Not even foreign values. Only subset of foreign values which are only shared by the Silicon Valley. Beyond that, half the US people disagree with Google/Apple/Twitter/Facebook’s non-neutral stance on politics, who weighed their full weight in censoring 50% of the political spectrum.
I will not call it the pied piper because Uganda weighs nothing, but the GAFA’s politics are now visible as directly harmful in USA, with calls to leftist violence given full platform since 4 years while censoring the 50% rest of the political spectrum, and any country who lets them operate their ideological platform is doomed to live through the Congress event again.
Good one, Uganda.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25705107.
Let's be clear: moderating/banning the accounts of a man and his supporters who invited tens of thousands of people to the United States Capitol, spent hours lying to them about the results of the election, and then weaponized them in an attempt to overthrow the US government is not a case of Twitter crossing some sort of threshold into tyranny.
A grave crime was committed this week, and the wheels of the legal system are dysfunctional enough that the perpetrator wasn't arrested on the spot but instead allowed continued control of the US military and its nuclear weapon arsenal. Just because Twitter is able to act quickly outside the confines of the legal system doesn't mean we're descending into tech tyranny.
I honestly don't want to hear another word about "leftist violence" or "the radical left" now that the right has unapologetically lined up behind the man who fomented a coup attempt.
Rag tag groups do not execute coups. That’s a willful exaggeration and further evidence of how narratives tilt people’s thinking.
This is the media and social media calling it that -they cannot help it. Are the armed forces classifying as a coup? It’s a ridiculous accusation. More of a coup attempt is the call for impeachment with two weeks left after the previous impeachment failed. It’s honestly sad.
The fact remains that the President gathered tens of thousands of people and, with a torrent of lies, weaponized them into an attack on the United States. Just because it failed doesn't make it any less grave of a crime.
Guliani also asked Tuberville to object to every state which if acted on would have required at least 11 days of 12 hour sessions with an armed angry mob outside.
When they finally attacked it took hours to authorize the national guard to defend the capital giving the mob maximum time to terrorize congress.
It we examine the possible failure modes in this situation we can imagine.
- The mob could have slaughtered burned or blew up our congress or enough to frighten the rest into compliance.
- The mob could have destroyed the physical copy of the ballots delaying the matter giving the mob more time to intimidate legislators further.
- The legislature might have lost heart over 11 days of being terrorized by the mob outside and come to some compromise like allowing congress to vote on the matter one delegation one vote allowing the republicans to pick the next president.
This would have only required all of the republican party and 6 democrats in the house to join to enact. They would simply have had to vote with the republicans to reject 36 states worth of EC votes in order to throw the election to the house.
It is foolish to suppose this couldn't possibly have succeeded just because they are very very incompetent. They could never have enacted a traditional coup because the military was never on their side. This could actually have worked if our congress had lost heart.
This was absolutely an attempted coup and we would be stupid to treat it as less.
We were a few fuckups away from a pile of dead congressional representatives. Don't kid yourself.
This was an organized attempt to assault a joint-session of the newly elected congress discharging their duty to certify the election results for the Executive branch of government.
Had the rioters reached the house or senate floor the US could have found itself without a legislative branch to legitimize the next president.
Like in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
And 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/protests-buil...
So far we know these companies made the decision to ban the President:
- Youtube
- Tiktok (ironic that he'd be banned by Tiktok before he banned it himself)
- Snapchat
- Spotify
- Shopify
- Twitch
I would love to know if YCombinator has formally banned him from the Hacker News community.
You have bought into a hysterical narrative, at least as fantastic as whatever insane narrative the QAnon people have bought into.
I'm just stating facts. The claims Trump has made about election fraud, hundreds of times over the course of two months, are lies. He used the people who believed those lies to attack the Capitol as they deliberated on the transfer of power.
Please elaborate on what's hysterical about my assessment of these facts.
Your opinion seems to be formed just recently, but you're making profound statements that ignore 99.99% of history. I am sorry, but this is an absurd and misplaced knee-jerk reaction and pooling it in to "Silicon Valley" culture. Silicon Valley culture dates back 50 years or more.
Other authoritarian leaders are likely thinking "If Twitter can deplatform the President of the United States [which has more power than my smaller country], they have the power to deplatform me. Better reduce that risk and start blocking services to maintain control."
Not saying it's right, but I understand their point of view.
Of course they have their own websites. But the goal would be to promote the "official" point of view while suppressing the opposition, to maintain the illusion of broad support. It's not a free speech issue. And if the "official" point of view gets deplatformed, it's a risk to them.
I'm hesitant to use VKontakte as a real-life example because I don't speak Russian, but according to Wikipedia VK had censorship issues until it was (supposedly) taken over by Putin-friendly people.
People are being shut down for being part of an offensive minority that supports extreme behaviors and statements. Lets look at the events at the capital as a proxy. 12% of America support this behavior. This is well within the margin of error for the percentage that tacitly supports the idea that the white "race" is exceptional.
Yet, last year Twitter and Reddit was full of BLM/Antifa supporters calling for and supporting cleansing of white people, republicans, Trump voters etc. without any kind of censorship.
Also for past decade these platforms have been safe harbor for terrorist organizations, cartels, gangs, government media from countries that do extreme human rights violations etc. No problem there either except sometimes when the shitstorm get big enough.
Apparently though some mentally unstable QAnon hillbillies stealing speakers stands are more extreme than countries and organizations involved in slavery, genocide, mass murder or terrorism.
Just putting that out there.
Given that open source and federated replacements for Twitter[1], Instagram[2], Reddit[3], YouTube[4] etc exist, this would not be a massive undertaking.
1: Mastodon, https://mastodon.social/about
2: PixelFed, https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
3: Lemmy, https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
4: PeerTube, https://joinpeertube.org/en/
Edit: I wish people downvoting this question would explain. I literally don’t understand and am asking for clarification.
Yes they do, but a lot less that right leaning calls do, because social media companies lean leftwards.
For example, Parler was recently kicked off of Google App store, and Apple and Amazon have also threatened to kick Parler off their app store and hosting platform. This was because Parler leans right and some messages by some users encouraged violence.
None of these companies would ever do the same to a mainstream (i.e. left leaning, because social media censors the right more than the left) social media platform because of left wing violent talk/threats.
It's blatantly obvious that big tech is biased to the left. (I say this as someone who is fairly left-leaning, FWIW).
This had nothing to do with Parler's political leanings and everything to do with Parler's wildly inadequate content moderation combined with top users calling for the execution of public officials with impunity.
Facebook's userbase is very right-leaning and has arguably just as many calls for violence, but they at least have a fully staffed moderation team.
Isn't this perfectly reasonable to switch to the modern Internet channels as time comes? Or should all the presidents keep transmitting in Morse code over cable telegraphs?
Having the wrong party affiliation?
They fine them if they not do so, and if they not be willing to pay the fine, then they are blocked.
Russia will certainly be a large enough market that they will consider it a financial loss large enough that they might implement this for Russia's version.
If more people were willing to do the right thing and sacrifice their political career the world would be a better planet.
A "ban them all" strategy is not unthinkable.
Banning a centralized service like gmail is easier, but then you lose in productivity as 90% of your country's businesses are likely to rely on it.
As far as privacy goes, it's also easier to coerce admins of smaller nodes to disclose valuable information than fighting with a multinational foreign corporation.
This is not an argument against decentralization. It's just not immediately obvious that decentralization does not automatically lead to censorship resistance. To do that we need onion routing or mix networks as a base for all our communications, so that banning the network would be equivalent to disconnecting the ISP from the Internet altogether.
To say that it’s “much easier” to ban hundreds of IP addresses instead of a dozen IP addresses is ridiculous. It’s no easier to get IP addresses in a distributed system than it is to get them in a centralized system.
GMail is a funny example to point to, because email is arguably the most used digital communication method and it’s also decentralized. Try to fully shut down email in the US — where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers, and is that going to be easier than just blocking Twitter?
And email is practically the only decentralized system in widespread use these days. And it's not centralized, but close to it. You shut down 3 or 4 email services, 95% of its traffic is gone.
Shodan is a readily available database of such data. Just search for all hosts with IMAP, SMTP and POP3 ports exposed and then block those. Alternatively, a DIY scan of the whole IPv4 address range can be accomplished within hours or days.
IPv6 address space is harder to scan, but it's arguably safe to ban all such traffic since nearly nothing critical uses IPv6.
If there is a decentralized service that is exclusively used by "perpetrators" then banning the service will have a greater impact even if the ban is harder to implement.
You don’t need to shut down the entire public email network (although it’s possible to do with DPI). You would only need to ban the servers that are involved in spreading of unwanted information.
Not if such network was made purposefully to minimize transparency.
Now of course most of the governments that would do this would be authoritarian and would look to control their own narrative, I think this illustrates how unbalanced and agenda-driven these media and social graph services have become who bring in foreign values to local elections.
This interference used to be called neo-imperialism not too long ago by the same people who now advocate for these narratives.
I would focus on the regional peoples' politics rather than the technocracy or American politics.
I firmly believe your thrust is irrelevant to the core issue, if not solely for the immediacy of a democratic threat.
I'm not an expert on this, but my family and I have been following this revolution for the past few months. To me, it's a promise to the people that things can get better.
From what I understand, not being an expert either but having spent quite a few months in Uganda in the last few years, Museveni has been the president since 1986 and brought a lot of stability to the country, aka brought peace after lots of conflict under Idi Amin. Some people have expressed gratitude for that and fear that Uganda will go back into the violence it faced before and yet seem very tired of the way Museveni has been running the country and want new leadership. Recently, there has been stronger opposition and in the last few years, a popular musician, Bobi Wine, decided to get involved in politics and declared to run for president.
I imagine, if I were in government, I might be afraid of the US, China, Russia, or other countries bringing their political influence into the country through the internet. I might fear revolutions like the ones that happened in Tunisia and Egypt and other countries. I may also just fear my own citizens and what they want. It's hard for us in the US to know how much of the political discourse here is from the citizens vs external sources vs government sources, and I could imagine even harder sometimes in other countries to figure that out.
That's the tricky part with this decision, it could be to stop foreign influences, it could be to stop local influences, it could be to amplify government influences, or a combination of all three.
Would they be? Consider what just happened in the USA: All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.
Now imagine if some similar subversion were attempted in another country, say Ecuador? Would these social media companies be as willing to silence a faction in another country?
What if it were to happen in a more important country, say Australia? South Korea? Japan? Germany? At what point should these companies be interfering through censorship, and at what point are the issues too blurred or difficult to figure out who's right and who's wrong? Sir Richard Wharton in Yes, Minster once quipped: "Once you start interfering in the internal squabbles of other countries, you're on a very slippery slope."
Naturally, these companies will resist the push towards becoming arbiters of Truth (until they actually BECOME such arbiters, then god help us all).
So non-American governments will have no recourse but to plead with Youtube, and then block them when the answer is "no".
I see no reason for any government or any party to trust the social media, mobile OS platforms and messaging anymore. A new set of tools is about to loom hopefully.
That, and of course financially complying with pressure from the Chinese government to be tough on whatever independence movement it struggle with now — Catalonia was of course free to chant it's independence.
Where did this happen?
Because I saw some specific tags blocked calling for a VP to be killed blocked (vs some generic "kill all humans" hyperbole)... and specific account blocked after its owner triggered an attack on the Capitol that resulted in 5 casualties (and breaking the rules of the platform for 4+ years)
-
Are you trying to say people who were pro-talking about killing Pence and storming the Capitol are a significant population?
Because last time I checked there were still tens of millions of conservatives on Twitter who aren't banned
Today, right across Africa, governments are studying the possibilities of restricting foreign internet services. Both as a way of controlling the information their populations get to view, but also as a means of addressing high youth unemployment among educated workers by giving their domestic internet firms the room to take root. This is actually an interesting sideshow in the more global tendency towards balkanization. But take my word for it, young startup type guys from Entebbe-Kampala, (and, with AfCFTA, even places like Dar and Nairobi), will be very active trying to press their advantage.
The political side of this shutdown is predictable, but the interesting action is the long game. I think these kinds of shutdowns are dry runs for the sort of internet world African leaders are quietly pressing for in their future.
>I think this illustrates how unbalanced and agenda-driven these media and social graph services have become who bring in foreign values to local elections.
Considering the existing rulers fail to live up to their responsibilities that's not necessarily a bad thing.
>This interference used to be called neo-imperialism not too long ago by the same people who now advocate for these narratives.
The countries who accept them can often be more successful than those who refuse them. Hong Kong is a pretty good example. Democratic values and capitalism forced down the throat of people. This became a threat to the authoritarian regime in the Chinese mainland and the rulers have to make concessions to their population. They built special economic development zones and simply copied the ideas that worked out in Hong Kong and were compatible with Chinese values at the time. Western investors suddenly had a reliable business partner in Hong Kong and a large "proxy" workforce that was manufacturing goods on the mainland which got shipped to Hong Kong and could be sold to the west. The story ends with China becoming a world leading economy, not because of the west but rather because the west forced the government to listen to the people.
So your point is to have Facebook and Twitter policing and monitoring everyone's posts for discussions on general politics. Good luck with that.
You better have a definition and where to draw the line on which posts, images, text and speech that fit your definition of 'politics'.
The problem is that these discussions go nowhere. Everyone may come to an agreement, and yet no one will do anything about it. Politicians themselves don't participate, which is sort of ironic.
Plus, these discussions often devolve into shit slinging over some general issues like racism, minority rights, wealth, power. It only takes a few people to start it, and often, all the rational people just leave at that point.
All of this blocking will just limit everyone's freedom and access to information. The core issue, education, is what needs to be solved.
1. You need to make officials accountable.
2. You have to make everyone in the country understand what's good for them and give them the ability to make informed votes.
Uganda is suffering from 1. The US and Europe is suffering more from 2. (extremism in any direction). They are completely different problems.
Censorship goes against 1. Fake news goes against 2.
And when was the last time anyone explained in detail why they think a certain law would benefit people? Wouldn't be that hard to do. But I'm guessing it could reveal the real reasons behind many laws.
After witnessing how they used their heft and influence in the US you better believe the likes of India, Russia, China, Nigeria, Brazil, etc., will evaluate their relationships with these services.
People have too many family members, coworkers, friends, etc. across country borders. There’s a high cost to cutting your country off from the rest of the internet in any real way. The cost of intercepting / controlling / severing internet communication is high and gets higher as communication volumes get higher, the economy relies more heavy on international communication, and encryption becomes more commonplace.
I do think we’re going to see a lot more geofencing as time goes on.
But here? I can't point to obvious actors with enough pushing power that would benefit from this. Not on the UK side, at least. Brexit feels to me like a meme that got out of hand and drove behavior that's against everyone's self-interest.
The internet naturally didn't end up having many borders.
These borders however are not just political, they reflect a lot of things.
It's very natural that the internet should be a little bit different in each nation, after all, everything else is.
We are not prepared for that, and we have no idea what it's going to mean, so it's going to be a rollercoaster.
India's most populous and likely poorest state, had 202 mn people in 2012; nearly 2/3rds of the current US population.
Here are some cities and numbers for scale (Google search)
Mumbai had ~20.4 mn people. Cairo has ~20.9 mn. Dhaka 21 mn Mexico city 21.7
New Zealand had 4.8 mn people in 2018. Canada - 37.59 Mayanmar - 53.71 The UK - 66 mn Vietnam 95.5 mn
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A few years ago, Mexico had a spate of gang violence. News about it was suppressed by the govt.
A woman driving along the road uploaded a video she had taken. It showed shell cases strewn on the roads, burnt out trucks, and the aftermath of that violence.
IT went viral on Facebook, going against the Government narrative and letting a slice of reality get observed.
Until morning came around to the UK. At which point someone opened facebook, and saw the gore. They were able to call people they knew at FB and say "why am I/my kids seeing this?".
And FB responded and took it down, for breaking site rules.
(taken from Custodians of the Internet) -----
FB wasn't necessarily wrong, but it was definitely partial. When the blood and gore rule was enforced during the Boston bombings, senior employees overruled it citing newsworthiness.
----
Your guess that the net will be balkanized is quite likely true.
FB spends great efforts to have local presence in each market. They recruit policy people, and negotiators. However, the platform does help broadcast content.
And if someone at FB can decide what is newsworthy or not, then why wouldn't local leaders crave that same power?
I understand the point but you have to admit it is a little funny you are expressing this point in english while on an american website.
I think you should recognize the reverse as well though - countries all over the world are interacting with and influencing americans and america - I know a lot of americans that would prefer to have their pre-globalist culture back as well.
So I for one would not be very interested in more balkanized Internet, simply because this limits my options to mediocre sources, whereas knowing English and having access to a global platform lets me find better material.
Yeah and it's only a matter of time until youtube will start de-platforming mainstrem hungarian vloggers because their values don't align with american
Not related to social media but this stuff even happen IRL https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/09/hungarian-opera-asks-whi...
Now, what I have noticed is that some have consumed so much U.S.A. media that they seem to believe various legal principles of the U.S.A. apply here locally when they do not. It can be nothing but dangerous that some seem to think that the emergency number here is 911, when it is not.
A lot of political anger is rooted in very simple economics. The economy is doing increasingly worse for the majority and that fuels extremism. Of course the extremism makes it harder to do the right thing because people believe in unrealistic promises that are never going to work out but they appeal to their own biases.
For example. Labor in China is very cheap. If Americans want to compete with China they have to reduce their incomes to match Chinese incomes. One idea is to introduce tariffs to raise the costs of products until they are high enough to pay for American labor. You can do this in theory but why on earth would you do it if China can do it cheaper? If you buy products from China you could still use the saved money to employ American labor. So the actual loss is not that great.
The only reason why the tariffs work out is that the labor market is not flexible enough. Low income workers need jobs and the jobs that are there are high skill. Training has to be paid by the workers themselves and the training is not guaranteed to grant a job. Even after acquiring a good college degree there is still a "pseudo training phase" during your first 3 years on the job. Converting low skill workers to high skill workers is too unreliable and expensive so it doesn't happen and it gets worse the older the worker is.
If you could figure out a way to do training effectively and inexpensively your country would be significantly better off by buying Chinese products.
So what politicians will advocate is tariffs instead of better training. It's short term vs long term thinking.
internet access should be enough
With app stores blocked, what prevents the government from blocking messaging apps next, as they won't have ways of providing updates to users? I'm referring to Telegram and what they've previously done to try circumvent blocking techniques.
Anybody know?
There's no way they would allow access to social media, the 21st century mass communication be controlled by some Silicon Valley companies located in the USA.
Expect the indigenization also occurs in financial ecosystem, etc.
Furthermore, the article goes on to say that this kind of block has occurred before in 2016.
Even though I know it’ll just cement their viewpoints even further, I’m hoping the mods do something about it
Likewise, Twitter et. al. are simply following the same precedent set to enforce their values in the products they offer. The social media app is not public square and no one is certainly entitled to use it.
- Noam Chomsky
This is clock work, every election period they shutdown social media & electronic payments. It happened in 2016[0]
But when an "OTT" tax was imposed on social networks (Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Linkdin) in 2018[1].
Majority didn't want to pay an extra tax(required to use social media) on top of paying for internet. So majority learnt how to use vpns.
As a result, the OTT tax was a complete failure [2] and now the Uganda Revenue service is planning on bundling it with internet data costs.
Since people now know how to use vpns, social media cant be blocked.
So the reason for blocking smartphone app stores is to essentially, STEP 1 i.e Stop people from installing VPNs.
STEP 2 will probably be the total blocking of all social media.
[0]:https://theatlantic.com/amp/article/463407/
[1]:https://dw.com/en/uganda-one-year-of-social-media-tax/a-4967...
[2]:https://techjaja.com/ott-tax-fails-as-ura-proposes-tax-on-in...
[0]:https://qz.com/africa/1957137/uganda-cuts-off-internet-ahead...
As for your general point, HN users are about 50% in the US, and of course some of those are immigrants/expats. So HN is a highly international site. It certainly has a US orientation, but I think that's far from "conformity to American culture" and certainly we have zero intention of forcing that. We want people to be themselves and have curious conversation across their differences.
In a way I think a bigger problem here is the opposite to what you're saying. Because so many of the non-American users here have such incredibly good English, it seems on the surface that the site is much more uniform than it is. People have no idea how diverse the community here is, and it makes for a lot of misunderstandings, often bitter ones.
The rationale and measure seems to be a better evil if the politics are thusly brittle.
https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/13414323996834078...
https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/13396952711737057...
Running the required servers might be too hard, though.
What’s fascinating is that many countries are using the whole tech censorship to justify their own behavior. It’s a bit of “see, even the US agrees dangerous speech should be censored” or “do you want to end up like the US? this is why we have laws about speech”.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-patent-disables-camera...
Ah, OK then comrade. Cancel elections as well since you've figured it all out.
Will be interesting to see what their internet turns out looking like if this is permanent
