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themaninthedark 8 hours ago

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information for in his heart he dreams himself your master." - Commissioner Pravin Lal, U.N. Declaration of Rights

ethbr1 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Full quote: "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."

(Alpha Centauri, 1999, https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/The_Planetary_Datalinks... )

HocusLocus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I sit here in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment."

~Anonymous, Datalinks.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anyway this video about Biden drinking the blood of Christian children is brought to you by Alpha Testerone 2 Supplements, now FDA-approved

dzhiurgis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That's why you buy $20,000 GPU for local inference for your AI-ad-blocker, geez.

Orrrrr you pay $20 per month to either left or right wing one on the cloud.

Yeul 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Haha this is why I stopped using YT and Twitter.

I'm just not interested in the batshit insane ramblings of Americans. The US can spiral downwards into its own Christ fascist dictatorship but there's no reason for me to join them.

yongjik 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds great in the context of a game, but in the years since its release, we have also learned that those who style themselves as champions of free speech also dream themselves our master.

They are usually even more brazen in their ambitions than the censors, but somehow get a free pass because, hey, he's just fighting for the oppressed.

tensor 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a difference between free flow of information and propaganda. Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.

I think you could make a reasonable argument that the algorithms that distort social media feeds actually impede the free flow of information.

AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.

The fundamental problem here is exactly that.

We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.

Which means there are no ads, because nobody really wants ads, and so their user agent doesn't show them any. And that's the source of the existing incentive for the monopolist in control of the feed to fill it with rage bait, which means that goes away.

The cost is that you either need a P2P system that actually works or people who want to post a normal amount of stuff to social media need to pay $5 for hosting (compare this to what people currently pay for phone service). But maybe that's worth it.

nradov 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no generally accepted definition of propaganda. One person's propaganda is another person's accurate information. I don't trust politicians or social media employees to make that distinction.

tensor 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What you think is propaganda is irrelevant. When you let people unnaturally amplify information by paying to have it forced into someone’s feed that is distorting the free flow of information.

Employees choose what you see every day you use most social media.

msandford 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Congrats! You are 99% of the way to understanding it. Now you just have to realize that "whoever is in charge" might or might not have your best interests at heart, government or private.

Anyone who has the power to deny you information absolutely has more power than those who can swamp out good information with bad. It's a subtle difference yes, but it's real.

tensor 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Banning algorithms and paid amplification is not denying you information. You can still decide for yourself who to follow, or actively look for information, actively listen to people. The difference is that it becomes your choice.

vintermann 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, this is about bringing back creators banned for (in YouTube's eyes) unwarranted beliefs stemming from distrust of political or medical authorities, and promoting such distrust. They weren't banned because of paid amplification.

I don't quite understand how the Ressa quote in the beginning of this thread justifies banning dissent for being too extreme. The algorithms are surely on YouTube and Facebook (and Ressa's!) side here, I'm sure they tried to downrank distrust-promoting content as much as they dared and had capabilities to, limited by e.g. local language capabilities and their users' active attempts to avoid automatic suppression - something everyone does these days.

vintermann an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OK, but that's an argument against advertising, and maybe against dishonest manipulation of ranking systems.

It's not an argument for banning doctors from YouTube for having the wrong opinions on public health policy.

dzhiurgis an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> distorting the free flow of information

There is no free flow of information. Never was. YouTube and FB and Google saying "oh it's the algorithm" is complete BS. It always manipulated, boosting whoever they feel fit.

refurb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And propaganda by definition isn’t false information. Propaganda can be factual as well.

fellowniusmonk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So many people have just given up on the very idea of coherent reality? Of correspondence? Of grounding?

Why? No one actually lives like that when you watch their behavior in the real world.

It's not even post modernism, it's straight up nihilism masquerading as whatever is trendy to say online.

These people accuse every one of bias while ignoring that there position comes from a place of such extreme biased it irrationally, presuppositionaly rejects the possibility of true facts in their chosen, arbitrary cut outs. It's special pleading as a lifestyle.

It's very easy to observe, model, simulate, any node based computer networks that allow for coherent and well formed data with high correspondence, and very easy to see networks destroyed by noise and data drift.

We have this empirically observed in real networks, it's pragmatic and why the internet and other complex systems run. People rely on real network systems and the observed facts of how they succeed or fail then try to undercut those hard won truths from a place of utter ignorance. While relying on them! It's absurd ideological parasitism, they deny the value of the things the demonstrably value just by posting! Just the silliest form of performative contradiction.

I don't get it. Fact are facts. A thing can be objectively true in what for us is a linear global frame. The log is the log.

Wikipedia and federated text content should never be banned, logs and timelines, data etc... but memes and other primarily emotive media is case by case, I don't see their value. I don't see the value in allowing people to present unprovable or demonstrably false data using a dogmatically, confidentally true narrative.

I mean present whatever you want but mark it as interpretation or low confidence interval vs multiple verified sources with a paper trail.

Data quality, grounding and correspondence can be measured. It takes time though for validation to occur, it's far easier to ignore those traits and just generate infinite untruth and ungrounded data.

Why do people prop up infinite noise generation as if it was a virtue? As if noise and signal epistemically can't be distinguished ever? I always see these arguments online by people who don't live that way at all in any pragmatic sense. Whether it's flat earthers or any other group who rejects the possibility of grounded facts.

Interpretation is different, but so is the intentional destruction of a shared meaning space by turning every little word into a shibboleth.

People are intentionally destroying the ability to even negotiate connections to establish communication channels.

Infinite noise leads to runaway network failure and in human systems the inevitably of violence. I for one don't like to see people die because the system has destroyed message passing via attentional ddos.

nradov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Fortunately your biased opinion about what information has value is utterly worthless and will have zero impact on public policy. Idealized mathematical models of computer networks have no relevance to politics or freedom of expression in the real world.

ruszki 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There isn’t. Yet, everybody knows what I mean under “propaganda against immigration” (just somebody would discredit it, somebody would fight for it), and nobody claims that the Hungarian government’s “information campaign” about migrants is not fascist propaganda (except the government, obviously, but not even their followers deny it). So, yes, the edges are blurred, yet we can clearly identify some propaganda.

Also accurate information (like here is 10 videos about black killing whites) with distorted statistics (there is twice as much white on black murder) is still propaganda. But these are difficult to identify, since they clearly affect almost the whole population. Not many people even tried to fight against it. Especially because the propaganda’s message is created by you. // The example is fiction - but the direction exists, just look on Kirk’s twitter for example -, I have no idea about the exact numbers off the top of my head

vintermann an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, but can you make an argument that the government, pressuring megacorporations with information monopolies to ban things they deem misinformation, is a good thing and makes things better?

Because that's the argument you need to be making here.

boltzmann-brain 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

indeed, didn't YT ban a bunch of RT employees for undisclosed ties? I bet those will be coming back.

soganess 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not in the original statement, but as it referenced here, the word 'information' is doing absolutely ludicrous amounts of lifting. Hopefully it bent at the knees, because it my book it broke.

You can't call the phrase "the sky is mint chocolate chip pink with pulsate alien clouds" information.

ayntkilove 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can call it data and have sufficient respect of others that they may process it into information. Too many have too little faith in others. If anything we need to be deluged in data and we will probably work it out ourselves eventually.

protocolture 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Facebook does its utmost to subject me to Tartarian, Flat Earth and Creationist content.

Yes I block it routinely. No the algo doesnt let up.

I dont need "faith" when I can see that a decent chunk of people disbelieve modern history, and aggressively disbelieve science.

More data doesnt help.

arevno 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While this is true, It's also important to realize that during the great disinformation hysteria, perfectly reasonable statements like "This may have originated from a lab", "These vaccines are non-sterilizing", or "There were some anomalies of Benford's Law in this specific precinct and here's the data" were lumped into the exact same bucket as "The CCP built this virus to kill us all", "The vaccine will give you blood clots and myocarditis", or "The DNC rigged the election".

The "disinformation" bucket was overly large.

There was no nuance. No critical analysis of actual statements made. If it smelled even slightly off-script, it was branded and filed.

BrenBarn 6 hours ago | parent [-]

But it is because of the deluge that that happens. We can only process so much information. If the amount of "content" coming through is orders of magnitude larger, it makes sense to just reject everything that looks even slightly like nonsense, because there will still be more than enough left over.

themaninthedark 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So does that justify the situation with Jimmy Kimmel? After all there was a deluge of information and a lot of unknowns about the shooter but the word choice he used was very similar to the already debunked theory that it was celebratory gunfire from a supporter.

Of course not.

netsharc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That sentence from Kimmel was IMO factually incorrect, and he was foolish to make the claim, but how is offensive towards the dead, and why is it worth a suspension?

But as we know, MAGA are snowflakes and look for anything so they can pull out their Victim Card and yell around...

Slava_Propanei 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

intended 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a fear of an earlier time.

We are not controlling people by reducing information.

We are controlling people by overwhelming them in it.

And when we think of a solution, our natural inclination to “do the opposite” smacks straight into our instinct against controlling or reducing access to information.

The closest I have come to any form of light at the end of the tunnel is Taiwan’s efforts to create digital consultations for policy, and the idea that facts may not compete on short time horizon, but they surely win on longer time horizons.

Cheer2171 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Beware he who would tell you that any effort at trying to clean up the post apocalyptic wasteland that is social media is automatically tyranny, for in his heart he is a pedophile murderer fraudster, and you can call him that without proof, and when the moderators say your unfounded claim shouldn't be on the platform you just say CENSORSHIP.

probably_wrong 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Beware of those who quote videogames and yet attribute them to "U.N. Declaration of Rights".

BrenBarn 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is that burying information in a firehose of nonsense is just another way of denying access to it. A great way to hide a sharp needle is to dump a bunch of blunt ones on top of it.

7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
rixed 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is your point that any message is information?

Without truth there is no information.

totetsu 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Raising the noise floor of disinformation to drown out information is a way of denying access to information too..

jancsika 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That seems to be exactly her point, no?

Imagine an interface that reveals the engagement mechanism by, say, having an additional iframe. In this iframe an LLM clicks through its own set of recommendations picked to minimize negative emotions at the expense of engagement.

After a few days you're clearly going to notice the LLM spending less time than you clicking on and consuming content. At the same time, you'll also notice its choices are part of what seems to you a more pleasurable experience than you're having in your own iframe.

Social media companies deny you the ability to inspect, understand, and remix how their recommendation algos work. They deny you the ability to remix an interface that does what I describe.

In short, your quote surely applies to social media companies, but I don't know if this is what you originally meant.

N_Lens 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We must dissent.

idiotsecant 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, great. Now suppose that a very effective campaign of social destabilisation propaganda exists that poses an existential risk to your society.

What do you do?

It's easy to rely on absolutes and pithy quotes that don't solve any actual problems. What would you, specifically, with all your wisdom do?

nradov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Let's not waste time on idle hypotheticals and fear mongering. No propaganda campaign has ever posed an existential threat to the USA. Let us know when one arrives.

CJefferson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you seen the US recently? Just in the last couple of days, the president is standing up and broadcasting clear medical lies about autism, while a large chunk of the media goes along with him.

nradov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I have seen the US recently. I'm not going to attempt to defend the President but regardless of whether he is right or wrong about autism this is hardly an existential threat to the Republic. Presidents have been wrong about many things before and that is not a valid justification for censorship. In a few years we'll have another president and he or she will be wrong about a whole different set of issues.

CJefferson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hope I’m wrong, but I think America is fundamentally done, because it turns out the whole “checks and balances” system turned out to be trivial to steamroll as president, and future presidents will know that now.

By done I don’t mean it won’t continue to be the worlds biggest and most important country, but I don’t expect any other country to trust America more than they have to for a 100 years or so.

nradov 5 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of people thought that America was fundamentally done in 1861, and yet here we are. The recent fracturing of certain established institutional norms is a matter of some concern. But whether other countries trust us or not is of little consequence. US foreign policy has always been volatile, subject to the whims of each new administration. Our traditional allies will continue to cooperate regardless of trust (or lack thereof) because mutual interests are still broadly aligned and they have no credible alternative.

defrost 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> whether other countries trust us or not is of

some consequence. Not all consuming, but significant.

> Our traditional allies will continue to cooperate regardless of

whether they continue to include the US within that circle to the same degree, or indeed at all.

Trump's tariff's have been a boon for China's global trade connections, they continue to buy soybeans, but from new partners whereas before they sourced mainly from the US.

Yeul an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a threat to autistic people. I guess they are next in line after removing the immigrants, killing the homeless we're gassing the mentally handicapped for being a drain on society?

Lots of Christian love vibes.

_DeadFred_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are spreading this nonsense in part in order to hide from the fact that they refuse to release the Epstein files, something that seems to include a rather lot of high profile/high importance official potentially doing really bad things.

It's called flooding the zone, and it is a current Republican strategy to misinform, to sow defeatism in their political opposition, default/break all of the existing systems for handling politics, with the final outcome to manipulate the next election. And they publicized this yet people like you claim to think it's non issue.

rixed 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It doesn't have to be national threat. Social media can be used by small organisations or even sufficiently motivated individuals to easily spread lies and slanders against individuals or group and it's close to impossible to prevent (I've been fighting some trolls threatening a group of friends on Facebook lately, and I can attest how much the algorithm favor hate speach over reason)

nradov 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a non sequitur. Your personal troubles are irrelevant when it comes to public policy, social media, and the fundamental human right of free expression. While I deplore hate speech, it's existence doesn't justify censorship.