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Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."
Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:25AM (3 children)
I'm so glad that I've never donated any money to Mozilla. This is the sort of activity I would never want to financially support in any way. Seeing how they've ruined Firefox's user experience for me lately is bad enough. But this initiative is just too much for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:05PM (2 children)
100% depends on how they go about it. I read the article, it is very light on details so it is impossible to say at this point. However, they do bring up that technological solutions won't fix the problem so they're working on educational initiatives and resources. As long as they don't put censorship by default into the browser then this is a good thing, not bad. Parental controls have been around forever, no one complains about the censorship those apply because they are optional.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:07PM (1 child)
This sounds like it could be Step 1 of such a plan. You can't integrate something like this into Firefox until it exists. But once it does exist then it's easy to integrate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:12PM
We are always one step away from fascism. There are a lot of things that worry me more than this move, Mozilla is not a monopoly by any means, if you want to worry about dystopuan information control than look no further than everyone's favorite browser from their favorite government proxy.