'No longer acceptable' for platforms to take key decisions alone, EU Commission says
It is "no longer acceptable" for social media giants to take key decisions on online content removals alone, following the high profile takedowns of US President Trump's accounts on Facebook and Twitter, the European Commission has said.
Trump's accounts have been suspended by the two platforms for inciting calls to violence ahead of the violent riots that hit Washington's Capitol Hill last week.
Speaking to lawmakers on Monday (11 January), Prabhat Agarwal, an official who heads up the eCommerce unit at the European Commission's DG Connect, noted how the EU executive's Digital Services Act attempts to realign the balance between effective content removal and preserving freedom of expression online.
"It is no longer acceptable in our view that platforms take some key decisions by themselves alone without any supervision, without any accountability, and without any sort of dialogue or transparency for the kind of decisions that they're taking," Agarwal said.
"Freedom of expression is really a key value in this," he told the European Parliament's internal market committee.
The comments came following concerns raised by some lawmakers in the European Parliament following the suspension of Trump's social media accounts. In doing so, platforms giants had demonstrated that they yield a disproportionate degree of power over the freedom of speech online.
"The fact that platforms like Twitter and Facebook decide who can speak freely is dangerous," Green MEP Kim van Sparrentak said.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @02:27PM (21 children)
What's next? Make it compulsory to express myself through these platforms? Sheesh... these MEPs seem to have their head in the same spot as Trump in terms of knowledge on what the internet really is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:53PM
Will you be able to speak if you have no mouth, mister?
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @06:51PM (19 children)
Exactly. There are many, many platforms out there, and if you don't like the centralized ones, you can always set up your own site, or even a Diaspora node. If you're too dumb to do that, then maybe you don't deserve to be heard.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:21PM (5 children)
Soon we will have p2p software that totally protects anonymity, etc. sure, pieces exist already, but i'm talking about easier and more full featured, linkable, etc. The government and big tech can sit around and jerk each other off.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:25PM (4 children)
Tor got taken over by SJWs, many of the node operators were actually alt-right types (not just Americans) who eventually defected to I2P over Tor devs ignoring longstanding issues with guards and misbehaving nodes that weren't being caught by the concensus. I2P in turn lost it's pro-anarchist, then its pro-communist factions, eventually devolving into SJWs and pro-fascists (and yes this was as weird as it sounds!) among its developers, eventually becoming a pro-censorship majority of both SJW and fascists who would kick, mute, and ban people they didn't like. Now almost all the channels on IRC2P are registered users only to post messages, even the formerly 'free voice at all costs' ones.
The former I2Pers have become a diaspora as nobody trusts the increasingly centralized, censored, and questionably secure networks, with lots of us having noticed oddly behavior node patterns to the point of actively distrusting the networks. Furthermore within the past 4 years both I2P and Tor have been subject to either denial of service or traffic monitoring attacks that call into question their suitability for anonymous service hosting as well as peer to peer communications.
For anyone saying well there is 'xxx' new privacy network out, go look into who is running those new services. Many of them were started by people who were on those networks and either actively doxxed people using them, or have publicly stated opinions that perhaps privacy and free speech aren't that important (perhaps during bipolar or depressive episodes, but are you really going to trust a crypto/anonymity developer who isn't 100 percent behind their beliefs in anonymity/privacy at all times, particularly when the code is not being externally audited?) If you are, try things like lokinet, but beware you're just trading one second of known risks and compromises for what is likely to turn out to be another set, perhaps even with backdoors baked in.
For reference: I was someone heavily into the scene from 2012 to 2018, and finally quit after a newly re-appointed dev, who had taken over the channel after the founder left over concerns the network was no longer anonymous and that the server admin were spying/censoring people, started censoring/banning users of that channel for objectionable comments. This was a person who had in prior years been banned from the project over personal attacks against a rather inept dev who later become the project head (overseeing the embezzling of over 6 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency donations that had been made to the project during the first and last 'official' convention for the project.) Many of the changes made since to increase performance have also caused similar anonymity attacks to what have been happening with Tor, while there has yet to be an external audit of the code, despite having had donations provided that should have covered even the most thorough auditi payments completely.
And that is where we are in the world of anonymity networks in 2021. No one to trust without an angle, and many of those same people only desiring free speech until it's the other guy speaking. Eternal September wasn't the worst the internet had to see, the true Dark Ages are just beginning. It will be educational watching what unfolds and if cyberspace will ever manage to recover, either culturally, technologically, or politically free from the traps now unfolding upon it at all levels.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:16PM
... When Advocating For Social Change" (an essay I wrote some years back): https://pdfernhout.net/why-encryption-use-is-problematical-when-advocating-for-social-change.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Here is a partial list of all the ways a tool like Briar can fail when being used by activists engaged in controversial political actions. ... In general, a system intended to ensure private communications is only as secure as its weakest link. If any of these levels is compromised (hardware, firmware, OS, application, algorithm theory, algorithm implementation, user error, user loyalty, etc.) then your communications are compromised. ... If you want to build a mass movement, at some point, you need to engage people. In practice, for social psychology reasons, engaging people is very difficult, if not impossible, to do completely anonymously in an untraceable way. People have historically built mass movements without computers or the internet. It's not clear if the internet really makes this easier for activists or instead just for the status quo who wants to monitor them. If you work in public, you don't have to fear loss of secure communications because you never structure you movement to rely on them. If you rely on "secure" communications, then you may set yourself up to fail when such communications are compromised. If your point is to build a mass movement, then where should your focus be? ..."
That essay mainly discussed individual issues of equipment compromise and also compromise by the other party. Maybe I should update that essay someday to include the sort of social trust issues you insightfully mention here about trusting some supposed "private" network with unknown and potentially biased operators...
And of course, there is also this: https://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 17 2021, @03:48AM (1 child)
So you're saying that the Jews ruined it, like they ruin everything else that's good?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @08:41AM
You're just pissy because your ancestors gave up their ancestral paganisms without even documenting them and fell to conquest, accepting some Roman psyops cool bro story about the One Righteous Jew and his hatred of Jewish bankers that's just yet another cult of the dead god with some vaguely Buddhist sounding stuff tacked on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:15PM
are you referring to lokinet through this whole quote or two different projects? i had high hopes for lokinet, at least for a reasonable amount of time.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @09:07PM
I heard there's this one platform where you can say pretty much whatever you want and the worst that will happen is that you have to eat 10 cans of spam or something. I guess they must consider that torture, the name of the website sounds slightly vegan.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:58PM (3 children)
No. You can't. Big tech will take you down one way or the other.
Either by removing hosting, dns, or ddos protection, or payment methods. Cross the wrong powerful people, and you will not stay online very long.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @11:45PM (2 children)
Yes, you can. Dark website inside onion.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:06AM (1 child)
So, ultimate echo chamber??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:32AM
Cryptonerd fantasy, duh.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday January 15 2021, @10:58PM (7 children)
There's countless highly intelligent people who don't have the level of technological skill & knowledge required to do that, even though they can easily do things that we'd find difficult at absolute best. (From what I've heard, that tends to include top-notch doctors of all stripes, for example.) At this point, given most of the tech community has figured that out, I lean more towards "if you still haven't noticed that about humanity, maybe you don't have enough insight into anything outside your field to deserve to be heard."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:30AM (6 children)
Setting up a Diaspora node isn't that hard. You don't even have to create a server; you can just get an account on someone else's. If you can figure out how to create a Facebook account and navigate it, which most of these right-wingers seem to have figured out, then you can figure out how to use a Diaspora account. If you're not techincally adept enough to actually set it up and link it to other federated servers, then find someone who is. Is there no one in the entire conservative movement who can handle a simple IT task like this? Somehow, these people managed to set up Parler (though not very well from a security standpoint, apparently), but you want me to believe that they're utterly incapable of using Diaspora?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @11:32AM
Diaspora is pretty much dead anyway.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:56PM (4 children)
... And I believe we've just gone full circle....
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:27PM (3 children)
So you want me to believe that there are no conservatives who know how to set up a server?
How exactly did these people manage to create Parler then?
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday January 16 2021, @09:12PM (2 children)
No. Just noticing that the expectations are fluid. They should set up their own server, cdn, DNS, and then we're back to "you don't even need to set up a server". Once the ISP gets pressured to shut them out they'll be criticized for not creating their own internet, installing their own fiber, phone polls & trenches. Launching a satellite array isn't an unreasonable barrier for free speech, right? It's a free country.
Not that I'm going to cry too hard about it. The "moral majority" of the 80s also used similar arguments to silence things they didn't want to hear. It's just a continuation of the ever escalating game of politics in the US.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 17 2021, @01:49AM (1 child)
They would never need to go as far as creating their own internet. At some point, you can just buy your own backbone connection. Amazon doesn't have an ISP, for instance. As for DNS, again, I don't think it's possible to be denied DNS service, per ICANN rules.
For an extreme example of what you can do when you want to actually express yourself using your Constitutional freedom of speech, instead of just sitting around and whining about "Big Tech" "censoring" you, just look at Stormfront. I don't feel like actually bringing up the website itself, but according to Wikipedia, it's still online, and it's been online for **24 years** now.
If those mouth-breathing idiots can do it, there's nothing stopping the MAGA idiots from doing it too. You can't claim that conservative thought is actually being forcibly kept off the internet as long as stormfront.org is still running.
Of course, stormfront is a website, and doesn't have handy stuff like a smartphone app, but we're talking about being completely blocked from the internet here, and this just isn't happening. As vile as I find the stormfront people, I do have to at least give them credit for sticking to their guns and keeping their disgusting website up all this time, instead of whining about "censorship".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @03:04AM
Andrew Anglin, or Flying Farang Syndrome fame? Oh, wait. No money. On the lam.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Friday January 15 2021, @02:28PM (37 children)
Leave it to the greens to make themselves more irrelevant.
There's a difference between passing legislation as to what the parameters are that a business must operate within, and actively requiring approval for decisions.
Greenies apparently don't understand that.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @04:57PM (36 children)
What you don't seem to understand is that these platforms are the public square and if you're going to have any right to free speech there needs to be some sort of regulation in place to prevent the tech giants from killing speech that they don't like. This whole business about Trump being deplatformed wouldn't be an issue if there were more platforms out there and the rules were being enforced in some sort of consistent way. Anybody that's not a politician would have been banned years earlier if they were spouting the kind of nonsense that he's been spouting.
At the end of the day, there's a reason why people are complaining about a handful of very powerful tech companies being able to enact the internet death penalty on people without any sort of legal proceedings or even consistency. It's not any less of a dangerous precedence than when the government does it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday January 15 2021, @05:19PM (27 children)
No, they're private squares. I think a big part of the problem is there are no equivalent public squares.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by slinches on Friday January 15 2021, @05:43PM (16 children)
That is the problem and as far as I am aware there is currently no way to create a public square on the internet because the infrastructure is privately owned. Something needs to be done about that in a way that doesn't ruin what's good about the internet and maintains the most freedom possible. What that looks like exactly is an excellent subject for debate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @06:30PM
^ might be one of the more reasonable posts on this topic
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @06:53PM (13 children)
If the government wants to build its own "public square", nothing is stopping them.
However, taxpayers might object to their tax money being used to build a place that's mostly used by conspiracy theorists, racists, and anti-government agitators.
It's all very simple: centralized social networks will always have this problem, because these are private companies, and it's their right to control what goes on on their own services. So if you don't like their policies, you need a *decentralized* social network. We already have these: Diaspora is a big one. Use that instead. No one can ban you on there (though they can refuse to be your peer, as is their right).
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:23PM (5 children)
Racialism and racial solidarity is only "racist" if you're white.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @10:11PM (4 children)
Dipshit. Race is 100% a social construct, so if you sexually identify as white, then you're racialist. I would suggest just simply not sexually identifying as white. Problem solved.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:44PM (1 child)
Well, that isn't really true because
1. There is a biological/genetic inherited component to race. If your parents have black skin, chances are you will have black skin.
2. You may not define as white, or jewish, or black, or whatever; but others will define you.
You can't just "define away" racism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:07PM
White privilege allows people who pass for white to do just this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @08:17AM
Incel!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:27PM
"Race is 100% a social construct"
no it's not. races are like breeds of dogs. separated by nature over 10's/hundred's of thousands of years as competition for the best design just like all specialization. in fact, the main classes of race (negroid, mongoloid, cacausoid, australoid, etc) are probably different subspecies. noone says breeds of dogs are not wildly different in aggression, intelligence, appearance, etc. these are genetic differences and the jews that push this anti-white agenda know it. go back to your boshevik training center, useful idiot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by slinches on Friday January 15 2021, @07:29PM (3 children)
Decentralized social networks are definitely more free, but they only address censorship by the one centralized authority they eliminate the need for. Anyone on such a network could still be blocked by the ISPs, hosts, etc. that their traffic goes through.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @07:33PM (2 children)
They can use Tor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:32PM (1 child)
I think you miss the point that Tor still requires an existing connection to the internet provided by an ISP. Just because they can't see where your traffic is going doesn't mean it can't be unilaterally disallowed in the form of refusing you service.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:33AM
Since when do any ISPs (in the US) ban people for using ToR or VPNs? The ISP can't ban people based on what they're doing online if they can't see where the traffic is going.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:41PM (2 children)
FWIW my tenuous grasp on the development of computers, infrastructure in general, and the internet specifically is, and was to a large degree sponsored by the government, and so - the taxpayer.
And how big, exactly, is Diaspora? You have to be very considerate of the influence that these market movers have and the advantage their mote possesses. They have untouchable momentum. Nobody wants to have a dozen different logins, they want to be on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and etc., where a vast majority of past, current, and likely future content will be. All these segues into different services, especially cognitively difficult ones like decentralized platforms, despite their evident appeal, come at the cost of becoming collaterals; thus they become uniformally populated with some qualitatively similar cohort. At this point, any disproportion in the views creates a positive feedback loop. At this point, exemplars in a smaller community are given a high degree of power over the development of the views of the community.
With these one ring companies, they're playing indiscriminately, they're (and more importantly, have) attracting the largest slice of the probable market. This is an important function as it enables diverse and otherwise disconnected voices to connect and relate. They are the public square, regardless of the infrastructure, and so they must be treated as the public square. And this will remain so, we live in a world where most every scenario is a winner take all, and the companies we're talking about have cemented their place in more ways than one, and in turn, by the communities and content creators had their places cemented. They don't operate in the sphere of a free market, and they have to pay the toll for their permanence by accepting they're a possession of the common.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:43AM
Fortunately, the fediverse also has federated authentication.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:33PM
And how big, exactly, is Diaspora? You have to be very considerate of the influence that these market movers have and the advantage their mote possesses. They have untouchable momentum.
Back in the late 90s or early 2000s, MySpace had "untouchable momentum", and Facebook was nothing. Where is MySpace now? These things only have momentum because people continue to use them; as soon as something else woos them away, it collapses. If all the angry Trumptards suddenly decide to jump to Diaspora, then Diaspora will be much more popular. What about Parler? A year ago, I had never even heard of the thing, and suddenly it's huge, right before it got shut down by Amazon/Google/Apple. If the Trumpers are really such a huge force, then any platform they move to will gain in popularity.
It's really weird: you're trying to tell me that YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have now grown so huge that no one else can possibly hope to supplant them or create a viable alternative with enough users to make it useful as a social network. However, the very existence and rise of Parler completely debunks this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:34PM
As, to a lesser extent, were mailing lists.
The problem however is spam and abuse followed later by corporate collusion has lead to heavy restrictions on the free and reliable transmission of email and the almost complete elimination of usenet, outside of a very small number of donation supported services (with limited group access) and paid, mostly binary themed commercial usenet services.
So the question is: How do you recreate something from the earliest days of the internet that can both eliminate deplatforming, and, most importantly, not run afoul of regional laws in the process of peering content? One of the current issues with usenet is all the major services are hosted in either the US or EU (Including Germany) and while you can say a lot in those places, there are still many kinds of speech that will get your posts removed or risk your banning.
Unlike in the past it is even possible that enough key servers could be running automated backend filters to shadowban usenet posts that go against the official story, and none of us would be the wiser.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @05:56PM (7 children)
We should demand one from the government. That's how it's supposed to work, competition instead of censorship. It is very unfortunate we let the government decide what goes on in the private sphere instead of just opening up shop and setting the example. Maybe the public isn't so good at business.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday January 15 2021, @06:03PM (6 children)
Would you want to participate in a social media platform operated by the government?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @06:41PM
When a subpoena by a lawyer without judicial review (*) is often all it takes to get whatever information a private social media company has about a person, is there much difference between the public and private spaces? (aside from the private spaces using the distinction to engage in restraints on speech the government could not)
I think it is a debatable question whether one is actually safer with publicTwitter vs. a privateTwitter. I share the knee jerk reaction against publicTwitter, but when we get down into the nitty gritty, I don't know if it is actually worse, and the ultimate conclusion may be that it IS worse, but it might be something worth thinking about more.
(*) https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-enforcement-support#8 [twitter.com] Note how "subpoeana" is clearly not the same as a "court order".
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @06:55PM
Hell, I still use the post office.
The public is suppose to oversee the government, if they want a good government.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday January 15 2021, @07:32PM
You already are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:26PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:00AM
That sounds almost as bad as Facebook, and I sure wouldn't go there.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:08AM
Ultimate honeypot.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @06:02PM
Even private squares can obtain the protections of public squares.
Company Town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama [wikipedia.org]
Shopping Mall (CA specific, not US-wide): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins [wikipedia.org]
This is from the Marsh decision, though be careful about broad extension to Twitter. The court was talking about real property:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:02PM
whitehouse.gov? That's what it's for. Just no push mode. Time for the whitehouse to make an app? Every email scammer can help them.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Friday January 15 2021, @05:38PM (3 children)
They are not proposing legislation, they're demanding the right to decide who may post. Big difference.
They want that, they should set up their own platform.'
It's only a public square if it's paid for with public money.
To say "you may not ban someone without checking with us first" is a bridge too far.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:58PM (2 children)
You don't get it. Here's how the EC operates:
- first, the EU signals problems, and waits for the companies to offer/implement solutions
- if nothing (or not enough happens), the EU starts suggesting industry reforms
- if nothing (or not enough happens), the EU starts developing its own policies
- if nothing (or not enough happens), the EU starts enforcing its policies
They've done this for mobile phone chargers (which is why they're all using USB now) for data privacy (which is why we have GDPR), and steel production, for example. They're doing the same thing right now for tax evasion, textile (clothing) production, and now online communications. You may laugh at it all you want, but remember that the EU is one of the most effective international legislative bodies [wikipedia.org].
And who do you think paid for the phone/Internet infrastructure in most of Europe? Hint: it was public money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:24PM
If euros like twitter so much they want their government to own it, they can have it.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:01AM
Europeans, French and Germans at least, have been in open revolt against their government for years. If anything, that revolt provides a sneak-peek of the next few years of America if the ruling party decides to go full-retard on declaring 75 million people "terrorists." To quote somebody else, they've been kicking a dog for no reason, for years, then when the dog bites them they grab the gun and declare the dog "rabid."
European bureaucrats are crying crocodile tears because they already tried this...or perhaps are actually afraid that a revolt in America will provide hope to their own freedom-fighters they've been trying unsuccessfully to squash for years. Like the CCP vs Jack Ma, European bureaucrats are just jealous that somebody else has the monopoly on speech control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:59PM (2 children)
"are the public square"
No, not even close. restricting access via user account is possibly a metaphor for a doorways. They are more like the town pub, than a a public square. Both are really bad analogies. The "public" part is the network, not the server infrastructure.
You don't like the loud obnoxious drunk in the corner, leave... I don't use Facebook, I don't use Twitter. If you think they are that powerful, why are you here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:55PM (1 child)
...is the correct answer,
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @10:39PM
you may be forgetting that the loud obnoxious drunk can be physically ejected by a bouncer if they break certain rules
attacking or threatening physical harm upon other patrons is pretty much always things that will get the drunk thrown to the curb, which is what happened to trump and other domestic terrorists
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:39PM
Nope, they're just popular.
> Trump being deplatformed wouldn't be an issue if there were more platforms out there and the rules were being enforced in some sort of consistent way.
It also wouldn't be an issue if you whiners actually understood the 'invisible hand' bullshit you spout whenever regulation comes up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Friday January 15 2021, @02:49PM (161 children)
I am not for censorship. I typically love when idiots stand up tall and spew their idiocy to the world for all to see. Unfortunately it seems that in today's age, wisdom and thought are not rewarded. I have been told by multiple IRL people that their feelz are more important than that, granted it's the half that never finished high school properly.
In the case of what we are seeing in the United States though, it appears that all politics is only getting more vitriolic. The narratives of the people caught up in politics is so far apart now they both call each other crazy. Everyone seems crazy to each other when ones set of facts don't line up.
For instance, republicans have watched "their" media tell them tales that the election was stolen by godless pedophiles and that the country is doomed with Biden. The democrats "media" has told them that Trump was going to burn it all down by acting recklessly. Republicans can't believe that anyone would put up with pedo's, where Democrats can't believe anyone believes this crap. What makes it worse is that the media for each group represents the other side like their fringes are their base.
I know which one I think seems to have bore fruit, but I'm told there are some 70 million people that do not agree with me.
I am not excited that folks like Zuckerburg are and Dorsey are the ones moderating speech. Handing the guys that created this social media deluge the keys to moderation seems like handing over the fire department to the arsonist.
It seems easy to say, "Ban the liars," but to each side, the liars appear to be the other guy. There are no adults in the room anymore.
What are we to do as a society? How does a society dig out from this?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @03:03PM (94 children)
Here is one recent problem to examine: Stating the election was stolen, with fire and passion, does not make it true no matter how many times you say it. If people hear that message, from several news sources, and all their friends, then they become enraged. I know I would become enraged if I heard the election was stolen, and it somehow seemed believable.
Part of the solution is an educated populace that can tell fact from fantasy. That can recognize a liar that says one thing Monday, the opposite on Tuesday, and then the original lie again on Wednesday.
I know the old saying: you can fool some of the people all of the time. But really. On this scale?
Beyond education, maybe the problem of having those echo chambers could be fixed. I don't know how. But Regan made this possible by eliminating the fairness doctrine back in the broadcast daze.
Another problem is the levels of rage. Before FaceTwit, people could disagree. But now people have to disagree to an extent they work themselves up into a murderous rage. It's unbelievable.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @03:17PM (27 children)
And once the people are educated, they will vote Democrat forevermore. Snort!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Friday January 15 2021, @03:35PM (9 children)
Unfortunately, what you say is actually something I have heard repeated to me, yet they actually meant it. I've heard many times that its college that is the problem. "College creates snowflakes."
https://nypost.com/2018/11/30/how-to-make-snowflakes-and-expand-campus-bureaucracy/ [nypost.com]
https://www.newsweek.com/millennials-are-snowflakes-heres-data-prove-it-670662 [newsweek.com]
I've heard many people say that college brainwashes people to think differently. I've started to wonder if this is the root of people not liking college, because they equate learning with being brainwashed?
There is no doubt that you can have educated people disagree and join different political parties, but as DannyB points out, "Another problem is the levels of rage. Before FaceTwit, people could disagree. But now people have to disagree to an extent they work themselves up into a murderous rage. It's unbelievable."
I agree. Its all unbelievable. I'd love to rewind the interwebs to the time before FaceTwit. It would be nice if people would at least educate themselves enough to realize that talking things out is a whole lot better than burning it all down and starting over.
(Score: 3, Troll) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @05:27PM (7 children)
Liberals: Climate change is real, we should do something
Conservatives 20 years ago: Climate change is real, but there are more important things to worry about. Or, but the cure is worse than the problem. Or, any number of disagreements reasonable people could have.
Conservatives now: Climate change is a fake Chinese hoax.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Friday January 15 2021, @05:44PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Captival on Sunday January 17 2021, @06:43AM
How amazing that everybody is a gullible retard except of course for all the enlightened free thinkers that vote exactly like you do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @06:15PM (4 children)
Liberals: Climate change is real, we should do something
Yeah, then they vote for democrats who want to tell us how often we can flush our toilets.
Instead of restrictions, the damn liberals should supply alternatives that are actually better!
And if they're really liberal, they'll stop voting for machine politicians from the 70s and 80s that frustrate everybody else into voting for republicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:07PM
Tried doing all those things.
"Instead of restrictions, the damn liberals should supply alternatives that are actually better!"
Conservatives: muh lightbulbs, muh gas guzzlers, muh freedumbs from carbon taxes, damn environmental regulations increasing business costs!
"And if they're really liberal, they'll stop voting for machine politicians from the 70s and 80s that frustrate everybody else into voting for republicans."
So it is everyone's falt but your own?
Jesus christ you whiny dumb fuck, the things that frustrate you are the improvements you just said should be made! Sorry you're a moron?? The single best thing we can do is make college mandatory and free, with a requirement of environmental and social justice courses so you can actually comprehend the problems instead of whining about the solutions.
(Score: 2) by helel on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:49AM (2 children)
Democratic politicians can't just magic the problem away. They can only implement policy designed to address it. To use your analogy, if flushing toilets causes climate change then implementing policy limiting how often you can flush is a solution. It's the thing that will reduce the problem.
There is a way to get better alternatives tho - fund basic research. I'll give you one guess which party supports that one...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:16AM (1 child)
"To use your analogy, if flushing toilets causes climate change then implementing policy limiting how often you can flush is a solution. It's the thing that will reduce the problem."
So now my toilet is plugged up all the time. What's the solution to that? Outhouses??
See, this is the problem with that sort of solution.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by helel on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:47AM
No, I don't really see. The toilet thing was just the AC's analogy. In the real world we're talking about things like minimum fuel efficiency standards so the real world equivalent of your clogged toilet is that you don't buy enough gasoline [caranddriver.com]. It's a problem, sure, but one that can be addressed.
Also, if clogging your toilet really is a problem you frequently suffer I recommend you get a poop knife [urbandictionary.com].
(Score: 1) by crotherm on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:24AM
Usenet got pretty wild back in its day. Spewing all these lies about green cards and such.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @03:39PM
QED
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @03:57PM
It is interesting how many educated long time Republicans are separating themselves from either their party, or at least from Trumpism.
It is interesting how many Republican judges, well educated people, including some Trump appointed judges, don't just drink the Trump koolaid when told to do so.
Educated people come to realize that the US is only 4 % of the world population. The other 96 % of people actually do exist!
Educated people discover the uncomfortable truth that not all people have white skin. (shudder Horrors!) And many of those oddball non white people are actually nice people if you can bring yourself to actually talk to them. Heck, you might even have to have one of them as a lab partner, or later a co worker, and actually get to know them.
Educated people discover that not all people (even white people) believe the same thing. Yes, sadly, people have different beliefs. One logical deduction from this is that: OMG that means there are people who believe differently than ME ME ME!!!
Educated people start to think about public policy in a longer term view and not so much about their most immediate needs in the next five minutes. Maybe it would be a good idea to have traffic signals? Roads? Bridges? Safe drinking water! Working sewer systems. Maybe a professional police force might be useful to keep crime down. Maybe military defense could be a good idea to preserve our way of life. All these simple things we take for granted. Things that people have bled and died for so we can enjoy our comfortable lives, even if we wish we had more / better. Nah! Let's just burn it all down! It won't affect my comfortable life! But will satisfy my short term rage! YEAH! BURN IT ALL!!! Educated people would embrace that idea.
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @04:57PM (10 children)
Right, one people are "educated."
30 years ago when I was in preschool, the Commies had me march in their parade, golding happy rainbow flags. I thought I escaped that. 30 years later Commies want my kids to march in their parade, complete with rainbow flags.
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday January 15 2021, @05:05PM (9 children)
The communist flag was red, not rainbow.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @05:16PM (3 children)
The communists are huge supporters of the gays.
See: Russia, how they treat gays
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 15 2021, @05:29PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @05:42PM
Apparently there is not a single gay person in North Korea. No, not even one.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:27PM
It's it so interesting how well propaganda works?
I don't mean Russia. I mean us. In Russia there is an average gay population, and it's no secret to anybody including politicians. There are even *gasp* gay clubs. The one and only difference between Russia and America is that in Russia it is illegal to disseminate propaganda of a sexual nature to anybody under the age of 18. So this effectively precludes any sort of gay pride march, tranny reading day at the library, or men walking around in S&M gear with other mean on leashes because these are all apparently things to do.
To be clear though I am speaking of Russia 'proper' here. Chechnya is a part of Russia (in a way analogous to how Puerto Rico is a part of the US) and they have their own set of rules, laws, and culture. And homosexuality in Chechnya is as well tolerated as it is in any Muslim majority nation. Which is to say, it's not.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:02PM (4 children)
Belive me, the colors of the flag were not red during the May Day "celebration." This was not a military parade, and they want the kids to have happy thoughts as they indoctrinate them.
I love how these armchair historians want to tell me, a person who was actually there.
I bet you also think you are smarter than average.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:20AM
We all know that you are somewhat stupider than normal. What were you doing "golding" flags, anyway? That sounds more Trumpist than communist.
(Score: 2) by helel on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:56AM (2 children)
Perhaps if you gave more information you'd get a more desirable response? Perhaps start by stating where and when you're referring to, describe the events or practices, and then discuss the indoctrination. That way people can lear from your experience instead of just being confused as to why you hate rainbows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:42AM
You'll just be sitting there, minding your own business, and then they come marching in, crawl up your leg and start to bite your ass, and you'll be like, AY, GET OUTTA MY ASS, YOU STUPID RAINBOWS!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @05:21AM
I gave up trying to warn people about this ten years ago, now I just accept their ignorance, and await for the day their offspring are steralized with puberty blockers. I will be goign back to my Communist hellhole, which is under new management, and surprisingly people who live thee are not keen to fall into the trap again, no matter how many epiteths ending in phobia are thrown at them by the international media.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday January 15 2021, @05:22PM (3 children)
How long will a party last when it has to constantly invent enemies to entice you to vote for them?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @06:18PM (2 children)
Indefinitely... the magic works
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:07PM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @09:15PM
No thank you! They're the magician's assistant
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by leon_the_cat on Friday January 15 2021, @03:46PM (19 children)
Yes and stating it was not stolen with equal fire does not make it so either so lets be honest neither of us know for sure if it was or not. From the statistical data we can infer that something was more than just a little off added to the numerous testimonies of polling chicanery, bending of election law and refusal to be transparent should lead to at least an investigation into irregularities but that was prevented from happening. As such a large number of people will no longer believe in the elected oligarchy system (some people call it democracy), this is a huge blow as belief in this system is a major component of control as it gives people the (mostly false) feeling they have a say. Now they feel they have none and that their voice is silenced online for political reasons. This only leads to totalitarianism and it will come down on you some day.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Barenflimski on Friday January 15 2021, @04:26PM (3 children)
That is only true if its two dudes yelling at each other on a corner with information that is equal and the same. Proving a negative is almost impossible, and not a great way to go about life.
I watched hours and hours of the "testimony" of people that wanted to say it was rigged. I heard it was too warm for anyone to accurately count ballots. I heard it was too cold to count ballots. I heard the power went out one time. I heard we should have done it like the Iraqi's. There were endless people describing how people were mean to them. I never once heard anything that even in the slightest would tip the scales. Doubt does not equal fraud.
No transparency? I continue to hear this, and I have yet to find anything to back this up. I continue to hear that peoples feelings were hurt, but no evidence of actual malpractice. Do we really need 10 people looking over the shoulders of the 5 people from varying parties that already count and verify each others ballots? Sounds great when yelling this in a crowd, but if you did this and everyone got to have an objection because of a scuff mark on a ballot, the ballots would never be counted in time and you'd have the same people saying this was the conspiracy.
All of the laws of these states were on the books and challengable before the election. Why didn't that happen? Because these politicians and lawyers know that the public memory is about as long as the next headline. It is super easy to stir the pot. It is extremely difficult to do anything in government in a manner that doesn't upset someone.
I'd suggest for every one of these people that want to whine and complain, that they themselves go down and sign up to help out in the next election. Go run for office. Go sign up to count ballots and learn how the process work. If the process doesn't work, then you're lucky, we vote in 2 years, so lobby your government to fix it. Go work in the local government and learn for themselves that in the end, most of the grandma's counting ballots are actually well meaning and nice people.
Standing on the side claiming the world should stop because one has doubts is nonsense. Offering only complaints and no solutions isn't helpful.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @05:55PM (2 children)
The irony being that these are all the "she lost, get over it" folks that are now rioting because they lost and can't get over it.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:06PM (1 child)
No, it's hardly all. It is a very small subset, and mind you none of them are remotely conservative. They just latch onto whatever is happening at the tome. Real conservatives are waiting for other shoe to drop.
This is about as ironic as this site claiming it is nothing like the green site, within few years becoming even more rife with Leftist drivel than the Green site. What a fucking accomplishment.
Now mod this post a flamebait, so everyone can clap...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:24AM
OK, done. Did you have some point?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:29PM (6 children)
Does it even seem plausible that Democrats could somehow manage to steal the election in one Republican leaning precinct / county? Let alone ALL of them.
It boggles the mind to conceive of the level of organization it would take to have such a vast number of people, in key positions, at every voting precinct. And to somehow keep this all a secret. It isn't even believable to think that Democrats, yes Democrats could manage a medium size organization, nevermind something this vast -- and in secret.
About as credible as 400,000 NASA people, and contractors, managing to keep the faked moon landings a secret for 50+ years. Without real proof of the fakery ever getting out!
Every election has had irregularities. It is common for recounts to differ by hundreds of votes. Sometimes as high as a thousand. But never enough to affect the actual outcome in the precinct being recounted.
If there is some kind of vast conspiracy to steal the election, it is upon those saying so to PROVE IT. They filed dozens of baseless lawsuits without any proof. They didn't even take their own lawsuits seriously -- they just expected a Republican judge to rubber stamp it. They didn't even produce proof of service upon defendants. Clearly bad faith in a lawsuit not even meant to be taken seriously.
If there really were a vast conspiracy to steal the election:
1. I would just LOVE to see the PROOF of it
2. I would be just as enraged as you are
So far all I've seen is claims the election was stolen. Passionate claims. Loud. Repeated. Said with a straight face. But that doesn't convince me. How was it done? Specifics? Who did it? What physical evidence is there? (This was the most camera recorded vote and recount ever!) I'm not talking about ordinary irregularities of dozens or hundreds of votes. I'm asking about what could change the outcome.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @04:56PM (1 child)
And of course, that entire massive conspiracy was coordinated by a sleepy guy suffering from dementia...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:33PM
Noone thinks the kid sniffer orchestrated anything. He's a reanimated corpse the puppet masters stuck on a string.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @07:45PM (3 children)
Let's just think a bit more about this massive conspiracy.
Much of America is small towns. Where everyone knows one another. Strangers are very obvious.
How would a vast conspiracy manage to infiltrate every single small town voting precinct? And keep it quiet -- 100% of the time, without fail.
How would the learn how the various checks and balances and security mechanisms work at each local voting and counting place? How would you engineer a way to flip votes or miscount votes at every one of these locations? With so many eyes (and cameras) watching?
How is it that all of these precincts certified their elections. Presumably all the local people knew who the vote counters were. Probably go to church / school / work with them. Other people (both parties) carefully watching. The local people would know who is ultimately in charge of presiding over the election, and declaring the certified outcome. And that person would know all the people he/she is communicating with about the entire process. Strangers would stick out.
How would you do this at scale in so many different small towns in so many different regions? In the mountains? The desert? The plains? Farming communities?
It boggles the mind that such a vast conspiracy could even exist, let alone be kept secret.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:24PM
"My gut feeling is that most conspiracy theorists have never been project managers. Their optimism is adorable..."
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:24AM (1 child)
You don't need small towns, You only need about a dozen key high-population counties.
And when +1200 people are willing to sign an affidavit attesting to witnessing what they believed was fraud (remember, lying on an affidavit is a felony) seems to me those affidavits should at least be examined, whether you believe anything nefarious happened or not.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @12:00AM
Seems like it would be easier to bribe 1200 people to simply lie or stretch the truth than run a conspiracy across hundreds of different counties. As usual rightwing nuttery is projection, as evident from how Trump's accusations and lawsuits always targeted communities with larger numbers of minorities and democrats. Can't believe you nutters are still in the Qult.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:53PM (1 child)
I would add this:
Trump's own people said things like: this was the most secure election in history
An AC elsewhere on SN posted:
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @05:58PM
Lawyers fear perjury because it has the actual consequence of losing jour job on top of the slap on the wrist the legal system hands out.
Hmm....wonder why Trump's legal team refuses to claim vote fraud under oath?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:02PM (1 child)
No, but the lack of any actual evidence supporting it being stolen, pretty much ought to end it. To suggest that the two positions have equal validity is rather ridiculous. This is a bit like arguing with a flat earth creationist, yes, they have a point of view, no it is not as valid as that of those that acknowledge that the world isn't flat.
At any rate, the folks complaining about it being "rigged" didn't seem to have any issue with the gerrymandering and the fact that smaller swing states get an outsized role in deciding the outcome of the election.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:16PM
It is all they have left, trying to use the general dissatisfaction with politics to make their horror show sound less repulsive. "TeH DeMoNrAtS aRe jUsT aS BaD!@!"
Was all fun and games till they want actual fascist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday January 15 2021, @05:42PM (3 children)
The statistically "off" things you refer to are a mixture of lies, irrelevancies, and utter lack of understanding of stats - usually a combination of all three. In particular that Shiva dude, he's a complete idiot, and all of his analyses are pure garbage.
The people who feel they they have no say are just whiny little shits that don't understand the paradox of democracy. Only one side wins. Get over it.
And they, by interrupting the functioning of your terribley broken democracy, are the ones who are bringing on the totalitarianism.
It would be hard for you to be more wrong in just one paragraph even if you'd *tried*. Start your next post with "up is down. black is white. odd numbers are even. hot is cold. I've got something intelligent to say." to make sure you get off to a better start on that front.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:35AM (2 children)
Shiva, you say?
The Dance is over.
Statistical Geniuses over here. My Gawd are they stupid! [americanlibertyreport.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @03:58AM
That one has to be trolling. The lack of knowledge about how election statistics work or Virginia's historical voting record makes that sad. I almost think that had to be on purpose. The last paragraph, however, makes it hilarious in hindsight.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 17 2021, @10:03AM
Classic Trumpaloon behaviour, concentrated Dunning-Kruger.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Tokolosh on Friday January 15 2021, @04:19PM (25 children)
The biggest lie yet perpetrated on the human race is that socialism or communism will benefit society. Evidence, history, economics, research, science and bitter experience back this up. So, time to suppress this fake news, deplatform anyone making the argument and delete all the posts. If this is not done, it means that any nonsense can be published, without consequence.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:35PM (13 children)
In the US we have public education. Socialism!
Some socialist countries have a better standard of living than we do.
I am NOT saying I want to turn the US into a socialist country. I'm just saying we already practice some socialism and not all socialist countries are bad.
As for communism, I can only say this: Communism only works:
1. in Heaven, where it isn't needed
2. in Hell, where they already have it and always will have it
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(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Tokolosh on Friday January 15 2021, @04:48PM (11 children)
Public education in the US? Thanks for making my case for me. Dollar per benefit, it is the most inefficient system devised, exceeded only by the healthcare system and the military-industrial complex.
Countries have varying degrees of socialism. The ones that have an better standard of living than the US, are ones that are less socialist with stronger free markets. The truth that cannot be spoken by left or right, is that the US is remarkably socialist. Just read the headlines today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:06PM (2 children)
Can I introduce you to the DoD, if you think that the public education system is inefficient, the DoD is an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude worse. They'll literally lose entire pallets of cash and nobody with any power seems to think this is a problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Friday January 15 2021, @05:36PM
It's working as intended. It's extremely efficient in its true objective of funneling money into certain pockets.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @06:53PM
They don't see it as a problem because they know exactly where those pallets of money went: To bribing local warlords. The bribes themselves were all off the books so that no warlord would know (and complain about) if or how much any of the others got paid.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @05:08PM (2 children)
When I was in public schools (mid 60s to end of 70s) public education actually did work.
The biggest discipline problems were:
* chewing gum
* talking out of turn
* and OMG running in the hallways
Kids watches Sesame Street.
Now:
* pregnancy
* rape
* drugs
* school shootings
Kids watched Barney purple dinosaur
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:58PM (1 child)
I went to school in the 90/00s. It was the same stuff. Pregnancy, drugs, and school shootings didn't used to happen, because most people didn't go to school that long. In the 60s, 40% of workers didn't have high school diplomas, nowadays 40% have 4 year degrees.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 17 2021, @12:49AM
The workers that didn't have a diploma in the '60s were school aged in the '50s.
The students in school in the '60s and '70s didn't enter the workforce until the late '70s or '80s. My own time in school from early '70s to late '80s saw practically everyone graduating (some a year late), no shootings, no rapes, 1 pregnancy, and a fair sized minority into pot. There was one half-hearted knife fight.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday January 15 2021, @05:47PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:37PM
"much of the other 96% of the world is doing a whole load of these things just fine."
yeah, right, you dumb tub of shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @08:11PM (1 child)
So if we have the least socialism and the worst education system, what would that imply?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:49AM
If... socialism... weighs the same as a duck, it's made of wood.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 15 2021, @09:57PM
And yet, when anyone suggests we should do something more like one of those other countries with a better standard of living, the GOP screams OMG SOCIALISM!!! So which is it?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @06:28PM
Does anybody read the last chapter of the Little Red Book? It has a rather happy ending.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @04:58PM (2 children)
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." - George Orwell [orwell.ru]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:19AM
And now the Democratic Socialists are going full-1984. Their mantra of "It's okay when we do it" also extends to public violence and murder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @05:29AM
This is case of re-branding. I grew up in People's Republic! It had to be Democratic Socialism, it was in the name!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 15 2021, @06:02PM (7 children)
The biggest lie perpetuated by Americans is that socialism is communism.
Let's compare the USA with the social semiconductor it's northern border, Canada.
Longer lifespan? Canada. Universal public health care probably has a lot to do with it. Covid infection and death rates? Less than half the USA per capita.
I guess you also want to eliminate the free covid vaccines in the USA, because that is socialist. And old age pensions. The minimum wage. Public utilities like water. Fire departments. Free public schools and libraries. And erect tolls on city streets. Do away with food inspectors, air traffic controllers, all those other things that everyone benefits from without necessarily paying for on a simple user fee basis because shared public services is socialism.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:21PM (3 children)
"Fire departments"
That one is particularly insidious actually, around 85% of all fire fighters are actually volunteers. I think it is awesome people are willing to support their communities like that, but it is really messed up that such an essential service people provide goes unpaid. 3 AM call? Get up and spend at least an hour taking care of the community then pray you get some sleep before work in the morning. Rather shameful and shows how the US culture simply does not value community properly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:19PM
On the subject of fire departments, I'd noticed over the years (in a canadian city) that one always sees the local fire department show up at even minor vehicle accidents and other places without a fire or the expectation of one. I mentioned it to a paramedic friend of mine, and she said it all came down to funding. Fire Departments need to be big enough and dispersed enough to respond in a timely manner anywhere within their service area. Modern building codes have resulted in a huge reduction of fires and other incidents that the fire department traditionally responded to.
Politicians see the huge size of the department in point one and the funding that goes with it, the small number of call-outs or other services rendered in point two, and decide funding can be reduced. This is a bit of a problem, since the fire dept. needs to be as big as it is to do it's job properly, regardless of how often it needs to do that job. So the local fire chiefs started seizing any opportunity they could to send personnel out and log it as a call-out.
There was a point I wanted to make when I started this but I've lost it now. Oh, maybe: Taxpayer Funded - Insanity, if it works at all.
I have no information on how many are volunteers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:30AM (1 child)
Actually, it shows how Americans value community more than they value getting paid.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @10:35AM
I'm not talking about the volunteers. It is nuts that essential services rely heavily on volunteers. Just shows what we value as a society. Maybe the volunteers should stop giving their labor for free, or we should track all Republicans and Libertarians to make sure they have to pay for any such services they receive. Call the police on some minority minding their own business? Police time billed to the person wasting their time. House on fire? Better pony up a few grand before they turn the hoses on.
See where this is going?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Tokolosh on Friday January 15 2021, @08:26PM
None of the things you list require a government, except for public rights of way, and enforcement of liberties and contracts. That is not to say that potentially they could be provided more efficiently by the state, but in the long-term, that is unlikely. If there were a way for individuals to opt out, I would say have at it. If you think your system is superior, nobody would opt out, so I challenge you to let that happen. How about making Social Security opt-in?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:04AM
Public services predate the advent of socialism (19th century) by centuries. Try again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:40PM
"The biggest lie perpetuated by Americans is that socialism is communism. "
yes, well the Jews that control the kids education, tv and church can't have little Jimmy learning that Hitler was the good guy in WW2.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 15 2021, @05:05PM
It may not be a solution, but it's an attempt [soylentnews.org] and has been tried in Taiwan. It may be that the scale of Facebook is too great for this to work; it may be that it could work but would interfere with profits.
(Score: 0, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @06:48PM (17 children)
You should have had this discussion with Rachel Madow a while back.
As for education, the Critical * Theorists have taken it over. Opposing viewpoints are verboten, disagreement is violence, and everyone is a racist nazi. It is NOT going to get better.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday January 15 2021, @07:57PM (16 children)
hemonaicyn here is a poster child for the education solution. An under-educated person picks up a few trigger-words, like "Cultural Marxism" and "Hillary" and develop an lower brain response. They can only hate, not understand. They cut themselves off from other points of view, and claim that organizations like CNN are somehow biased. The whine about being silenced, when they offer no rational arguments, and start adopting the positions of the Former National Socialist Worker's Partei of the Deutschland. Yes, it people can publicly act in such uneducated ways, in public, without being asshamed of their ignorance, it is not going to get better.
(Score: 1, Touché) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @09:52PM (15 children)
Point made.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Friday January 15 2021, @10:09PM (14 children)
The boy doth quote himself! Very small bubble, very small. But you do nazi you, hemo!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @10:15PM (13 children)
Point made again.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Friday January 15 2021, @10:25PM (7 children)
Yes, the bubble is closing in! Get out, while you can, hemo! We don't want you becoming Buffalo Horn Hat Guy!
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @10:52PM (6 children)
No chance of that. I'm an atheist. He is somewhat amusing though: https://imgur.com/t4mDuoe [imgur.com]
"sound actually proceeds electromagnetic activity ... so when you sing and drum especially when you do so really loudly, you affect the quantum realm ..." Buffalo Horn Hat Guy
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:03AM (5 children)
Yep, instead of a pardon and organic jail food, I think he needs psychiatric care. But you yourself are getting close to that as well, my dear hemo!
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:50AM (4 children)
That guy was one random life event away between rioting for Antifa or being a Qdude. Same mindset, different religion.
(Score: 2, Touché) by aristarchus on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:00AM (3 children)
Nah, and you know it, hemo. Crazy only bends one way, and that is toward the right. Pol Pot? Right wing authoritarian, under a Maoist cover. Any other questions, Boomer?
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 16 2021, @10:05AM (2 children)
Not a boomer.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday January 16 2021, @10:53AM (1 child)
Oh, shit? Pre-Boomer? Or just an idiot right-wing nut-job of any generation? Admit it, hemo, you are a Nazi left over from the previous Nazis. Actual Nazis. OK, crypto-Boomer?
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:01PM
point made again, again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @10:46PM (4 children)
walks like a duck, quacks like a duck
gee it's a duck!
Personally I don't think hemo is an actual nazi type, just an idiot possibly with creeping dementia that watches Fox News and still can't put 2 + 2 together to realize he is constantly defending nazis. Being an old white male he has been sold a persecution complex that is laughably absurd.
Details may be off in reality since we're communicating via 100 symbols, but that is the caricature he portrays. Calling him a nazi or a nazi supporter may be accurate, but it just feeds into that persecution complex and has him double down. Reality by damned!!!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @11:16PM (3 children)
Look who's the nazi now! The old "2+2=4" thing is an "attack phrase" -- you need to decolonize your math if you want to be a lefty: https://twitter.com/ESMathTeacher/status/1290680121024684032 [twitter.com]
Background: https://arcdigital.media/mathgate-or-the-battle-of-two-plus-two-ed4af5f32933 [arcdigital.media]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @11:45PM (2 children)
HA!
I try and give you some benefit of the doubt even though you have displayed a sickening level of support for the insurrectionists and this is how you respond? Whatever you cantankerous fart, you traitor to democracy, you lover of racists. We see what you are by your response to the insurrection.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:47AM (1 child)
Just saying, you used the idiom "2+2=4". That means you are a nazi by left-authoritarian standards. Read the backgrounder -- I'm not even joking. I'm just pointing out how insane the left-authoritarians are and if you think you can escape that, think again. You already screwed up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:02AM
No, no! It is the 2X4 upside your head, hemo! Also known as a "clue stick"? Do not you Pine for the days of 3X5 studs? I know you do!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:46PM
They are producing news shows that are presenting fantasy as fact.
Prior to this there used to be a 'hard liberal', 'hard conservative', and 'respectably neutral' slant to most news in the United States (there has always been partisan news stories published, but for most papers they had to maintain a veneer of credibility by ensuring most of their stories most of the time were factually correct.) However the past 20 years or so has seen more 'flexibility' in the mainstream stories to the point where news within an ideological bubble will all copy each other in order to ensure consistency, while the other side will present a different narrative (whether real, slanted, or factually incorrect) and the only real way to verify the facts is if you have the time, critical reading/thinking skills, and knowledge of other news networks to source your information from, say, international sources and sources with known slants to verify which narratives are correct, incorrect, biased, or unbiased.
Unfortunately many people in the US have come to worship their news media like a false idol, and are making sacrifices to it because the narratives tell them to.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @03:10PM (9 children)
It comes down to legislators wanting to "eat their cake and have it too". "Platforms MUST filter content because think of the children..." (ten minutes later) "Oh noze! My content was filtered!".
From a technical standpoint much of this became a problem with the death of usenet. Which is still around though not many people use it anymore. Usenet has a native distributed architecture. It did have moderation capability, but moderation and capacity were largely separate. The architecture was killed by two things. The first was Google buying out and killing the largest web to usenet gateway out there. (Currently groups.google.com it is still there) and a single committee that ran the heirarchies who themselves were blowhards, rather than advocates for the system.
When usenet died, web forums took over, but they have the problem of not being distributed, and are subsequently are much easier to censor. They also fit comfortably into Googles business model of sell everybodies ass to everybody else, and pretend none of it is actually going on.
There have been some efforts to create frameworks to return forums to their unregulated, difficult to censor state. Freenet for example. But they have ;by and large; been only accepted at the fringe. This has to do with as much with bad architecture as with demand. Nobody has hit the nail on the head yet as far as creating a truly uncensorable product that is reasonably secure and acceptable to the masses.
As far as the politiicians go, it is egoic to think that they don't understand the Internet. I think the apparent ignorance is mostly a mask for malice. These are people who genuinely believe that the ONLY thing you should be paying any attention to is them. They are not obliged to make sense, because their logic is dictated by narcicistic self interest alone. It isn't that they don't get it. It is that they wouldn't care even if they did.
As such, and as always, the only way past them is around them. Which will eventually be found by assembling a proper censorship resistent means of technology that people will accept and that scales. The last part is the hardest part. Scalable cryptographic systems are extremely difficult to engineer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday January 15 2021, @03:27PM (8 children)
What you say is largely true, but the real reason that usenet died was because the noise level got too high.
And the basic problem that is difficult to solve is that when lots of people are trying to speak at once, only the loudest voices get heard.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:04PM
One major problem I remember with Usenet towards the end was that even a short term archive (that aged out in days) was taking up 4 GB of space. At the time that was an enormous amount.
It was also decentralized. So every major NNTP server had it's own copy of the archive. But not all servers served the complete set of available newsgroups. They tended to pick and choose based on economics and the needs of their local users.
Yes, you could get Comcast in hell.
Yes, you could also get Usenet in hell, but there was only one newsgroup: comp.news.sci.rec.soc.talk.misc.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday January 15 2021, @04:13PM
Not just signal to noise issues, also total content volume and associated storage and bandwidth requirements - most usenet servers in the early days were free, and roughly zero budget, keeping any kind of usable history of alt.binaries.* just became impossible (either physically or financially).
Once your "local" servers started keeping only a limited selection of groups for a couple of days only (with propagation time often significant) you either dropped usenet or went to one of the big hosts out on the web for better propagation and more groups held for longer. And once you were out on the web anyway, why use a kludged user interface over a legacy system, gaining no benefit from the underlying distributed nature - just use a dedicated web forum.
Type of internet connection probably also played a part, usenet was useful in dial-up days when you setup your own server and let it sync (along with your emails) while the connection was up, and then read / reply at your leisure without the pressure of the per-minute costs, an advantage that disappears as soon as you've got always-on internet connections.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @05:11PM (4 children)
One thing that was no doubt instrumental in killing Usenet was the invention of Spam.
Spam began on Usenet.
Then it moved to email.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday January 15 2021, @05:52PM (1 child)
If you like odomoter wraparounds, if anything, we should be celebrating usenet - today is 9999th September 1993!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @06:01PM
Sorry, I didn't realize Usenet was still alive.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 15 2021, @11:55PM (1 child)
FWIW, I first saw span on email. And I did use usenet, though admittedly only a few technical groups.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:42AM
Same here. I actually remember the first spam I ever got... it was from a lawyer named Beard. (For some years he owned beard.com.) Arrived once a month like clockwork for about 15 years; was actually surprised when it stopped, but I suppose he retired.
Where I was reading Usenet, the main problem wasn't spam, it was cranks like "Usenet Freedom Fighters".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:53PM
I actually tried to create a group once, and the response I got made it clear that these people didn't really understand the software architecture of the underlying system, and why it was good/bad for various reasons. The thing is, cross posting was essentially exactly the same thing, technically speaking as hash tags. There was only one message, the header just made it appear in different parts of the heirarchy. Facebook basically nicked the system, and they could because the committee didn't understand what they had.
And I understand the capacity issues too. Yeah it was huge, and still is. But not so much if you didn't carry alt.binaries. But again that comes down to somebody having to make an administrative decision about capacity. So the details don't matter really except the fact that it costs money to back up other peoples content. Which is a fundamental problem with a wide open distributed system. Even Google is starting to show some push back on bulk content now (indirectly)
Really the capacity needs to be born by all users, which is what freenet, and torrent does to some degree. But formalizing that is tricky. Text-only content compresses well, until you start getting uuencodes and base 64 encodes getting posted. What Facebook and Twitter really did was bring together people under a common contract and interface. The core of the tech wasn't all that much better, it was just more acceptable to people, and they traded their civil rights for the convenience of doing what was already available elsewhere, (mostly).
Politicians are making demands that the markets serve THEM, rather than making demands that the market serves the people. That is why they are getting so much push back. It is a backwards mentality. They say "it shouldn't be this way, and we DEMAND that (pick a provider) changes to suit congress". Of course they could simply support civil litigation under the 4th amendment on behalf of citizens who are angry that they are being molested by providers. In which case the market impetus for the providers would change, and the products would more clearly reflect social norms without having to create a bunch of bad legislation.
You can't fix this by passing laws that will never see a court room. You have to fix this by actually going to court on behalf of citizens. So the question isn't "what law to pass", it is how to possess the necessary evidence to bring civil and criminal litigation under existing statutes. And that data lives in the terrabytes of log files spread across all the vendors. The data required to litigate exists, they just aren't using it. So if they have such a need for new laws, that need certainly isn't in the interest of the public, because if they were willing to serve the public, they already would have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Aegis on Friday January 15 2021, @03:13PM (12 children)
Except they actually did try to burn it all down last week due to Trump's recklessness.
The pedo lizard people, on the other hand, don't exist.
This isn't "both sides." This is one side that has completely divorced itself from reality and the other side being worried about it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday January 15 2021, @03:49PM (8 children)
Trump is a fruitcake - even many of his supporters agree with that. What the rest of the US seems to be missing, is this: Trump isn't the problem. Trump is the symptom. The real problem: half of the population believes that the US government, and the political inner circle that runs it, is corrupt. Trump was elected, not because he was a decent candidate, but because he was the only candidate who wasn't a member of that political inner circle.
- If you believe that the government as a whole, and the political elite in particular, are not corrupt, you need to prove that to the other half the country.
- If you agree that they are corrupt, that there is a "swamp", then you need to fix it.
The current impeachment frenzy is just that inner circle avenging themselves. If Trump were actually to run again in 2024, and be elected again: see above. He's not the problem; the reasons for his election are the problem.
I don't envy you guys, trying to sort this out.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:10PM (3 children)
One major hole in your thesis.
Trump promised to drain the swamp.
He became part of the swamp. Corruption? Yep. Trump. Corruption at least as bad as anything I've ever seen. And far more brazen and out in the open about it. And his supporters defending his corruption! Trump saw the presidency as primarily a way to benefit his personal businesses. Hid his taxes. Would not effectively divest himself. So please don't mention corruption as your central thesis and people not liking it. They loved it!
C'mon in! The swamp's just fine!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday January 15 2021, @04:18PM (2 children)
But he did drain the swamp, turns out when you drain a swamp you get left with a big hole to fill, so he filled it with his own muck, I mean you gotta fill it with something...
Same size & location of swamp, but if you dip your finger in and taste it, the flavour of the s**t has changed slightly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:27PM (1 child)
No he definitely made the swamp bigger AND worse. More and worse corruption.
Like we've been saying, conservatives can be forgiven for voting for Trump the first time, but if they voted for him a 2nd time or supported him after his first year or two then they are evil or stupidly ignorant. I blame Fox News and the attending propaganda machines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:48PM
"I blame Fox News and the attending propaganda machines."
Fox is controlled by the same international Jews that run the rest of the media. That's why they push vaccines and worked against Trump in the election. Trump may have been a honeypot/psyop the whole time anyways. Gotta keep whitey paying federal taxes while he is invaded with brown people via Jew/Christian(Goi lap dogs) churches and NGOs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 15 2021, @04:23PM (2 children)
That "half of the population" is probably way off. If you are presuming that all Trump voters believe government is corrupt, that's OK, you're probably close to right. There are also those who voted D, who believe government is corrupt, but preferred D corruption to Trump corruption. Then, you've got all those non-voters, some of whom have voiced opinions that government is corrupt, and they don't want to participate in the corruption.
Any decent survey (non-partisan, and without any agenda to push) would probably reveal that well over 60% of Americans believe government is corrupt. Do I hear 80%?
(Score: 2) by helel on Saturday January 16 2021, @04:04AM (1 child)
In my experience offline probably half of Democrats think the government is horrifically corrupt and the other half only think it's corrupt when under Republican control and the same is true of Republicans, in reverse. Ignoring the non-voters that gives us about 75% of the population at any given time. Everyone I know who votes third party or is willing to admit to not voting at all agrees the government is always corrupt.
So, in my unscientific polling I'd definitely say the number is around 85-90% of the population sees corruption at any one time, possibly more or less around elections while those optimistic about their party update their views.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @04:14PM
For the short term gain of 'keeping a democrat/republican out' rather than voting for the long term policies they want and eroding the political clout of both the democrats and republicans for longer term gains and actual political change. Instead they are counterintuitively throwing away their votes by voting for a candidate more likely to win.
I've been voting 3rd party for over 20 years now. Usually Green for the presidency, although this last election I voted Libertarian (The replacement for Stein had even more nut-jobby policies, and out of the four top candidates the Libertarian one looked best, even though about a quarter of the policies I disagreed with, none of them were in key areas that both the Republicans and Democrats have been continually colluding to erode, like digital rights, privacy, etc.)
That got the libertarian candidate to over 1 percent this election cycle. They need 5 or 10 percent for the federal funding stuff, and perhaps more to actually get debate time and other media coverage. If Sanders hadn't betrayed his 'bernie bros' in the '16 cycle by signing on with the Democrat ticket, even if he'd lost, he would have gotten the percentage of votes to gather federal funding for the independents. His choice to sign on the Democrat ticket however lost them both the campaign funds he gathered and even a place on the ballet (They may have had a candidate but I don't even remember it showing up in the election results.)
Point being, until/unless we can get runoff voting legislated into the system here in the US, the best we can do is sacrifice a few elections, even if it that gives us another Trump (hopefully not the same one, so we don't risk a successful coup next time) so that the election after that sees one or more alternative political parties with the cloud to both erode the corporate sponsorship that has kept the two nominally colluding parties in power, and shift the presidency and congress into groups who have to listen to their consituents at risk of being permanently purged from politics thanks to voter disdain and ignoring the will of their constituents. Until that happens the same donkey and elephant show will keep going on, and we the American People will all be the worse off for it.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @04:33PM
I don't care how many people think lizard people are running our government.
Lizard people are not running our government.
The problem is the group of people who have so divorced themselves from reality that they believe these lies.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:44PM
Tried to burn down? I guess it was a fiery but mostly peaceful process.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday January 15 2021, @07:27PM
The pedo lizard people, on the other hand, don't exist.
While lizard people is obviously not real and is often just a dog whistle for the "Jewish conspiracy", pedo island is very much real and the Epstein case has a very strong smell of cover-up. See also, Jimmy Savile.
If they don't want people to believe there's a vast pedo conspiracy, maybe they should stop making it so believable.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:22AM
Sure they do -- Epstein, Weinstein, Mossad Maxwell, and the many practitioners of the Metzitzah B'Peh getting away with it in plain sight -- and that's only the ones we know about.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 15 2021, @03:35PM (22 children)
I also am not in favor of censorship. Yes, let the idiots talk. Give them rope to hang themselves with.
These big, private social platforms should want to be relieved of all obligation to do any policing. What's needed is that official organizations, law enforcement, representing the people, employed by the people, and answering to the people, watch for trouble. No, they shouldn't pull the plug either. It's like any other large social gathering. It's just prudent to have a few officers of the law about. Sky marshals on airplanes, a few uniformed and plain clothes cops at the carnival that came to town, police directing traffic for the megachurch on Sunday, that sort of thing. The EU Commission is right in this.
One of the whines I have often heard about anything new that draws in people is that it will draw in criminal elements too. It's as if, upon proposing a new road, law enforcement makes a big case that they don't have the resources to patrol it, it will make it easier for bank robbers to escape, and easier for all those criminals to come here from that impoverished town or neighborhood full of low lifes that will now be much more closely connected. And therefore the proposal should be rejected. They don't make a fuss over a new road, usually, but anything else that's a bit unusual, oh yeah. Like, if a foot trail is proposed. See, everyone knows that only poor people walk, and, poverty making them more desperate, are more likely to commit crimes.
As for deplatforming troublemakers, that's something that is perhaps best handled by the legal system. Use warrants and such like judicial decision making. Might be very hard, perhaps impossible to make a case that any citizen should be cut off. For an example, always, anti-piracy advocates want those accused of piracy to be kicked completely off the Internet, all connection cut, implying that it is only logical, as if the Internet is a weapon that has been used to commit a crime and the only sensible way to stop further crime is to take the weapon away.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @05:32PM (21 children)
My house, my rules.
My website, my rules.
The Might Buzzard and Co's website, TMB & Co's rules.
Twitter's website, Twitters rules.
It's not that complicated.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday January 15 2021, @06:04PM (9 children)
It's a little more complicated than that. It's also:
My hosting company, my rules.
My search engine, my rules.
My domain registrar, my rules.
My ISP, my rules.
etc.
So even if you own your own website, you can't allow speech on it that any of the other companies that make it accessible to the public don't approve of.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @06:08PM (8 children)
ISP's were banned from blocking tings because they were classified as Common Carries until Team Trump revoked that classification.
So you can thank Trump for the ISP's being able to block stuff they don't like.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @06:47PM (2 children)
By the FCC, which is useless. Congress failed to pass legislation between 2009 and 2011 to make it really stick. FCC rules are changed by pure whimsy of the executive unless congress acts, which they won't, because they really don't want common carrier either. If they did, it would be law.
We need to use technology to make censorship as difficult as possible, can't depend on the law, that would be foolish
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @08:04PM (1 child)
ISPs were reclassified to be Common Carriers in 2015. [senate.gov]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @08:34PM
An FCC order, that allowed it to regulate the ISPs, totally bogus, easily overturned by the next admin. Congressional legislation is needed to make it a mandate to regulate the ISPs. They had that chance between 2009 and 2011 when they had a majority and the nuclear option, but instead abdicated. Why are you in denial?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday January 15 2021, @07:01PM (1 child)
You have your causation mixed up. ISPs were already blocking stuff in violation of their common carrier status, so they were reclassified. They were essentially double covered by common carrier and section 230 protections and while the Trump administration had no way to remove both directly, reclassification at least means that they would be subject to the same rules as everyone else who controls the content going through their systems. Then any follow on revisions to section 230 to address the free speech issue would apply to them as well unless they want to change their policies to regain common carrier protections.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @08:54PM
As horrible as the whole CDA is, it and section 230 were passed by congress. Reclassification of the ISPs also requires an act of congress to make it real and a tiny bit more permanent. They squandered that chance a decade ago, mainly because they need a national firewall, you know, to block piratebay... FCC regs can and always will change at the drop of a hat.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:03PM (2 children)
Net Neutrality isn't the same thing as Common Carrier. CC is a stricter standard than NN, and is what ISPs should have been from the start. The NN fight also predates Trump by at least a decade.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @08:02PM (1 child)
2015: FCC Reclassifies ISPs as Common Carriers [adweek.com]
2018: FCC Eliminates Common Carrier Regulation of Broadband Providers [lexology.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 15 2021, @08:37PM
2009 - 2011: Congress fails to classify ISPs as common carriers!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @06:07PM (1 child)
Too short-sighted. There is a slight difference between SN and Twitter. Try to find it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:25PM
Does it only de-cloak if you're butthurt about a recent election or something?
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Friday January 15 2021, @06:57PM (7 children)
In a hard right liberatarian or anarcho-capitalist world, that may be true. But there is a legal concept of Quasi Public Places where the analogy to "your house your rules" breaks down, because now you aren't excluding the public from your house, you are inviting them in. If we truly lived in a "your house" world, there would be no regulation on the cleanliness of restaurants for example. Inviting the public into your kitchen, invites the government too.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @07:28PM (6 children)
Sorry, no. That only goes so far. Walmart invites the general public into their supercenters, but that invitation is good only as long as you obey their rules. They have every right to kick your ass to the curb if you: 1) shoplift, 2) make a scene or act disorderly, 3) try to set up a protest, 4) refuse to wear and shirt and shoes, 5) now, refuse to wear a mask, or 6) do just about anything else the manager doesn't care for. Any business open to the public has the right to kick people out, and if they refuse to leave voluntarily, it becomes "criminal trespass" and you can be arrested.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday January 15 2021, @07:54PM (4 children)
Quasi-public restrictions are limited, but they are limited based on purpose. If you create a space where you invite people in for the purpose of operating a retail business, then you can kick people out that you don't want to do business with (though even that is subject to accessibility and protected class protections). But if the purpose of the space is for the public to interact and speak with each other, then that comes with an obligation to allow everyone to speak freely. Currently this legally only applies to real property, but I think extending the same principles to internet sites makes sense.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:26AM (3 children)
But if the purpose of the space is for the public to interact and speak with each other, then that comes with an obligation to allow everyone to speak freely. Currently this legally only applies to real property, but I think extending the same principles to internet sites makes sense.
Sorry, no, I don't buy it. You'll have to provide proof if you want me to believe this wild-ass claim.
There is no way I will believe that someone can open a privately-owned space for the public to interact, and then be required to allow literal Nazis to speak freely.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Saturday January 16 2021, @06:28AM (2 children)
The circumstances are limited, but there are certain situations. See Marsh v. Alabama.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @07:29PM (1 child)
Interesting, and thanks for actually responding to my challenge with a substantive reply.
However, at the very end of the Wikipedia article about this SCOTUS case, it says: 'Recently the case has been highlighted as a potential precedent to treat online communication media like Facebook as a public space to prevent it from censoring speech. However, in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck the Supreme Court found that private companies only count as state actors for first amendment purposes if they exercise “powers traditionally exclusive to the state."'
So, it does look like using this case as precedent has already been attempted, but failed at the SCOTUS level. In the Marsh case, the company town was exercising normal state powers, like policing, maintaining infrastructure (the town roads and sidewalks and probably utilities too), etc. Facebook et al don't do any such thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Corp._v._Halleck [wikipedia.org]
Interestingly, it was the Court's conservatives who wrote the majority opinion here. The Court is now ever more conservative thanks to Trump, so I wouldn't expect them to rule differently if they're traditional, constitutional conservatives (which they appear to be), because they typically are more in favor of private-property rights than liberals.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:28PM
Yeah, true. It's not likely that it will happen in the courts. Although, that really shouldn't be the process to make changes anyway. The best approach would be to change the law to address it. That would probably take the form of some common carrier like standards and objective and fair guidelines for removing content and banning users. Enforcement could be accomplished by fines as well as revoking section 230 protections for repeated violations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:53PM
"5) now, refuse to wear a mask, or"
No, you liar. They had to drop that shit pretty damn quick.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 15 2021, @10:54PM
All in jeopardy of losing most of their ability to be funded if Visa and MC declare our credit cards, our rules.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @04:11PM
RSS Feeds... go back to individuals hosting and running their own blogs (or "micro-blogs") and using RSS feed readers to subscribe to the ones you want to "listen" to?
Decentralized federated social media like Mastodon? [https://mastodon.social]
People create a personal web site and post their opinions there?
Using ideas like Handshake [https://handshake.org/] to keep sites alive and protected from DNS blocking?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by theluggage on Friday January 15 2021, @04:30PM
But they were the moderators from day one, even before they started cancelling people. They choose the algorithms that promote and recommend posts to people, creating the central social problem of TwiTubeBook: the way they automatically seek out and feed users more of what you like, and foster the creation of "echo chambers". They chose to base that purely on populism and maximising clicks (...and even if they're fake clicks by fake users on fake accounts, they're still clicks...). Of course, the same is partially true of any other news outlet that came before, but social media has hugely increased the extent to which this is possible, while its operators try to deny any sort of editorial responsibility.
In a way, the whole Twitter/Facebook thing is a sideshow. The more ...interesting development was AWS's ban on Parler (IMHO good riddance to bad rubbish, but there's a 'chilling effect' at stake here). Twitter banning Trump is like a newspaper editor refusing to print your articles in their paper (over which they should have their own creative freedom) - the other is like a print shop refusing to even print your paper in a world where there is a diminishing number of independent print shops. Now, at the moment, Parler can simply go elsewhere for their web hosting (and iPhone/Android users will just have to make do with a regular website instead of an App - oh the humanity!) but AWS represents a significant fraction of cloud hosting capacity in an industry which is prone to monopoly problems - and if ISPs, server hosts/cloud services, DNS registrars and even long-distance carriers are held responsible for the content they carry, it could become very difficult to set up a website without agreeing to suffocating T&Cs on content.
So, part of the solution might be to really clarify the legal boundaries between publishing edited/curated content vs. providing Internet infrastructure (yes, Google, Amazon, MS, Apple etc. that probably means breakups) - NB: that doesn't mean trying to sneak one-sided legislation through as part of an urgent government budget bill...
Also, Mr D. Trump esq. may have the right to freedom of speech as of next Wednesday, but I'm not sure that the President of the US-fucking-A should feel free to dump whatever is on their mind onto Tw@ter without taking advice on the consequences or someone ensuring they're not sending different messages to different people. So maybe - rather than treating them more leniently - Twitter et. al. should just ban all senior members of government. It's not like those people don't have other channels for speaking to the world (hopefully moderated by an advisor to make sure that they're not wearing their underpants on their head today).
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 15 2021, @04:48PM
There are not "70 million people that do not agree with you."
There are maybe 70 thousand people who do not, and they have zero else to do with their time, so they post a lot of comments online. In real life, I do not know a single person who believes the election was stolen. And about 1/3 of the people I know voted for Trump. This is because they don't like socialist handouts to C students, because they don't want college debt "forgiven" - which means "people who paid theirs off and have good jobs now pay for the ones who majored in gender studies." In addition, most of these anti-democrat voters (most trump voters), do want single payer health insurance, higher minimum wage.
Here's the issue: a small portion of democrats are the BLM guys threatening you at restaurants, burning down buildings, and blocking the road so you can't get home. a small portion of republicans are literal nazis. So we have a huge group of republicans voting against the shitshow that blm has become, and a huge group of democrats voting against the kkk. and the rest, on both sides, are a small group of crazy violent loons, who are too dumb to think about individual issues, and can only select red or blue for all choices they make.
there is no freedom of speech or censorship issue here. my house, my rules. this is freedom of speech - my freedom, in my house. the EU, and I've lived in several countries there and visited the rest, does not have freedom of speech. this is the type of stuff that makes republicans call socialism "communist." walk up to a cop in France and tell him to go fuck himself. you get a 250EUR fine for swearing at the cop. now, as expected, they want to tell you what content you can host on your platform. And if we apply this type of law, then images of Muhammad are illegal to post on your blog, because places like Iran don't want it. EU's stance on this is "we're superior and our government dictates what's good and bad to say." That bs, thankfully, would never fly in the US.
what I find funny is the gop trying to repeal section 230 because their tweets were taken down, not realizing if they do that, a lot more tweets will be taken down. it's like a drooling retard pissing on his shoe, complaining something smells like piss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:19PM (6 children)
The solution is right in our face and has always been but no one is talking about - consistent public moderation. Either you employ public moderation like Slashdot and wash your hands off of censorship, or you apply it consistently and making your algorithm public.
And the only reason it is not being implemented is because these platforms want the business of nazis as well as communists. They want to pretend to be neutral when it suits them takes sides when it suits them.
Just keep watching. All options will be taken before coming back to this. I can already see a government approved ML algorithms like we have government approved patents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:38PM (5 children)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:45AM (4 children)
Just like Democrats did after Trump got elected moron.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @09:02AM (2 children)
Remind me how long Democrats continued to insist that HRC was the real winner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:39AM
But false equivalence is so fun for them!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @10:51AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @06:13PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @07:13PM (4 children)
I am not for censorship. I typically love when idiots stand up tall and spew their idiocy to the world for all to see. Unfortunately it seems that in today's age, wisdom and thought are not rewarded.
This is why completely free speech doesn't actually work: the entire premise rests on the idea that people will spend their time debunking lies and countering "idiotic" speech. However, it takes a lot more effort to debunk a lie such as "the election was stolen!!!" than to simply make up the lie or spread it around. So it doesn't get done enough, the lie spreads around even more, and pretty soon you have what we see in America now.
I am not excited that folks like Zuckerburg are and Dorsey are the ones moderating speech. Handing the guys that created this social media deluge the keys to moderation seems like handing over the fire department to the arsonist.
However, what we've found is that Zuckerberg and Dorsey aren't actually *that* bad. Sure, they've been profiting off all this BS for quite a while now, but they're not violent extremists, and now that they're seeing the effects of their prior inaction, they're clamping down (I think Dorsey more so than Zuckerberg). Just look at what happened with Twitter and Trump's account: for a long time, they just left it alone, because "we can't just silence the President of the United States!", and the usual arguments about free speech, including your own bit about "letting idiots stand up tall and spew their idiocy to the world for all to see". Well, we know that sure didn't stop Trump's lies from being believed by 70M Americans. So they decided they needed to try moderating it some, and they added in the warning notices: "this claim is controversial", "this is not factual", etc. Well, that didn't work either, because Trump's followers simply don't believe Twitter management when it tells them that Trump is lying to them. So after Trump incited an actual insurrection, they finally decided enough was enough and pulled the plug. They didn't come to this point all of a sudden, it was a long, slow, step-by-step process of trying *not* to shut down the President's account altogether.
It seems easy to say, "Ban the liars," but to each side, the liars appear to be the other guy. There are no adults in the room anymore.
What are we to do as a society? How does a society dig out from this?
That's a good question. When almost half the country doesn't believe in actual facts, and instead believes in lies made up by multiple media sources that profit off those lies somehow (like Alex Jones selling doomsday-prepper stuff), I don't think society *can* dig out from it, unless it goes into full authoritarian mode. Personally, I think this is going to end in one of two ways: we'll get some kind of overthrow and an authoritarian government like China's, or the country is going to break apart, sort of like how UK broke away from the EU because there was too much internal strife.
Just looking at evidence, that being various other nations around the world, it simply does not seem like a very large, diverse nation is able to exist in a stable state with a democratically-elected government in this age of instant communication. There are many examples of democratic nations that are peaceful, stable, and very economically productive with excellent qualify-of-life ratings: Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, etc. However, many of these are quite small (NZ and the western European nations) and generally not that diverse, with the exception of Switzerland (which again is small), and the others are extremely homogeneous (such as Japan: 11th largest population in the world, but 98.5% ethnically Japanese). The EU, which isn't really a nation, is very diverse, and is having trouble holding itself together, as seen with Brexit, and many of its member nations are experiencing rising far-right-wing movements (esp. Poland and Hungary) as a reaction to the EU and globalization. Russia is pretty large, and somewhat diverse I think, but it's pretty authoritarian. China is extremely large, and a lot more diverse than westerners probably realize, but again it's very much authoritarian. America was supposed to be the example to the world that you can have a large, diverse, democratic nation that leads the world in many ways, and we're failing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @11:35PM (1 child)
You and the rest of you Democrats need to look up the definition of the word "lie". Or are you canceling and redefining that word too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:20AM
Democrats see only the truth.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @11:52AM (1 child)
I'm also a firm believer in free speech, but I've always found the this quote interesting:
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @07:34PM
Yes, I think Popper is correct here.
There's been a web comic [skepchick.org] about this floating around recently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:26PM
sucks to the law! kill the pigs! spill their blood!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @08:53PM
Step one for an alcoholic is to admit they have a drinking problem.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday January 15 2021, @09:02PM (2 children)
I agree. I love it when the stupid make fools of themselves in public, and sun light is a very good disinfectant but... and it's a big but, this only works if there is at least an equal and opposite reaction from the other side to restore some sort of balance.
My experience in the last five years has been that the side of the stupid, the ignorant, the belligerent and the selfish has far outstripped the ability of the natural opposite view to compensate. It's an open secret that Project Alt-Wrong in the Anglosphere has had paid trolls on its side. In fact, it's not really a secret at all. Credible professional independent journalists have investigates and reported on the phenomenon.
When one side has highly-motivated and wealthy individuals, with professional trolls and the other mostly has amateurs and ordinary concerned citizens, it's not a fair fight.
We, the world, are in the process of learning a painful lesson. Things must change.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Saturday January 16 2021, @12:46AM (1 child)
I did what I could. Unfortunately, there was a statistically impossible conspiracy by Buffalo Horn Hat Mighty Buzzard to censor aristarchus. Now, alt that is over, as you can see here:
The Alt-Right Is Now the Entire Right [soylentnews.org]
And, here:
The Alt-Right Is Now the Entire Right (Revised, all fixed! ) [soylentnews.org]
And most recently, here:
The Alt-Right Is Now the Entire Right (Moar Revised, even more fixed! Hope this meets with your t [soylentnews.org]
And not at all here:
Baked Alaska is cooked! [soylentnews.org]
Turns out the broad brush was the proper one, eh, Buzzard?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by turgid on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:16PM
And we appreciate it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].