equates nudity with pornography. Where I'm from it's not normal to do that.
I didn't equate nudity and pornography, and Americans don't do that. I'm asking if porn is normal elsewhere (answer was no) and saying FB moderation board might be lumping them together because there aren't fair ways to designate porn vs not.
If there's a social media site in some other country that doesn't have those rules, that'd be a good example.
What Americans see is already censored - by Americans. If you want to know what a whichever prescribed political leader is saying, you are not going to get it from the local media establishment, you're going to have to go to official transcripts from the government of that prescribed political leader, and no doubt risk ending up on an FBI database as a result.
This is true for all government systems, the more you dig into it, they are all just different flavours of a system of control, less Perl vs Python more PHP7.3 vs PHP7.4
They alter transcripts. The examples I have seen have been done to fix "flubs" of the Presidential Administration but a simple 'fix' done with care can subtly alter the message for future readers and I believe sets a dangerous precedent. However, for all I know this has been common practice for some time, but I have only seen evidence of this occuring recently.
Decades ago, the American media colluded to hide FDR's physical condition from the American public.
Many doubtlessly think this was good, because a physical disability shouldn't reflect poorly on his leadership abilities. But there is no guarantee that such collective blindness will always be done in the 'good' way, whatever that is.
I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position. Different matter of course if official transcriptions were altered by unauthorised parties
"I don't mind transcripts being altered if it reflects the officially endorsed position."
Can't you see how this "officially endorsed position" editing would be a dangerous thing? Transcripts should be an exact representation of what occurred.
why - please explain? What actually needs to be known is exactly the official policy, this is more important than the exact words used. Right now, we are reliant on media to reinterpret what was said, with the inevitable decontextualisation and reframing that comes along with it. This is the practice of propaganda
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See people, this is why free speech must be absolute. The moment you let someone become the gatekeeper, they will absolutely use that leverage for their own benefit, at your expense.
What is worse? Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?
Show me one country where free speech has ever been absolute. At a minimum "fighting words" and libel/slander usually have criminal or civil penalties against them. Then there's stuff like IP law where reproducing certain speech can have civil or even criminal penalties.
Statements like "free speech must be absolute" are basically zero content because they don't engage with the nuance of the debate, but they sure sound good.
We most certainly don't, but it's an interesting thought exercise whether it's a better model than everything else we have seen so far. Of course, it asks for very different trade-offs. For instance, you should be willing to forgoe libel/slander laws and allow people to smear the shit out of each other. It means people will need to figure out for themselves whom to listen to, but honestly, I don't think the situation is any different today.
It also means scrutinising things like copyright and questioning whether they are a net value to society. These policies have since forever been driven by corporations to serve their own interests. There's good arguments to be made that their concerns about loss in revenue are largely overblown. You can implement policies that restrict monetisation of copyright content without putting restrictions on what individuals can express.
Of course these are fairly naive ideas, and there are likely many more problems we haven't touched here, but the point is that there are options. It is worth thinking about them because the alternative as we see doesn't seem to be working out. There's a trend around the world where countries are moving more and more towards authoritarianism. At the same time, the wealth gap is ever increasing and I don't think these two are unrelated. I think the common people are getting an overall raw deal on this planet and really need to think through what policies will benefit them most.
> For instance, you should be willing to forgoe libel/slander laws and allow people to smear the shit out of each other. It means people will need to figure out for themselves whom to listen to, but honestly, I don't think the situation is any different today.
Anyone who's had a conversation with someone who was relentlessly bullied should know this is how you increase suicide rates and/or mass shootings.
These are perspectives that you, personally, are comfortable with. I, however, am not. It would be unfair to advocate that myself, and many others, are subjected to what can be considered a living hell.
> See people, this is why free speech must be absolute.
No, it's why, in a lot of cases, free speech doesn't really work the way you think it works. Private interests have all kinds of ways to influence speech that don't require the threat of violence.
>Allowing fringe boneheads to spew hate and lies or allowing powerful people to do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability?
Powerful people can do evil and damage livelihoods with zero culpability under free speech absolutism. Fox News just paid a large sum because they harmed a company's business with (repeated and knowingly false) speech.
We don't even need absolutism to see zero culpability. I personally believe my representative shares blame in the deaths during the January 6th riot, because he disgustingly egged on the "stop the steal" movement. Despite that, he won't be charged with anything because of freedom of speech. I'm not okay with this specific result, but I do accept it because the alternative is a frightening world (people are convicted for kicking off a chain of dangerous events because "We just know" they understood the consequences).
Everything, including speech, is used by powerful people to benefit themselves at your expense.
> Sony let North Korea censor what US audiences saw, for a while.
This is a very bad mischaracterization of what happened: North Korea blackmailed Sony over The Interview, threatening retaliation. Sony didn't censor themselves to make headway into the North Korean market.
If I provide services to a dictator because the dictator is giving me a boatload of money, that makes me a bad person. If I provide services to a dictator because the dictator says they'll kill my family otherwise, that makes me a victim.
On Reddit, whenever China is even remotely applicable you will see the top comments mocking and flaming Xi. India is less extreme (not on random posts) but the vast majority of https://reddit.com/r/India criticizes Modi as well (and on random posts there's general India negativity and sometimes even racism in other subs). Other platforms I'm on (including HN) also give no sympathy to dictators.
> In June 2014, the North Korean government threatened action against the United States if Sony released the film. As a result, Sony delayed the release from October to December and reportedly re-edited the film to make it more acceptable to North Korea. In November, the computer systems of Sony were hacked by the "Guardians of Peace", a North Korean cybercrime group. The group also threatened terrorist attacks against theaters showing the film. This led to major theater chains opting not to release the film, and Sony instead releasing it for online digital rental and purchase on December 25, 2014, followed by a limited release at selected theaters the next day.
Disney also includes stuff that gets them banned in some countries that could have easily been omitted without harming the story at all.
"Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness" was banned in a few Mideast countries because in a brief scene that has a character from a different universe showing how she ended up traveling between universes she is seen with two women and refers to them as her two moms.
"Onward" was banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia because a female cyclops minor character mentions her girlfriend.
In both of those instances, I'm pretty sure the references in question were intentionally easy to remove so they could be submitted to the Chinese authorities for approval. Laughably apparently there was an Epoch Times newspaper box in the background of Doctor Strange MoM (Because it's NY and of course there is) and that got the movie rejected.
As someone who has spent the last 15 years living abroad in various countries, and socializing with local people, I've begun to realize that the things you see online are heavily controlled by many factors. Dictators are one party that I feel strongly shouldn't have the power to censor what I say do. But I also don't want Mark Zuckerberg or Capital One bank or Digital Ocean to censor what I can see, but they all do it and I don't think that's any better.
Browsing through the replies in this thread, it's apparent why we have tech boss censorship and always will - most people, sadly, actually do want censorship and defend and even advocate for it.
Acting on behalf of adversarial governments is fine too if you register with the government. In the case linked above they didn't do that and conspired to keep the fact they took orders from Moscow hidden.
I think we would all agree on that, but don't you see a risk that this labeling could be abused pretty easily to punish dissidents or any other enemy of powerful people?
Is someone charged with drunk driving just "labeling"? What about manslaughter? First degree murder? Treason?
Someone being charged with a crime is a completely different thing to someone "being labeled" and trying to downplay the severity of the former to try and extend it to this hypothetical is telling.
When the West does it, it's called NGOs. When the East does it, it's called malign influence. Maybe it's time the West retire the free word from its world. It's two worlds at odds. And none of them is free (though in one you do definitively have a bit more rights and a semi-functional legal system).
The Espionage Act has been on the books for a century now and it was definitely used to punish dissidents. In some sense nothing new. But don’t be naive. There are plenty of countries waging various forms of attack against America at all times and there should be laws to thwart these attacks. The implementation and enforcement is key. Simply relying on abstract principles is the core danger of such a law, hence the need for a court that is itself accountable to the electorate. Either way the risks are abstract. The implementation is the key.
To confuse matters, many of these attacks aren't so much against America, as against the concept of liberal democracy.
To uphold liberal democratic values is to support the free speech that makes these attacks possible. The old 20th century style of propaganda was mostly ineffectual. The modern tactic of flooding public discourse with bullshit is much more effective. At some point people concede that maybe the shills and useful idiots working for the dictators do raise some valid points, so who knows what to believe.
As near as I can tell conducting a “malign influence campaign” isn’t an actual criminal charge that can be brought against someone in the US. The people in that article were charged with illegally acting on behalf of a foreign government without registration. Americans continue to be free to conduct malign influence campaigns to their hearts’ content so long as they aren’t doing it on behalf of a foreign government. Between politics, lobbying, social media, and general advertising, we have a massive and thriving malign influence industry here in the land of the free.
Given how willing people are to believe that [russia|china|insert other boogey man] are behind every bump in the night, that leaves you only one "person familiar with the matter" away from serious trouble.
E.g. Elliekelly's comment had all the classic earmarks of russian disinformation campaigns, said an unnamed expert familiar with the matter.
One need not "be careful". One simply need not act as an agent to a government adversarial to the U. S. I, for instance, have never "been careful" the whole time I've lived in the U. S., and no FBI agents knock on my door.
It's illegal for foreign nationals to fund domestic elections. Don't participate in a conspiracy to influence domestic US elections by funding or directing them. It's pretty simple.
It's rather hard for the government to make these charges stick, which is why there are so few prosecutions for this. So if someone's formally charged, they done goofed. Presumption of innocence aside, the government isn't going to move on this case unless there's compelling evidence it happened.
So you gonna show me where the law carves out specific countries?
(4) Foreign election interference
The term “foreign election interference” means conduct by a foreign person that—
(A)
(i) violates Federal criminal, voting rights, or campaign finance law; or
(ii) is performed by any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of, or in coordination with, a foreign government or criminal enterprise; and
(B) includes any covert, fraudulent, deceptive, or unlawful act or attempted act, or knowing use of information acquired by theft, undertaken with the specific intent to significantly influence voters, undermine public confidence in election processes or institutions, or influence, undermine confidence in, or alter the result or reported result of, a general or primary Federal, State, or local election or caucus, including—
(i) the campaign of a candidate; or
(ii) a ballot measure, including an amendment, a bond issue, an initiative, a recall, a referral, or a referendum.
> is performed by any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of, or in coordination with, a foreign government or criminal enterprise
I think the disconnect is that some orgs that people might think work on behalf of a foreign govt aren't registered as such because they don't receive funding from there, like AIPAC. This has been a contentious topic.
Tech companies can choose to obey laws of a foreign country to gain access to their populace. I don't really see the controversy, US first amendment rights don't apply beyond our borders. This article is an incredulous take considering the increase in censorship within the US media-sphere which actually violates the law.
First of all, from a purely legal perspective, the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech.
Secondly, the article is saying that tech companies are starting to censor speech in the USA that dictators in China or authoritarian leaders in India don't like.
It is positing a slippery slope where you may one day soon be banned from Twitter globally for posting an image of Winnie the Pooh, which would be done in order for Twitter to gain and maintain access to the Chinese market.
> the first ammendment has nothing to say on whether a private company can or can't censor speech
Yes, but the first amendment _does_ bear on whether or not a private company can or can't be compelled by the state to censor speech, which is what OP was referring to.
The first amendment directly powers section 230 of the communications decency act which gives these companies the legal right to host whatever they want. So the first amendment has everything to do with what a private company can or cannot say.
Doing 3 minutes of research on this topic lead me to the Indian posters page, in which he doesn't even remember the context of his tweet and has reposted the screenshot. He has dozens of tweets discussing censorship, they're all up and available.
Tbh this just sounds like incompetence rather than malevolence, which considering Musk's bungling overhaul of Twitter shouldn't surprise anyone.
Sufficient incompetence can be indistinguishable from malice. For example, it's possible Elon may have fired all the teams that review and push back on government complaints -- effectively ensuring that any large government can report and block tweets through a portal that has no reviewing staff. Even if true, the fact that Elon did this through ineptitude would not change the final result, namely that foreign governments can now block Tweets in the USA at will, with little oversight and pushback from Twitter.
Perhaps such incompetence will be corrected. But it is definitely worrying that Twitter has continued to keep the content blocked even after multiple news articles brought it to public attention. To me that takes it from "whoopsy daisy we made a mistake" to "we do not intend to/are not capable of correcting this mistake." One can apply the principle of charity too liberally.
The problem, IMO, isn't that they blocked a tweet in India based on a request from India. The problem is that Twitter blocked a tweet globally based on a request from India.
The founders of the United States thought it was too dangerous to let a democratic government influence the media, which is why we have the first amendment.
Rival nations with totalitarian governments are now exercising control over US media to cover up terrible human rights abuses and influence US politics...and your only feeling on the subject is "meh not illegal"?
Foreign propaganda is an existential threat to a democracy, we can't look the other way as us media giants cede control to other nations.
I have no problem with companies that censor for their international audiences, since asking them not to do it is akin to asking them to simply be banned in an overwhelming number of places. I think the advantages to having American companies operate abroad in many places is probably worth making this trade off.
I DO think we need legislation stop this censorship from affecting Americans though, because that's a tradeoff not worth making. And companies have a very clear profit motive in these cases to comply.
>>Midjourney CEO David Holz announced last year that his program would explicitly forbid users to create images of China’s Xi Jinping. Users who attempt to do so are threatened with a ban. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” Holz posted on Discord, according to The Washington Post. He added that “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”
It is not about the ability of people in China to use their tech that is more important than our ability to to generate satire — it's Holz' ability to make money.
And if he thinks that some people's ability to use it at all is more important than all user's ability to use it freely (without CCP's blessing on every pixel), I'd suggest he needs to rethink freedom vs authoritarianism.
"Tech Bosses" are dictators and I'm always surprised that most people have absolutely zero intellectual challenge suspending the values of democracy for 8-12 hours a day.
Virtually all of the rights we learn about in grade school are suspended in the workplace. And while employees do have the ability to quit, they a.) still have to find some other dictator to work for and b.) are much more heavily impacted by a loss of income than the employer is the individual loss of skill.
So the dictators we work for day in and day out are aligned with other dictators. You aren't entitled to free speech in your office, so why would you expect to the people running your office to care about your free speech after hours?
edit: I'm still surprised that people are incapable of question the ideology that shapes your worldview. The very concept that "well you're working for someone else so the of course suspension of liberties is okay" is doctrine that you have been lead to believe since birth precisely because it benefits those people in power.
Working for money is doing something others want you to do in exchange for money.
In the west typically 2/3 of your day is free, as are weekends (and I see plenty of people commenting during work hours too).
I am a worker myself, but maybe because I have a past in actual physical labour I realize how much of a brat I have become now, being able to walk around, grab coffee, chat, stare mindlessly out the windows and browse HN while being paid handsomely to create software.
It's a normal human tendency to consider our own particular situation as representing the "average" or "normal". It's quite common for people who live privileged lives (such as most people here) to not recognize that they are living privileged lives.
It's very good to remember how lucky most of us are, and how unusual our circumstances are.
I think of it many times a year, how lucky I am to no longer need to showel manure or move wet grass using a pitchfork to earn a fraction of what I do today.
There are pros and cons of course. I am noticing my health declining somewhat since working inside versus physically. I am not as strong especially in weird muscle groups. I am more sore, prone to injury, and inflexible. I don't get as much sun exposure. My eyesight is declining quite a lot since I am bad about getting up off my desk and staring at something far away a few times an hour. My hands and wrists are going from spending a lot of time typing. Maybe I am monetarily richer, but certainly not physically richer. Maybe mentally I am poorer too considering the stresses of work follow me home now versus staying at the job site.
It makes sense. We evolved to be laboring outside, staying in shape with physical work, keeping our bodies active, constantly moving, sleeping with the sun versus an alarm clock. Even elders in tribes that still practice traditional hunting are remarkably active compared to elders in the west. We didn't evolve to be troglodytes, unmoving in an artificial cave for 95% of the day, but ironically these are the types of work our society disproportionately rewards.
Last time I saw this mentioned on HN, someone had a mental breakdown and told people to stop bringing it up because they were tired of hearing "sob stories".
Is browsing hn so different than a clerk reading the paper or a book or chitchatting with a coworker during some down time in the 1940s? Probably not. Downtime is part of work unless you work by the piece. Even when I worked outside labor jobs, there was plenty of downtime e.g. waiting for the 1 skid steer to move some stuff before you could do anything else. That being said its not like 2/3 of your day are truly free, you are omitting the sleeping, the cooking, the eating, the washing the dishes, the commuting, etc, that quickly sucks up your time. I know someone who works 9am-7pm. Maybe 1-2 hours of their day are truly free during the week. Plus on the weekends thats when you typically play catchup, and do all the chores and errands you'd been neglecting during the week due to work.
> Virtually all of the rights we learn about in grade school are suspended in the workplace.
Virtually none of them are suspended in the workplace. When you're at work, though, you are on someone else's private property and so some of your rights are constrained (just as some of the rights of people visiting your home are constrained while they're there). This is because there are competing rights involved, and it's logically impossible for everyone to retain their full sets of rights in those circumstances.
But, as you say, if the restrictions on your freedom are more greater than you can tolerate, you can quit. If no workplace gives you the amount of latitude you need, then you can work for yourself.
But, at the core, we live in a society with other people, and that inherently comes with certain restraints on behavior.
It's the rest of the world's own decision to use US websites. If I went to a China-based forum, yeah I'd expect censorship about Xi Jinping. But using Midjourney??
I feel like it's most places. But what does this have to do with what I said? Midjourney is based in the US, I expect US laws rather than Xi Jinping censorship.
False dichotomy. It's not like China would magically start having international hegemony over the media and the internet if the US didn't. Almost the entire world is subject to social media rules and values that are mostly coming from the US, and a pretty specific part of the US too.
It's understood there is no universal truth, so the news here is not that these platforms are becoming distorted where they were not before. It's that social media platforms in the democratic US are increasingly moderating content to align with dictators for, one assumes, money. Perhaps it's to increase platform reach in those countries, but what is the side-effect going to be on US politics with an online media landscape that now skews more heavily toward #dictator? Will US states legislatures begin to request the same 'moderation services' to support their own anti-democratic agendas? If so the country will change, the economic environment will change here, and not for the better.
Write a book and share this universal truth, translate it into all the languages, you'll make a fortune. Last I checked, a half-billion authors are still trying to establish it.
EDIT: I see you edited your comment about 'universal truth' after I answered it. I love the irony. Hail to the internet.
I see. You are asserting axiomatically consistent systems are 'universal truths' in the context of things that people say online. However, math is about processing statements, and does not make an assertion about the truth of those statements in the real world, just on whether they were processed correctly.
Not quite, I am saying universal truths aren’t inherently something you are going to make a great deal of money from.
A list of previous baseball games listing just dates and teams isn’t particularly interesting even if it’s absolute truth. Meanwhile a less accurate list of future games with teams and dates is something people might actually care about.
I have never understood the relativism about math fundamentals. What does it matter what we "agree to" or not? Either it is true or not. There is like no room for "kinda true but really it ..." in '1 + 1 = 2'. And I am not talking about notation semantics here.
This isn't what I'm talking about. The agreement means it's not "universal". It's only true because we agree it's true. Can you prove that 1 = 1 or do we have to agree that 1 = 1? If you can't prove it, is it a "universal truth"? I'm asserting that a truth which requires an agreed context[0] is not "universal".
The universal nature of mathematical truth isn’t dependent on agreement. Instead it’s only universally true when you include all those seemingly unspoken “agreements.”
I'm not sure what you mean by this, particularly this phrasing: "sets of axioms where 1 = 1". 1 = 1 is an axiom, not something that's proven by any set of axioms.
But I'm willing to believe I'm simply naive here. You say there is some set of axioms which prove that 1 = 1. Are those axioms not agreements? Since you seem to be familiar, what are those axioms?
The foundations of mathematics are deeper than that basic assumption. I can for example say 1 + 1 = 10 in base 2, but people imply the base when when saying 1 + 1 = 2 as well as a great deal of other details few people actually care about.
This is the agreement that happens and why it's not universal. We have to agree that "1 = 1" for any statements like "1 + 1 = 2" to even make sense, let alone be true. Per your point, we have to agree that we're talking about something other than base 2 in order for "1 + 1 = 2" to be true, despite my intentions for it to be a potential example of a universal truth. Even "math" isn't universally true.
The above is false, math isn’t independent of axioms so there is nothing to agree upon beyond conventions where Math is simply the result of axiom choices.
= 2 @ + 1 1 is a different notation, but the underlying math is unchanged. So if you explain the notation difference an alien that might use = 2 @ + 1 1 they would also agree that in an our notation 1 + 1 = 2. The same relationship is true of the choice of axioms.
> math isn’t independent of axioms so there is nothing to agree upon beyond conventions where Math is simply the result of axiom choices.
> 1 = 1 isn’t inherently true on it’s own
This sounds a whole lot like "math isn't a universal truth". I guess we need to take a step back, since it seems this is where the disagreement lies: what does it mean for something to be a universal truth?
My position is that a truth is universal if it is self-evident; that is, it does not require an agreement between observers. These axioms are that agreement and therefore Mathematics, which stems from such axioms, is not universal truth.
Axioms are just another aspect of Mathematics and changing them has utility for mathematicians. Euclidean geometry for example uses one set and a wide range of non Euclidean geometry systems use different sets.
The universal truth that in Euclidean geometry the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is not diminished because the interior angles of a triangle can add up to different numbers in spherical geometry. It’s just two different systems but they all fall under Mathematics.
This is a mistaken understanding. Axioms define the logic of Mathematics.
E: I guess I may have misinterpreted. I mixed up “supersede” with “precede” in my head. I mean to say axioms are a precursor to logic systems. The axiom has to be agreed upon before any truthful statements can be made.
No, axioms are part of any truthful mathematical statements.
If A, B, C … then Y is a self contained true statement. You can’t simply say Y alone is true because without A, B, C, … it’s not true.
People tend to assume A, B, C etc when they say things like 1 + 1 = 2 but that’s just a quark of language. Words like him or they work because people can work out the specifics from context.
Maybe. Post it somewhere highly visible online, to check if everyone agrees with it. Make other statements like it. See how many you can make that remain disagreement free. I'll save you some time. As long as people engage with what you say, you'll just keep finding alternative ways to view things, no matter what you say.
Related to this issue, an article in Harper's Magazine, from 2015, discussed the threat China poses to the United States, via the American businesses who have interests over there:
"The New China syndrome: How Beijing shakes down foreign businesses"
The article focuses on the idea of indirect lobbying: namely, China pressuring U.S. businesses to lobby in favor of China's interests, or risk losing the privilege of doing business in China. (Length: 6 pages)
Nipples aren’t porn. Being topless on the beach or breastfeeding are common, normal and not porn. Yet their depiction is forbidden because US companies control most social media.
Youtube took down every channel that didn't agree with the US government/Uncle Joe on Russia/Nato/Ukraine, at least.
RT (Russia) and the so-far-left-they-went-hard-right crowd (Taibbi, etc.), PressTV (Iran), etc.
And they label 'government-funded' channels but not 'corporate-funded' channels, even when those corporations are bigger than governments.
Corporations "set the conditions within which the U.S. government operates, and control it to a large extent" -- but are kind of seen as not important actors -- they're made invisible.
Global corporations are increasingly wealthier than many countries, with Walmart, Apple and Shell richer than Russia, Belgium and Sweden, according to research by the campaigning group Global Justice Now, which found that 69 of the world’s top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015
We definitely need to rein in corporations like YouTube/Google/Alphabet, and not just Big Tech -- but real players like Walmart, ExxonMobile, etc.
I guess you could say that removing all their content and/or shutting down complete channels and/or accounts is 'just not actively promoting them' -- but you wouldn't really be telling the truth then, would you?
Regarding VK and Russian social media, I'm a US-American, so i'm mostly concerned with what US companies do -- because they're much more destructive, and I can do a lot more about them.
i was just reminded of another way YouTube and other organizations censor info that is not friendly to the US government/elite -- mark certain videos or channels as 'Mature', like this one:
Even editorially independent media is invariably heavily biased one way or another.
Given the way people consume news you can be bias through the use of a subtly misleading but otherwise accurate headline, or a boring headline, or just not have it as a leader or bulletin.
There is so much News these days that you could report on everything absolutely fairly and still have a strong bias just because of what you decide is worth showing people more often.
FWIW, information regulation has been an aspect of how things are done online since at least Web 2.0. Google has an intricate fabric of policy-modifiers to tweak what people can and cannot see based on their geolocation, up to and including the details of national boundaries. Twitter, pre-Musk, had "banned in Germany" / "banned in France" flags on tweets and accounts that were even API-accessible (which was kind of neat; they served as a proxy signal for "Not saying this guy's a Nazi, just saying Twitter has found it legally expedient to suppress his ability to broadcast his thoughts to people in Germany").
... but the services that we'd expect to be mature enough to support those levels of nuance are starting to fall over on their asses, and that's concerning. Midjourney's a bit of an outlier (and, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but given Hotz's attitude on the topic I think it'd be worth it to follow the money on them). But Twitter, in particular, has seen a massive backslide. I always thought their ultimate goal was untenable (one flat, mass public forum is probably not a viable model for human interaction), but under Musk's dictat it has utterly imploded.
Social media are entertainment platforms. Unfortunately, they have also become de facto news delivery platforms by sheer percentage of eyeballs. It's a bit like what happened with screwdrivers: people kept touching them to live electrical lines, so the wood handles with metal ferrules disappeared and the handles were redeisigned to insulate human hands from electrical shock. But no one is trying to fix social media so it can deliver news better- rather they are being retooled to compel users to instead consume more content more quickly. Which leaves the mind with even less time to question and consider. It's a recipe for disaster.
I am reminded of earlier useful idiots complaining about "corporations being more powerful than governments" over them not bending the knee towards their whims. Well this is exactly what governments being more powerful than corporations looks like. Of course useful idiots also never learn.
It's delicious when it does. Watch people backpedal! See them do linguistic backflips! Now try to put the tiger back into the cage! It's always the same sad circus when power shifts and suddenly what was okay to do to "those bad guys" is fearsome and troubling when it happens to them.
Is it any surprise though? When for-profit entities operate in overseas territories and wish to remain in business there, of course they are subject to their laws.
This is why non-profit entities and decentralization are important.
To me, I think the issue is that people hear what they want to hear. It has nothing to do with censorship. Internet is huge, if ppl want unbiased view, they can get it, but for most ppl, echo chamber is better.
Not a new problem. Powerful people and groups always have an interest in controlling narratives. They have also made effort to do so, and they always will.
Flip side is when Google left China in 2010 it opened the door for Baidu, which is completely state controlled and gave the CCP more power. Is that better? I think what we're finding is that the world is interconnected and authoritarianism anywhere is bad for everyone. It's complicated.
Also, think it's important to note that the CCP is not China. Many Chinese citizens don't like the CCP but are powerless to resist.
This problem is way larger than tech companies and isn't new. Some examples:
- Richard Gere got canceled for speaking out against China's human rights abuses to the Tibetans at the Academy Awards in 1993 [1];
- The Neil Armonstrong biopic "First Man" didn't have a scene of planting the American flag [2];
- These are examples of a long history of Hollywood bowing to Chinese pressure and interests [3]. Modifying a movie for the Chinese market is one thing. Modifying the global release of a movie to keep China happy is something else.
Now look at the mainstream media just this year. Some examples of stories that got zero or significantly delayed coverage include:
- The train derailment and environmental disaster at East Palestine, Ohio. For a good week you wouldn't even know this was happening if you weren't on Tiktok. Consider the irony of that situation;
- The massive French strikes and protests got almost no play in US media;
Now consider the bias in media coverage:
- Western media in general is unforgivably biased when it comes to Israel [4]. A common technique is deliberate use of active vs passive voice [5]. Example: Shireen Abu-Akleh was "killed" [6]. A more accurate headline would've been "Middle Eastern and American citizen journalist assassinated by Israeli sniper while wearing a blue press helmet and vest".
- Media coverage is unbelievably biased towards the police in cases of brutality and death at the hands of police. Guests on TV will often be former or current police. What about civil rights lawyers or victims rights advocates?
Remember this when the media writes stories about the bias in tech companies. While there might be truth to that, never forget that the media too is incredibly biased.
Each of us builds capabilities used for both good and evil.
The modern extent of government power and private influence would be unthinkable even decades ago. Personal rights have failed to keep up, in part because it requires constitutional or legislative action that's basically impossible because of politics or jurisdiction (international).
As a practical result, we can't really absolve ourselves of responsibility by saying that it's legal, or that it's for another country to decide, or that it's necessary to gain access to a market.
No one doubts that IBM/ACM was morally culpable for providing systems they knew would be used for "organizing" undesirables by the Nazi's. It's much less clear whether doing devops at twitter helps or hurts Modi, or if that's a bad thing.
But it helps to have some smell tests. Mine are:
- Everyone worldwide should be treated with the same respect - American or not.
- It's better for speech and commerce to be free, when it's aiming for true understanding and mutual benefit.
- Every technology should be openly assessed for who it benefits or harms, who decides its use, whether it can be safely managed, and whether it corrupts or improves those it affects.
Analytically, the notion of commercial franchise is quite helpful: twitter has the franchise for a current event stream, Modi has a franchise over legislation in India, etc. All tech companies build their own franchise (with moats, etc.), and may coordinate in mutually-reinforcing teams. Franchises are not only bargaining power but also a whole ecosystem self-organizes around them. The stronger and more relevant the franchise, the bigger the payday, and the more enticing it is to take over. That creates very strong incentives to hold your nose (and be used as a tool), or to steer well clear (and be, well, irrelevant).
I salute those who struggle with these difficult questions.
Why do they lump India into this? Modi is democratically elected leader unlike Putin and Xi. Just because one doesn't likes ideology of opponent, one cannot dismiss them as dictator!
The point of this article isnt to disagree with their insular close mindedness & lack of ability to process criticism or satire.
The point is that because of economics we keep letting their conservative close minded views dictate what happens in the Western Democratic world. These conservative authoritarian approaches should have no quarter here, go against the values & rights the creators & owners of these sites arose from & should be supporting.
It's a sad development & China should be the one having to eat tough shit.
Well unfortunately, the people power (and many regular citizens for that matter) have decided that China's money is much more important than Western values.
Economics is all that matters in this world. It feels even silly to have to spell it out when we are on a website funded by the pinnacle of capitalism, where money overrides principles day and night.
China will not have to eat any tough shit while the economics is on their side.
And before you object, I ask you to consider the device you are using to reply to me. I know where mine came from.
I doubt it, the sources of materials and stages of manufacturing for most advanced electronics are spread all over the world. I know my motherboard was made in Taiwan, my processor from Malaysia/Germany, but that's just the start.
> I have no interest of arguing geopolitics with a moron that approaches this kind of discussion in bad faith.
Ha! So this is why you defend authoritarian regimes. Like them, you have no tolerance for valid criticism. Like them, you can't admit you're wrong. Like them, dishonesty is all you've got.
You mean the proxy war that the US is funding through NATO to make Europe stop buying Russian gas and buy American LNG instead? That very much sounds like economics to me!
Edit: now that was an ambiguous use of '«they»'. For <State>, hence "rule", one would have used 'it'. But 'they' suggests at least the possibility of plural, hence "the people". And that the people share the same view of the rule is not a given.
laughable assertion. I can find people equally dissatisfied with the US. in the aggregate the Chinese people approve of their government at a level westerners literally cannot comprehend. These include studies from western institutions like Harvard, and are so readily available that if you claim to not have heard of them you are either 1. arguing in bad faith or 2. completely unqualified to comment on the Chinese people.
> in the aggregate the Chinese people approve of their government at a level westerners literally cannot comprehend
It's easy to comprehend that the Chinese people have such a warped understanding of the situation. It's a combination of both ignorance and a lack of self respect.
Let's have a look at the results of one of your surveys:
It says, "In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either 'relatively satisfied' or 'highly satisfied' with Beijing."
But when we get to the level of local government, the level of government people have direct contact with day to day and can see up close, what are the results? The survey says, "At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were 'very satisfied.'"
And why the disparity? Because Chinese convince themselves that the efforts of the "good" central government is being thwarted by the evils of "bad" local government.
In reality it's all bad, top to bottom. All authoritarian regimes are. The fish does rot from the head.
Xi Jinping is so weak that he couldn't do two terms and quit. He's such a poor leader that he's convinced himself that he's the one special boy to lead China and he must stay in power.
That's the corrupting influence of authoritarianism.
First we're talking about open versus closed societies, not tribes. The repression of spirit closed societies impose on their members is a humanitarian concern, imperils the soul, eats away at becoming ourselves. Open society all the way. Society has to be allowed to consider itself.
Second, this isn't laws of the land. It's the internet, the unplace where different places can meet & connect. Your suggestion proposes that it's the pro-speech folk forcing themselves upon the world. Not so. What's actually happening in this story is the small authoritarian lowest-common-denominators of the world are imposing their views on all interconnectivity, on everyone else. They are constraining everyone else.
And tech bosses keep letting it happen, keep letting ourselves be bullied. And the governments of open societies are not stepping up to illuminate & push these issues as the threats to open society that they are.
Two absurd inconsistencies. Human rights are amazing. The suppression of humanity is dreadful. That's the "tribe" you are defending.
These are all your opinions and personal values. I agree with all of them on a personal level. Where I think we disagree is that this is some kind of "pro speech" vs. "anti speech" battle. I see it more as a global US led Imperium attempting to impose their opinions and personal values on people throughout the world regardless of what those citizens or governments think. I'm in the US, me and my countrypeople shouldn't get a say in what happens in Hong Kong. Just like China shouldn't get a say in what happens in the US. Why isn't that enough?
And it continues the filter of seeing this as open society being an imposition. If you have a closed society & the open society of the internet doesn't fit your society, you shouldnt be on the internet. Your closed society doesn't want to participate, then fine, if it must: go elsewhere.
I don't want anyone in a closed society and I'd go through great lengths to help people trapped in close societies have access to open connectivities like the internet.
If a society wants to be closed though, your society has the onus of responsibility to enforce closing. Your society can't impose that position on everyone. Hence me saying the society probably shouldnt be on the most open connected free connectivity on the planet, one created by open society & which enables open social values.
> You've decided...
It looks like you have decided here friend. I never openly said that, although heck the words I use build a pretty lopsided case. I think everyone should decide for themselves though, and come to their conclusions. To me the choice seems obvious & it's hard to see what is to respect about closed, but I'm open. I'm open to learning.
The title of this post is "Tech Bosses Are Letting Dictators Censor What Americans See", the article is about China getting a say in what happens in the US.
We don't know what Chinese citizens think because it's impossible to conduct independent opinion polls on political topics. So, how do you know that the majority of Chinese don't agree with our opinions and personal values on freedom of expression?
Countries always seek to extend their influence. The USA and China play the same game, just with different tactics. There will never be "enough".
We don't get a say in what happens in Washington either. Frankly, in the present day USA, it's a minor miracle when the county road commissioner will fill a pothole in a timely fashion.
Definitely not the people who say that a non-believer of Islam cannot depict the prophet Muhammad. That's both a trample on my rights as an individual to do what I want, and a trampling of my rights to not participate in religion.
Do you think that the customs of China's tribe and island are the laws of nature?
For that matter, in the era of nearlight communication around the planet, how important even are things like "island" anymore, and how is "tribe" defined?
>No, i think the customs of chinas tribe and island should reign supreme in china and the customs of my tribe and island in mine
Isn't that the point? The problem is that the customs of others is infringing on the customs of others. If some places insist on a policy for their people, that is fine for their people. But what we have here is an insistence that those people can control how other people outside of their place and people can see and access technology.
Should your tribe & China tribe have say over what every company online does? Should they have sway over what US companies do? Seems like you are saying no, that you seem to agree with the frustration shared by the article.
China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better."
It may not be wise to categorically dismiss the shared philosophy and cultural experience of billions of people. We Westerners have a philosophical concept inherited from our ancestors that describes that attitude: "hubris."
> China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better."
The CCP has no continuity with the previous imperial government. They love to make that claim when it's convenient but it's bullshit. It would be like the US claiming they have a national continuity with Britain going back millennia.
The US does have a national continuity with Britain going back millenia.
Half of jurisprudence is grounded not in writings that came after the Revolution, but English Common Law. We lean on the First Amendment for issues of free speech, but we lean on the Magna Carta for questions of whether you've produced the right magic slip of paper to prove you own the land your outhouse sits on.
... hell, many of the states have a right to grant exclusive ownership of that land that's fundamentally rooted in a king having granted them that right.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can't ignore that we're mostly speaking English for some reason...
Basing laws off laws of another country isn't national continuity. The British didn't just accept the Declaration of Independence and remove their agents from the US. The CCP wasn't formally recognized by the imperial government as the new government of China. There's no continuity of government in either case.
"Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States." ~ (guess the source)
With respect, between the work of a Cornell professor and an internet rando, I'm going to defer to the professor on the topic the professor wrote on.
China's got a better rail network than the US, more industrial capacity, and produces the world's electronics now. The gap in tech is measured in decades at most, and by that metric the world was behind England (until it wasn't) because England had the accident of thirst for coal and the use for automated, sustained drainage and pumping that allowed them the critical mass of tech and need to build and refine the steam engine.
In terms of world history, the era of European / American tech ascendancy is a blip on the radar.
Who cares? America's progress came from Anglicization. The Brits invented the steam engine, the locomotive, and the electric generator. Then the Americans took those ideas and ran with them.
... now, China's running with the generation of ideas America pioneered and refined, and America's mostly playing catchup because they're off the rails (tragically literally, if you live in East Palestine, OH).
I do. The Western model is superior. Your Chinese model is inferior.
You can live under the boot of an authoritarian regime if you lack the self respect to stand up for yourself. Liberal democracy and the rule of law do take work, and you do sound lazy.
Maybe you do need to be told what to do.
> tragically literally, if you live in East Palestine, OH
I don't know, I would consider it lazy to write off the political structure coordinating over a billion people as "inferior" when it seems to be working for them. I have no disagreement that authoritarians tend to massage and hide data more (as opposed to liberal democracies, where we just classify it and throw people in jail for dumping those databases, right?), but I observe the way the world works and conclude the jury is currently out on which solution leads to a more stable society in the long term. China's communist experiment is young, but it's grounded in political philosophy and theories of social structure dating back thousands of years... I'll let America get a couple more hundred under its belt before I conclude this Democratic experiment is working.
History suggests previous attempts at democracies were unstable. Maybe the alchemy was right this go around. But I'm watching this one allow itself to be spun up into division and polarization that has resulted in a civil war in the past, so we'll see how it goes. The house has a tendency to win, especially when the house is time herself.
> I would consider it lazy to write off the political structure coordinating over a billion people
You're not considering anything. You're only desperately trying to hold on to a losing proposition you've arrived at through a lack of principle, a profound laziness, and a basic nihilism.
> I'll let America get a couple more hundred under its belt before I conclude this Democratic experiment is working.
Such sloppy thinking. You really do need to broaden your horizons.
England is considered to have a continuous culture going back to Londinium and huge numbers of their kings and queens weren't even born in the country.
I also agree they're better (probably coincidence that I was raised in a society and education system praising them nonstop). But to what lengths are you willing to go to impose them on people who don't want them?
edit: If we're comparing china, i'm not sure you want to use length of time the society was built as a metric demonstrating chinese inferiority lol
It's pretty funny that you equate the oppressive actions of an authoritarian regime with what the people want. It's even funnier that you've failed to understand that the whole point of the article is that an authoritarian regime is imposing itself on others.
You contradict yourself but convince yourself you're being rational.
That's the problem with being an unprincipled apologist. You end up compromised.
a place with 1/3rd of the population has a hard on for one specific theoretical form of expression that they don't even use that much? easy ignore.
Midjourney also retrains from all prompts free or paid, making it easier to get better results from simpler prompts. Access to that population of human nodes is definitely more important than placating some ideological position of a smaller group.
Pretty funny reading the differences between this thread and the one from yesterday where Canada fined Google for not censoring information. In that one, people were all "Tough shit, Google has to follow the laws of countries they serve in! Not everyone is American, stupid Americans!"
Turns out, countries will have laws you disapprove of too!
There is a difference between Canada requiring Google follow the laws in Canada while operating in Canada, and China requiring stuff be censored globally to operate in China. If you are unable to see that difference, that's on you.
it turns out "it's just memes, bro" is a poor defense against Conspiracy Against Rights charges.
> Have you never seen people post "Vote early, vote often"? It's the same as that.
If you are aware of an instance of someone being convicted by a jury of their peers of Conspiracy Against Rights for sharing "vote early, vote often," be sure to let us know.
It's possible that Popehat's Law of Goats applies here. Even if Mackey was totally joking about what he was doing, he was still engaged in voter suppression.
Then apply it equally and lock up anyone that has ever tweeted "vote early, vote often" or "Party X votes Tuesday, Party Y votes Wednesday" (when the election is on Tuesday). Of course, with all these politically motivated prosecutions it only goes one way.
Just in case your not already aware this account you are responding to is very “out there” and hard to take in good faith. It’s just one thing after another of absolutely nonsense points like this.
The takes you have posted in this thread aren't moored to reality, and have nothing to do with left vs right wing. I hope these comments influence you to reevaluate things, but I am done engaging with you.
It has everything to do with it. I have posted from a pretty standard right wing perspective. Apparently you have so few people in your life that disagree with you politically that you can't even recognise this.
Of the nine bulleted benefits at the beginning of the article at least five can be achieved when giving two weeks notice.
Eliminate all stress from your job: the moment I've decided to leave a job, even if I haven't found the next one yet, I feel any stress dissipate almost immediately. Knowing that something unpleasant can end and that I'm going to take steps to end it is a relief.
Get paid the same. Extend your benefits for longer. Vest more stock. Get your bonus: you can achieve all of these things by simply waiting to give notice. Wait until after you've vested to the amount you want. Wait until after you've received your bonus. And obviously you get paid the same regardless of when you give notice so this is a weird benefit to cite.
Take unused vacation time: I've always taken a bunch of vacation before giving notice. Arguably that's less offensive than telling everyone, "hey my last day is in eight weeks and for a quarter of that time I'll be on vacation."
I'm sure there are companies that will wait several months for a new hire to start because they want a long petering out period with their current gig but I've never worked anywhere that would allow that for anyone other than executive or very, very high level engineer. This also seems risky because what if something happens to that job in the two to three months notice you gave?
If this had been posted three weeks ago I would have thought it was an April Fools joke.
There is a set of skills that's needed to objectively classify information that's found on the Internet or in other media sources (yes including books). Any rational democractic society would be wise to teach these skills to people from an early age, although certain groups (religious fundamentalists, corporate advertisers, government authoritarians etc.) would oppose this for obvious reasons.
The authoritarian elitist crowd doesn't seem to like it when the unwashed masses develop these skills; they'd prefer to have a population of brainwashed zombies who get all their propaganda from a government-provided list of 'acceptable sources' and who don't have the cognitive capacities and practical skills needed to independently test claims for veracity.