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On January 15th, 2018, World Socialist Web Site reported that users are unable to share a promotional video for a January 16th online meeting, "Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship."
Facebook has blocked users from sharing a social media video promoting the January 16 online meeting "Organizing resistance to Internet censorship," featuring World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. The initial post of the video, uploaded Friday, cannot be shared by any user. Those who attempt to do so receive an error message that seems to imply a technical failure.
Users reported, however, that upon clicking "If you think you're seeing this message by mistake, please let us know," they were presented with a notice that clearly indicates the content had been blocked in the name of keeping Facebook "safe."
WSWS published an open letter about internet censorship and net neutrality on November 25. The FCC repealed net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017.
In this AC's opinion, Facebook is certainly within their rights to refuse to host any content for any reasons they choose. However, for many people, Facebook is the internet.
Should we worry about entrenched services such as Facebook and Google using their positions to suppress information? Does the presence or absence of net neutrality change one's analysis of the situation?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
It's been awhile, but that sounds about right. By Marx's standard there's never yet been a communist government. But he was wrong.
Communism is one of the oldest forms of government around. Most families use it internally. Of course, you could also focus differently as say most families use dictatorship internally, or differently again and say most families use anarchy internally.
Still, communism is one of the primitive forms of government. It works quite well in the appropriate circumstances. The problem is, it doesn't scale at all, and it depends on a level of altruism not usually seen outside a circle of close relations (and not always there). Charismatic leaders can get it to work in groups of up to around 100 people, but since it depends on a charismatic leader it usually soon falls apart.
Please note that democracy doesn't scale well either, though it scales better than communism. It can work well in groups of 500 people without the need for a charismatic leader. In larger groups, however, it tends to decay into some form of Oligarchy or into Tyranny (in the Athenian sense of the word). Republicanism isn't a form of government, but rather an set of rules that can be attached to one of the other forms of government. Monarchy is an inheritable form of Tyranny...though it comes in lots of variant forms. Theocracy isn't a form of government, but is rather usually Tyranny with the responsibility for bad results fobbed off to some spiritual cause. It could equally be an oligarchy, but I'm not aware of any examples.
What I'm basically doing is classifying the variety of government by how the power is dispersed. If it's concentrated in one entity, I'm calling that a kind of tyranny. If it's shared among a (relatively) small group of competing entities that are in basic agreement as to what the formal rules of competition are, then I'm calling it an oligarchy. If it's dispersed generally among all the people (except, possibly, for some groups) then I'm calling it a democracy. So the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Athens was a democracy (except when it was a tyranny). Etc. And note that no existing or historic government is a pure form, there's always an admixture of all the other forms in varying proportion. Now communism is an economic system, not a governmental system. It talks about wealth being shared equally, but Marx's theories about how the power to cause that sharing would happen are so unrealistic that nobody has ever even tried them beyond the scale of an extremely small village who are all closely related. And on that scale they can work with a charismatic leader.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
You've made the observation of Dunbar's Number, a.k.a. The Monkeysphere.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:16AM
Pretty much, yes. Democracy can work a bit beyond Dunbar's number, but after that it has a tendency to decay.
The other respondent commented about Switzerland being a counter-example, but I believe that it's a "representative democracy" rather than a democracy. Athens was able to make actual democracy work with numbers slightly higher than 500, but as it got larger it started splitting into factions, and they basically lost it even before the war with Sparta. Actually, they lost it more than once. The laws of Solon are from one of the earlier times that they lost it.
I don't know much about the Swiss system, but it seems likely the cantons are small enough that the candidates are actually known by the people who vote for them. If so, then the cantons could have a democracy even though the country didn't.
OTOH, don't make the equivalence between democracy and good. Democracies are often less tolerant of deviant individuals than are monarchies. Some intolerant bigot wielding the "will of the people" may be telling the truth (though perhaps he shaped the "will of the people"), but that doesn't make him good. He's still an intolerant bigot.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:39PM
Actually, it does.
(You must be a USAian, where your country was set up as an Oligarchy and where the propaganda says it is a Democracy.)
N.B. Public financing of political campaigns would go a long way toward straightening out things.
...and, for contrast, see Switzerland. [wikipedia.org]
Note also that no country other than USA has an Electoral College; elsewhere the one with the most votes wins.
Some places have Ranked Voting to assure that a majority is reached.
Many countries have a "majority rules" paradigm (not simply a plurality) where, if there isn't a majority, a coalition must be formed to get a ruling majority.
USA is centuries behind when it comes to governmental forms.
...and Thomas Jefferson advocated for a Constitutional Convention every generation (every 19 years by his count).
democracy scales better than communism
Your post is a mish-mash of "ideas".
Democracy is a governmental form.
Communism is an economic form.
In fact, Communism requires Democracy (everybody gets a vote and all votes are equal).
It's clear that you have swallowed a whole bunch of Cold War bullshit.
It's sad that Comparative Economics was purged from USAian schools and all that was allowed to be taught is Neoclassical Economics.
You can expand your knowledge base via Prof. Richard Wolff.
The descriptions of the presentations are best at his own site. [democracyatwork.info]
The sample rates/file sizes there are, however, ridiculous for spoken-word stuff.
The file sizes are more reasonable at this Pacifica Radio affiliate. [kpfa.org]
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