If the point of sanctions is to get the local population to rise and make it difficult for the government to keep its course, why cut out their access to independent news that would let them know what to protest? That will leave them with only state-controlled news. And now they can't submit that to Reddit to discuss it?
I get that Reddit don't want to be left out of the PR bandwagon, and as a link aggregator all they can do is block links. But this doesn't feel like helping.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-service-provider-coge...
I'm not sure why HN comments are so quick to make these extreme fear-mongering comparisons. Just yesterday I saw a top comment comparing Youtube removing a video to Chinese censorship...
If free speech is paramount to democracy, we shouldn't discriminate. Most people understand there is an information war at play. Most people know that information is either propaganda or carries an agenda. If you cut one opponent's voice, then it's not balanced. Why shouldn't we defend the right for Russian media to promote their narrative? Besides, legitimate, unrelated stories from one perspective also end up ignored.
Censoring Russian media only further isolates Russia, which is counterproductive. That also further separates the world from Russia and understanding regular Russian people.
Last, there is the argument that understanding the Russian state is also critical at times like these. You can also read intent between the lines. Understanding the current opinion of those in power in that part of the world is of the essence.
I am reading Clark's Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia (<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RI9PMM/>). Right after hearing about YouTube shutting down Russian state media channels, I was surprised to learn in the book of the extent of the freedom of the press in late 18th-century Prussia. A British visitor wrote that people were as free to speak as back home, citing a work that was very critical of the king in the context of Poland. During the Napoleonic wars, despite the existential threat to Prussia from France, at least four newspapers that celebrated Revolutionary France as the next step in human freedom were allowed to publish.
It's always preferable to counter propaganda with free speech. Even liars deserve the opportunity to speak. This is especially true when there is no formally declared war between the US and Russia.
If every Russian can see what an inconvenience it is to have Putin as a leader the hope is that they will be more inclined to do everything in their power to have him replaced. Some will of course just blame "west", but there will also be those who will come to question power.
This isn’t a good example of cutting Russia from the internet - Reddit is allowing Russians access to Reddit, and they can post on Reddit, they are just blocking links to Russian sites. That’s perhaps I’ll advised, and too blunt an attempt to slow disinformation, but it is not cutting Russian citizens off.
"Cutting off" means all sorts of things. Blocking russian sites from being posted is a form of cutting off.
"Too blunt an attempt to slow disinformation" is, IMO, bordering on euphemism. The increasingly enthusiastic swinging of blunt weapons has already made a terrible mess. Once the war misinformation game matures to where the Trump election or covid misinformation game has already matured to...
This week Youtube shut down an actual news channel that aired a Trump election statements in the process of reporting on it. Airing pro-regime Russian media will likely be next, in some fashion.
Yesterday, I caught up with a Russian friend of mine. He had complex views Ukraine, Putin & such two weeks ago. His views are no longer complex. He's squarely anti-Putin, anti-regime and considers Zelenski and the Ukrainian fighters heroic with no caveats. Obviously, the invasion itself played a part forming his current views. But... the shuttering of nearly all free media outlets cinched it. Now that dissident opinions are literally illegal in Russia again, he's literally supporting the opposite side in a war. This man is a lifelong nationalist.
This fearful attitude towards misinformation is dangerous, far more dangerous than misinformation in my opinion. That does not mean misinformation is not real, not a problem or not something that needs action. It does mean that this is a bad decision by Reddit.
This is not good PR for reddit, whenever they make decisions like this the entire site erupts in revolt for a week or two. More likely, reddit thinks this is a good idea because it will reduce the spread of what the administrator's conider Russian disinformation. Acting to limit the spread of Russian disinformation has been a major effort for all the big social media sites since 2016, and this change seems inline with that pattern, just taken to an extreme that reflects the current extreme situation with Russia.
There's no point in getting the local population to rise up because the vast majority of Russians are pro-Putin fascists. Even western poll show that they're pro-Putin.
The point is to quarantine Russia so that it doesn't infect us.
there's selection bias since I'm finding Russians who are on Western social media platforms, but still, I don't think you can claim the "vast majority" are like this.
Source? The latest western polls show his approval rating in the high 60s but you have to significantly discount that bc 1) the perceived danger of speaking out against the govt skews responses towards approval 2) those polls were done before the Ukrainian crisis
And in any case, even if they don't explicitly ban left-wing views, their algos will make sure most users don't see them.
this is all about money, like all world conflict. it just shows how globalisation only works if you're subservient to the will of the US.
Try learning from the Russian people, who are learning from the BBC, instead of random people on the internet.
""" We decided to do this due to the heavy cyber component to this war and the chance of manipulated content. Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign. We certainly recognize that this is a pretty far reaching decision but there are generally other ways for most people to share the type of content that is being described.
As to why this wasn't communicated, there is a lot of things going on right now and sometimes moving fast means missing steps along the way (like sharing with mods). We did not intend to hide this decision. """
So it has little to nothing to do with attempting to censor.
The spam filter intentionally or not does a lot of censorship
That said, this is just par for the course of Reddit. Just like how every subreddit has arbitrary rules that discourage viewpoints the moderators don't want people to see whether that's Bitcoin Cash on r/bitcoin or getting scolded by a mod on r/vancouver when I said something bad about the DTES.
Banning .ru is about as effective towards the imagined cause as subreddits putting up yellow and blue banners.
This is a betrayal of one of the core values that make a liberal, rules-based order worth fighting for.
this kind of inept safetyism is fundamentally incompatible with a free society.
Yes, it is censorship. The what, why, how, shoulds, and coulds of it are irrelevant to the fact that it is censorship.
For christ's sake, I use Yandex translate because it's better for Russian. I now can't link that on a language learning subreddit.
I'm not Russian.
It's not as if Russians can't just register .com domains either. This is just fucking people around purely for the sake of it.
What should I do here? Fly to Russia and tell Mr Putin to stop?
It feels like corona all over again. Bad thing A happens, so you react by doing something that's about ten times more damaging.
The whole 'least worst case' scenario in which the West being directly responsible for a revolution is somehow less likely to cause fallout than just getting involved in the war is insane. The actions of people (e.g. the Russian government) aren't a set of if-then-else chains that you can find a loophole in.
Yandex has also .com domain, won't your links work through that?
I'm sorry that you can't post translation links and it may seem blunt, but currently people are dying and fleeing.
If every Russian can see what an inconvenience it is to have Putin as a leader the hope is that they will be more inclined to do everything in their power to have him replaced. Some will of course just blame "west", but there will a also be those who will come to question power.
this may sound blunt. but people are always and will always be dying. most of them will be poor people in some bush conflict you do not hear or care about but there has always been a war 'somewhere'. if conflict demands we suspend all of our principles and all modes of sensibility 'for the sake of the dying people' then we will do so indefinitely.
The citizens of a country don't see their existence as being a bargaining chip. There is no situation in which the Russian people simply think "oh, ok, let's just do what those people who disabled my bank account say". None.
This whole thing is an exercise in seeing just how little people know or are even interested in the world outside of their tiny bubble.
- Ghost of Kiev using ARMA Footage.
No evidence this person exists.
- Miss Ukraine fighting in Kiev.
It was an airsoft gun. She says she isn’t fighting.
- Snake Island soldiers killed after heroic standoff.
They all surrendered.
- Nuclear Reactor shelled, radiation rising.
A training building was involved in a relatively small firefight. Reactor was never in danger and radiation levels didn’t change. The training building that caught fire was outside of the perimeter of the reactor complex and there is no evidence of “shelling”, which means heavy artillery.
—
People debate if this is a needed part of the information war, and I’m not here to go back and fourth on that.
I am curious what Russian propaganda or information ops look like in the west because I haven’t seen them yet. (I’m not a social media user)
Does anyone have examples?
Edit: Added details for clarity. I’m a trained former nuclear submarine sailor, and current Army Officer, so this engagement sits at a nexus of my unique experience.
1. This wasn't a small firefight. It was an hours long fight including numerous tanks, armored vehicles, rpgs, etc.
2. The training building caught fire, but it was far from the only piece of the complex shelled.
You can find the 4 hour long video of the fight here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUT36YGOh8
I'm not going to watch it again to find you timestamps (sorry), but I can assure you that in it other buildings (including the building with the camera, which is not the building which caught fire) are seen being shelled.
I also believe that this footage/geolocation of damage within the complex is credible, though I have no hard proof of that: https://mobile.twitter.com/RespectIsVital/status/14998955944...
Edit: The information about radiation levels increasing does appear to have been false, but that's the only incorrect claim I've seen about what actually happened. There are also competing claims about how badly this reactor could melt down if it lost cooling, so at least some of those are incorrect. Which of these are intentionally false though is unclear.
You might find this twitter thread interesting: https://twitter.com/marcowenjones/status/1499312121141673986
This may have been said, but even the most mainstream american news sources like NBC said it was totally fine within hours of the initial concerns.
That gets half credit. I’m curious what else people have seen.
I would give anything to go back to usenet and that everything would be taken with a grain of salt because it is usenet.
That is never going to happen though. We are society of automatons now who have mostly outsourced their thinking to the mob/group mind of social media.
If you read Le Bon or Freud's work on group psychology it may as well be talking about social media in 2022.
"The feelings of the group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that the group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. It goes directly to extremes, if a suspicion is expressed, it is instantly changed into an incontrovertible certainty."
The actual censorship is Putin's 15 year punishment for news he doesn't like.
I wish enough of HN understood free speech at a level to pass a test in 8th grade that we would embarrass one another when getting things this wrong.
It really hampers our ability to function in the real world, the way we reject any constraint involving text and then say "but muh free speech"
This isn't intelligent or correct
There is war. People are dying, and you’re here commenting about free speech and your lack of access to 0s and 1s.
Edit: My usage of the term “generation” was pointed out to be wrong
Media is manipulated by government for their politics. Some people are forcing their own viewpoint to others. People blindingly spreads hates without deeply thinking. Many users from social platforms think they know very well about politics and say like a professor when arguing with others.
Such a crazy time.
* Russians are bombing civilians, infrastructure, power plants, &c
* We using sanctions and cutting of Russian influence.
These are in no way the same, and you can't say we're "spreading feud" when they're giving 15year prison sentences for saying the word "war".
>infrastructure, power plants
>they're giving 15year prison sentences for saying the word "war"
https://balkaninsight.com/2022/03/01/czechia-mulls-penalisin...
sounds like reddit better start censoring .com/.gov/.us/.cz links
Everyone cheering for this should be ashamed of themselves for their blind Russiaphobia.
A government is not its people.
the only way this war ends without escalation is when the Russian people convince their government to stop fighting it
It's not happening in weeks to come whatever the west does.
The "we must do something!" mentality at work.
- "Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign."
I'm afraid the future of the internet really will be a small oligarchy of walled gardens, each of which only permit mention and reference to other walled gardens, in the interest of controllability ("integrity", "security", "safety"). The independent, non-corporate internet will slowly die out in the kernel of the hyperlink matrix.
The ironic thing is, this can apply to most of reddit. If they were really so worried they should shut down the entire site as it's rife with manipulated content and competing agendas. This internet era red scare is very strange to me
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/05/war-conflict-enemies-o...
Banning .ru sites doesn't actually undermine Russian military interest. It just undermines people like myself who want to link to Russian sources to expose Russian military propaganda. It drives sceptics towards unreasonable echo-chambers where they're more prone to and less aware of foreign influence. It causes Russians to host their propaganda on .com's where people will be less sceptical of it which is just correcting your enemy while they're making a mistake. If you were going to censor them, a targeted blacklist would at least have the benefit of letting through anti-war .ru's, it's not as though everybody in Russia supports this war. A .ru ban fails at the very goal it's trying to accomplish.
Banning 5 million .ru domains [5] is also just so destructive. The vast majority of websites blocked with have nothing to do with politics or news or the war. Fuck the people who run and use those websites, I guess?
The Russian perspective is also valuable to listen to, even if their government is horrible. If a Ukrainian war criminal in Ukraine rapes and murders a bunch of people, by censoring Russians who are uniquely capable and motivated to expose such war crimes. We're going to help war criminals get away with and continue perpetrating their crimes. War criminals regardless of country benefit from wartime censorship. Hearing the Russian perspective and engaging with Russians also helps to end war diplomatically and peacefully. It's the best situation if we hear the Russian perspective, but we're AWARE it's the Russian perspective, so as not to be misled by bias and to be sceptical of potential slanders.
A .ru ban totally fails at its intended goal, it hurts a lot of bystanders, and it undermines the goal we should be aiming towards.
[1] https://youtu.be/g1VNQGsiP8M [2] https://youtu.be/Z9F-cHc5Qog [3] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/370618-syria-sources-bartlett-rt/am... [4] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/reddit-bans-links-to-r... [5] https://statdom.ru/tld/ru/report/domainscount/#8:date=202202...
this is an authoritarian feature of our merger of state and market that will continue to grow and find increasing number of avenues for application.
