The most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode.
The "marketplace of ideas" narrative was always a trick. And it worked.
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.
Do recognize, you're voluntarily participating in a highly moderated forum. If one were principled in their opposition to moderation, one would not voluntarily choose to use said forum for nearly a decade ;)
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them. Jefferson Airplane used that metaphor to sing about psychedelics. The Matrix adapted Carroll's pill motif to represent an alteration in one's perceptions of reality. In the broad sense, yes, in the narrower sense, no.
The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc.
Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
I think you've experienced a bit of Mandela effect. Alice in wonderland is in fact mentioned as a metaphor in the movie. However, Alice would eat cake and take pleasant tasting potions to change size.
I believe that was the point of both what I and GGGP wrote. Pahlaniuk would not be one of "those who love using the term snowflake", in its current context.
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:
> One pill makes you larger
> And one pill makes you small
> And the ones that mother gives you
> Don't do anything at all
> Go ask Alice
> When she's ten feet tall
I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
The most ironic thing to me is just how fast the political pendulum swings.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.
2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.
I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure. Remember the soccer matches in places like the UK, where some continental teams or players were booed for not doing so?
Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.
Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)
The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...
So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
> Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
> Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure
Pure social pressure. Whereas now everything is completely political pressure dictated from the top down. Idk social pressure seems more organic at least. Biden didn't order that anyone who didn't take a knee will be deported to a torture prison in Guatemala
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
This did not happen fast though, but over decades.
On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.
When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
> the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work")
Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.
> When you tell people their problem isn't real, (...)
Their problems might be real, but they sure are not caused by immigration. The Trump administration boasts about having deported 1M immigrants, and yet everything turned to shit, there are less jobs, pay hasn't increased, and things haven't became more affordable.
The first step to fix a problem is to identify it. Failing to do so risks aggravating the actual problems.
i am not telling people that their problem isn't real. i am telling them that their understanding for the cause of their problems isn't what they think it is, or what they are being told it is.
the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
Tons of morons bought the Trump administration lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets. Their problem isn’t real. They are complete idiots with zero critical thinking skills who have more influence in elections than more rational populations due to this stupid ass country’s prioritizing empty land over actual citizens. Isn’t it funny how when “centrists” compromise with conservatives it always seem ruin things for decades if not centuries?
I had some hope as a millennial youth that we were “evolving” past the conservative mindset. It was insane to me that an ideology that has been consistently wrong from supporting slavery to opposing women’s suffrage would continue to have any support. But here we are still talking about gay marriage again because fucking conservative bigots cannot let anyone live in peace. But I’m sure you consider their “concerns” to be very valid and worth entertaining.
well, the concerns do need to be addressed. it is important that everyone gets an opportunity to voice their grievances and not be ignored. but grievances that come from lack of understanding the reality can only be addressed with education.
People/institutions didn't want to fix real problems. This unwillingbess/inability causes problems to spiral and more and more problems to appear. Including the clash.
Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weren't killed by capitalism or global climate change.
Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.
Well, roots of everything are long. We are a long-lived species and our political attention spans decades or longer. People still think of the Roman Empire and write in Latin alphabet, after all.
But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.
Imagine left leaning orgs being as organized and funded as the right.
GP made the same mistake by putting the AfD on the right and anything else on "the other side that ignores problems". This other side is not the left, its the center or the non-left, which gets good funding too.
The decades of political development were always meant to bolster the current power structures, and i am not talking about pol. parties or the interests of the many and their problems. From that angle, the current political swing is not suprising. Musk and Co are winning their war on the left mind virus, which is much older then them.
How is that my mistake??? YOU came up with "left". I very deliberately did not say such a ridiculous thing, given that any "left" party has never in power.
I would also appreciate if you did not paraphrase what I wrote when what I wrote still is right there, or at least don't attribute your words to me.
I always find it fascinating, and quite disturbing, how people rewrite what other people wrote to base their "counter-"argument on their rewrite.
> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.
Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
If you are left (I am not, but I have observed it) and you agree with 90 per cent of the ideas of some group, but disagree on the remaining 10 per cent, they will turn on you in fury, denounce you as a traitor, hate you more than an actual opponent. Deviation from orthodoxy is a capital sin.
(This is not new, see how Trotskyists were extirpated by their Stalinist comrades 100 years ago. Heresy is simply not tolerated.)
The right wingers of today are a lot more capable of building a bigger tent, at least right now. Personally, I am somewhat rightwing, but very secular, as usual in Czechia. I still get invited to Christian events even though they know that I am not a believer, and they won't grill me to convert.
The same can be said about the right, but you are correct, infighting is stronger on the left.
But...
Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.
The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.
I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
I think you underestimate the complexity of the right. It is not just secular nationalists all the way down.
First, there are still religious people there, and this very wing is splintered among several groups at least. Famously, many Catholics including JDVance were in a value conflict with their own late Pope Francis. The actual religiously educated people tend to be very good at writing, because the schools that they graduated from are good at teaching persuasion.
Second, there are libertarians, not very numerous but somewhat influential, especially in tech circles.
Then, there still are some trigger-happy neocons, nowadays marginalized, but they may yet come to the fore in case of a bigger war that directly involves the US.
Then, there are reactionary types like Curtis Yarvin, who dismiss any nationalist ideas as blind alley of "demotism".
Even the practical question of "how many people from which country should get a visa yearly and under what conditions" will hit enormous ideological differences in the right-wing tent.
To me, religious people, simple racist and libertarians all suffer from a identity-based cognitive bias. "Our groups or my well being is the ideal to project onto the nation/world." (Neocons dont fit in here, i have to admit. Maybe its abuse of power pleasing the monkey brain, but resulting wealth certainly too.)
I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason.
But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left, because, again: tribalism taking over higher order reasoning.
The reality is that Northern Europe is the safest, most free and wealthiest part of this godforsaken planet.
People don't know how good they have it.
It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse.
When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
People don't compare themselves with countries on other continents, but with their neighboring countries or with the memories of their own country (how it was in the past).
Swedes look at the statistics of bombing and shooting incidents in this century, while Finns look at economic growth, GDP and salary growth in the last twenty years, especially compared to other Nordic countries.
The economic difference between rural former GDR and, say, Denmark, is pretty huge, and AfD mostly dominates in the former GDR regions, where local industries collapsed almost overnight and all talents got picked off by West German employers.
I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra.
This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.
If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere,
Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..
> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.
Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.
This is a Reddit-tier quip that keeps being repeated. It doesn't spark curious conversation:
"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."
"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"
"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "
"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."
I'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased, often ignoring or softening the controversial topics that affect their side. It's the same old journalism trick where they claim to be neutral and dedicated to the truth but in reality they all have their own agendas, which seems unavoidable (nowadays or since forever?). The main issue is people believing that their favorite fact checker is the most neutral and thus using their content as absolute truths.
Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias.
Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...
And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence.
Do the following exercise.
In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.
Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.
It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.
Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc.
A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers, they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?
You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.
I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.
Nobody is going to give a singular example because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased. But if you point out what you believe the fact checker's bias might be, that in it of itself is a bias, and now you're no longer trustworthy by the metrics you yourself set forward.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.
> because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.
A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?
> To me, it was just journalism in disguise
It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.
I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.
The fact-checking organization "Correctiv" (which was one of the first that got the privilege of marking shared links on Facebook as "disinformation") falsely claimed the right-wing AfD party planned to deport millions of non-Germans in a secret "Masterplan" ("Remigration") which of course did not happen which was confirmed by a court and later by Correctiv themselves.[1] This false report was repeated on every TV station, print and online magazine but the correction was not as widely shared (most people don't even know that the report was fabricated). Keep in mind that the Correctiv report lead to mass protests against the AfD and reactions from a lot of companies and government officials, so it had a HUGE impact.
The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).
Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it.
Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.
I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.
> Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.
Maybe instead of "fact-checking", they are instead called "rebuttal" or 'counter-point'. This framing may be more accurate most of the time. But for the instances where the initial point is objectively provably false, like 'the earth is flat'.
This is not new. I can call myself Bearer of the Unassailable Truth Who Is Beyond All Doubt or Criticism but that doesn't make me any more accurate than the next guy.
The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.
The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.
I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Mike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries.
Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.
And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
Mildly amusing if true, but I can't help but notice that some things the article mentions, like "fact-checking", are never in fact a direct quote from the supposed memo.
Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says?
The chose you are given is to either not listen to anybody and stay uninformed or listen to "experts" and become mis/disinformed.
It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
There are other options besides those. You have two pieces of information: If you trust experts or "do your own research" and if you are correct or not. This leads to four choices:
- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right
- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong
- You do your own research and are right -> You are right
- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong
Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.
> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?
I did not mean that those 2 choices I mentioned are the only ones. I meant that the "deep legacy media"/"experts" are trying to convince you that only these two choices (listen to the "experts" or not to listen to anybody; "don't trust anybody else, trust me when I tell you that") exist. This leads to the 2 outcomes I painted: being not informed or being misinformed. Everything else that doesn't fit the current official narrative is branded with bad words.
Obviously, this is a false dichonomy and one should do the right thing (educating oneself with different sources, to form a full picture) despite the namecalling.
I don't have any study (I don't know if they exist) and was purely talking about the topic dear to my heart that I have following on for 25+ years: the Finnish expertise on Russia/Putin. It is horrendous. And I am not even talking about crazy expert opinions that one can disagree with, but core problems with logic and basic facts.
It is even sadder because Finland is trying to brand itself as The Russia expert in EU, is succeeding and this incompetence has real consequences.
The quality of expertise in this example is so terrible that we get the incredible situation when not informed people, using only their common sense, have a higher percentage of reasonable/truthful takes than people who are trying to be informed using "homegrown talent". This is an unbelievable consequence!
I am not saying that this is a general trend or that "experts bad". It's just in this particular case I know the topic and have the knowledge to access the correctness of people who are performing as experts on Russia. I have been having presentations on this topic.
Also, obviously, political "sciences" is different from actual sciences.
This reminds me of the Onion's expert panel on Nigeria, with the difference of journalists also being clueless (not their fault, they can't ask critical questions and challenge "experts", if their whole world view also comes from these "experts").
https://youtu.be/Pwom49awRKg
As nutty as it may seem - All moderation is part of the “censorship industrial complex”.
Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.
The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.
Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.
We need to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of anonymity on public online forums. It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication, most of us see the harm, but we also don’t want to swing towards mass surveillance(which is a very real risk).
EDIT: By unnatural I am referring to not knowing who you are talking to, not knowing the slightest thing about them, our brains don’t process this aspect for what it is, instead we fill in this identity with our imaginations. Perhaps there was a better word for this than unnatural, but to me its especially unnatural because it doesn’t really occur in nature(at least not easily), where as communication across long distances or time happens all the time in nature. TLDR: It’s unnatural that we no longer even know if a comment was written by a human.
EDIT2: I am not strongly in favor of removing anonymity from the internet. I don’t know what the answer is.
I’m not sure how this counter argues my observation. You seem to be implying that the end goal would be to stop people from saying certain things you find abhorrent. Humans won’t ever stop doing that, it’s that it would sometimes be nice to know that the person presenting themselves as a disillusioned American voter is actually on the opposite side of the planet.
Any form of communication other than grunting and howling from trees is "objectively an unnatural form of communication."
Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.
We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.
Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.
While the point made on unnatural communication is undefined, these three positions are in conflict.
- The updated visa instructions
- we have had this conversation
- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.
I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.
Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.
If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.
>I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.
It has been had. But you seem to require some objectively correct and universally agreed upon consensus that will never exist.
>Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
"censorial powers on private platforms" are and have been acceptable since the dawn of mass communications. Even Ben Franklin when he ran a newspaper refused to run stories he considered too libelous (although he just as often ran such stories, exercising personal bias in his decisions.) The entire rationale behind the First Amendment is that it binds the government from interfering with free expression, because that right belongs to the people, implicit as it is in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and freedom of association.
Again, the conversation has been had, and the matter has been settled at least for most people. That the current regime disagrees doesn't prove anything any more than disagreement with anything else. People disagree that the world is round, that doesn't mean the matter is still in dispute beyond a reasonable doubt.
>and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If they commit crimes, have them arrested for those crimes. If they violate TOS (even if they happen to be a sitting President), ban them. Otherwise even criminals and traitors have the same rights as everyone else. Again, this is well established and shouldn't be controversial.
> If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.
> If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
what kind of force is "must" implying here, and how is "well" being defined?
We do have legal frameworks in place intended to do what you're proposing, but people are imperfect and may make mistakes or act in ways you might consider to be in error, without falling afoul of criminality. But that's acceptable. We don't abandon rights because they can't be defined or defended perfectly.
Perhaps this will translates the ground reality into the framework you seem to be using.
1) The conversation has been had
2) There are people who are making a concerted effort to overturn the status quo
3) They have decreed that content moderation workers are a category of workers which is not to be granted entry to the USA.
You can say the conversation has been had, as much as you want - which is your freedom and right. However some people have decided they don’t like the status quo and want to change it.
You are preaching to the choir here. I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.
>I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.
That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.
Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?
Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?
Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?
There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.
I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.
Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?
You get that by dealing with the absolute capture of the news and media ecosystem, something that has been lumbering along since the 1960s.
People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.
I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.
I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.
There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.
> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication
Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.
I don't think of myself as anonymous. I am a glittering grain of sand on a beach. I am anonymous only as long as nobody cares to pay attention. If somebody (or some three-letter-agency) decided to focus on me, I'm fairly certain they could decipher my identity and 'de-anonymize' ('demonize') me. But as long as I don't glitter too brightly, don't call too much attention to myself, I can remain safely pseudo-anonymous, just another caw in the cacaphony of the crowded beach.
> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication
I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.
There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.
((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)
I will tell you the truth, and you will be safe, believe me, because I know what is true, from my personal experience.
This is the truth over which I can claim authority. My personal experience, that small portion of objective and infinite reality that became mine, once I'd perceived and diced my tiny slice, stored and explored and retrieved and believed. I know what's true, just ask, I'll tell.
The fact checking I've looked at starts with something like a claim, then dives into context, then lists supporting evidence of either verifying that claim or disproving it, leaning on that supporting evidence.
For fact checking not to be valuable, either the supporting evidence is wrong, the reasoning leading from that to the conclusion is wrong, or something third is wrong.
If that is the case in fact checking, that should absolutely be criticized, and any fact checker with integrity would put up a correction.
For all the vague critique against "fact checking" I've heard, I've never actually seen anyone give examples.
If the critique instead is "they selectively only fact check this and not that", the conclusion should not be that fact checking is bad, but that more is needed.
Surprisingly few things are solid facts. Many of them are opinions, especially in politics, culture and celebrity reporting.
Snopes is one of the most beloved fact checking services, yet I have seen them make questionable claims. I remember they tried to say once many years ago that snuff videos don't exist. How could they make such a blanket claim? It would have been more honest to say that most of them are fake. Not only would it be possible to make such a video, there is considerable evidence that some have been made. Saddam Hussein and his son are said to have enjoyed watching videos of executions. Now that may be propaganda against Hussein, but he would have been capable of sourcing such material and watching it. At least one murder was streamed on Facebook Live and someone was arrested for it. I'd say that counted as such.
Snopes excluded itself from archiving. I let you guess why.
My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE. Imagine if it was archived and available now?
How can I link it if they are excluded from the time back machine and they pulled that "fact" since then? I have no clue if someone wrote blog post about it. I also don't read all checks currently on their site so cannot answer your question about them. I have only read the one about masks because someone at work sent a mail about masks available and another person responded with an angry critique, complete with a link to snopes ( I am sure that couple of weeks later the same guy had been driving around with a double mask and reported unmasked to the police)
I did read your original post and pointed out that there is no archive of Snopes "checks" because Snopes excluded itself from the service. Do you have any ideas why would they do that? As far as I know, it's opt-out, the Wayback Machine indexes everything by default so Snopes not being indexed required some action from them.
> Did someone write a blogpost/tweet/reddit post/take a screenshot of it at the time?
For a claim you are making, you seem to not be able to find a single piece of evidence. How did you ever find out there was an original article that they edited? Is this purely from personal experience?
The claim I am making is that Snopes excluded itself from the Wayback Machine during 2020, here is the evidence: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/snopes.com
Apparently they enabled indexing only from the end of 2021.
No, you also claimed Snopes edited an article about masks, and claimed something about the contents it was edit from and to:
> My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE.
So what is your proposed mechanism for attempting to maintain a commonly-observable reality? People have shown throughout history that they have an incentive to bend truths to suit their narratives, often to the detriment of society. How would you address this?
The first would be being honest enough to say that many statements are not hard and fast facts, but opinions. If we say ice is frozen water, then that is a solid fact (leaving aside dry ice etc). But if we say such-and-such is a good/bad leader that is often mostly based on one's opinion of what good/bad leadership entails. In many cases, one person's good leader is another's bad leader.
While technically true, you have censored and suppressed the truth.
Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such.
Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s
Where exactly is the dictatorship here? Or is this just a vague line meant to imply something without actually saying it? If you have a point to make, just say it plainly.
The man who constantly says he will find a way to have a 3rd term, who commits war crimes and also suggests the death penalty for his political opponents a few weeks before carrying out war crimes because his opponents said militaries should not commit war crimes even if ordered to.
The leader who announces, illegally, that all his predecessors' orders are null and void.
"Face checker" is such an Orwellian term, and right enough, in many cases, they are pushing subjective interpretations and their own biases for someone, rather than solid facts.
Nothing's true anymore, everything's permitted... And at one point they'll get you to a point where you are unable to tell what's true or false. So you stop caring. And they win; your apathy is what they need.
That and the TSA circus is actively dissuading me from tourism in the US. I don’t need their bullshit in my life certainly not when trying to have a nice holiday
It is in my experience - easily the most unpleasant experience of all the countries I’ve visited.
Even places with intense security concerns like Israel was better. More intense than the US but less powertripping assholes (no doubt this comment will get me into trouble too given their invasive social media bullshit)
Okay, let me be even more clear then: it is required to fill out every social media handle and every phone number you've used for the past 5 years as a part of the DS-160 form (AKA online non-migratory visa application for countries not covered by ESTA).
That's been the case since 2019. Before that, asking to hand that info out even voluntarily was widely seen as an overreach. Now, it's required for countries not covered by ESTA and still voluntary for ESTA countries.
(I have family and lots of close friends in the US. I miss them all. But I don't intend to visit given the way things are over there these days. _Maybe_ after the next administration change? Depending on how things change? But I've come to accept I may never visit again.)
I already missed a funeral on account of all this bs. But it just doesn't seem worth the hassle any more to go there. It is frustrating because I have more friends on that side of the Atlantic than I do in the EU. But the last interaction with US border patrol was enough to sour me for the rest of my life.
I've been to the US multiple times this year and it's really not much different from how its been for the last decades. If you are choosing to to not go to events that you would want to attend over this you only have yourself to blame.
I only have bluesky with only work posts, nothing else. I've gotten a visa in last few months. Even though I never went because of the situation. Needed to get a visa for potential work related stuff which eventually could be worked around.
As far as I can tell from the Reuter’s article, the memo reads “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”.
To me that seems like a good thing?
But the very carefully placed quotes around censorship in the article makes it seem like it would be unfairly painting activities like fact checking as censorship?
Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
"Anyone involved in harming the country" is easy to say. It's much harder to know what "harming the country" means in this context. One persons censorship is another persons fact checking.
If the government is going after anyone "censoring free speech", they can pick and choose who to apply that to because there is no clear definition of a civilian censoring another civilian (because legally this does not exist).
> Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
I’ll be curious to see this when it finally leaks too
> “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing?
It seems like it until you remember that the current party in power considers things like a private business saying “we don’t tolerate hate speech” as infringing on free speech. At this point, the right uses “free speech” as a battle cry to shut down people who don’t agree with them. The government telling anyone they can’t have DEI practices, or forcing compliance with their views on what’s appropriate by withholding budget, or targeting citizens for their social media posts - these are actual free speech issues.
The land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course free, as long as you want to shoot school children, not if you want to openly express yourself. Brave as long as it's a defenceless third world country, terrified, if it is someone who is transgender or intersex or free thinking or compassionate or not Trump supporting or not Israel supporting..... And so on.
In serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published.
To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
I see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.
Mainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many.
In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.
Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly.
Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.
I'll use a non-American example. Such outlets present themselves as more serious than they are, particularly the BBC. The BBC presents itself as neutral, for example, when it is no such thing in many areas. When it comes to British foreign policy or the Royal Family, its biases are clear. The BBC tried to bury the Prince Andrew story repeatedly.
I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.
Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.
I don't know how any of that has anything to do with what I explained to you. Two completely separate topics, I'm not here to indulge your every gripe you have with news.
> State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble
Very good example, BBC has criticised the government many times, and even did embarrassing investigations and fought in courts to get to publish them. A very good one is them fighting like hell to publish that MI5 are shielding an informant who is a pedophile. And they got to publish it, and directly say that MI5 tried to stop them via the courts on the grounds of "national security", but the courts disagreed.
So yeah, no.
> Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners
Depends. Le Monde is a French left-wing newspaper (top 2 in France alongside the right-wing Le Figaro), which is majority owned by a holding company majority owned by one of France's premier tech billionaires (Xavier Niel). But everything is structured in such a way that he barely has any control (he can't even sell the holding company without approval from the remaining owner of Le Monde, a representative body of the journalists, staff and even readers). It has full editorial freedom.
> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
You're quoting the NPR article, which misleadingly conflates the people we're talking about (who work for news agencies to verify their stories before publication) with social-media moderators, not the State Department directive, which (if we can believe the Reuters reporting at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders...) is fairly clear that it's only talking about the second.
Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:
> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
Big press outlets have been publishing fibs of one kind and a other since as long as I can remember. A certain Australian's newspapers have had problematic statements in them for decades.
Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.
To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.
(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
That isn't "vague", it's a way that I can express disdain without opening myself up to legal repercussions. A lot of dubious content appears in mainstream media, usually to push people in whichever direction that media desires. I catch YouTube doing it all the time, it's always trying to pull me in one direction or another (often ones I disagree with or am not interested in).
American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.
On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.
I mean, that was free speech advocates and centrist (read pro-right but pretend not to) position position for years.
Typical free speech advocate was considering criticism, fact checking and mockery of right to be attack on free speech for years now. Even in HN, you frequently seen the definition of free speech as "dont mind nazi speech and is actively helping nazi when they are in trouble". It never applied to nazi opposition.
This is downvoted, but "defending Hitler" was a test for free speech defender for years on HN. Never ever it was "defend a feminist or progressive". Those were supposed to be shut up.
Now the nazi are in government and free speech advocates are mostly silent. They focus on criticizing ... anyone except radical right wing.
This entire thread is emblematic of the type of willful ignorance that seems to permeate certain HN discussions going back quite a few years. A full display of ignorant outrage for all to see.
First, this dates back to MAY of this year. Nothing new.
Second, it is obvious that nobody took the time to research, read the policy and understand it. Most comments are nonsense based on a complete lack of context.
Finally,
The restrictions apply to foreign nationals who are involved in:
- Issuing or threatening legal action, such as arrest warrants, against US citizens or residents for social media posts made while they are physically present on US soil.
So, any foreign official or person who threatens to, for example, arrest a US citizen based on what you post online WHILE YOU ARE IN THE US will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this?
- Demanding that US tech platforms adopt content moderation policies or engage in censorship that extends beyond the foreign government's jurisdiction and affects protected speech in the US.
Someone not from the US who tries to censor you in the US and beyond the limits of their own national jurisdiction will be denied a visa. Or, government officials in Peru demanding that HN prevent you from posting your drivel while in the US (outside their government's jurisdiction) will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this one?
- Directing or participating in content moderation initiatives or "fact-checking" that the US administration considers a form of censorship of Americans' speech.
Anyone that, from foreign soil, attempts to limit your right to free speech in the US while hiding under the "fact checking" or "content moderation" excuse will be denied a visa. Remember that your constitutional right of free speech in the US does not come with a fact-checking or content moderation limitation. As this thread easily demonstrates, you can post absolutely nonsense, lies and distortions and you would be protected. Fact-checking isn't a magical tool that allows someone to bypass constitutional rights to silence someone else.
What's your problem with this?
Of course, there are nuanced and not so nuanced elements to what constitutes free speech, where and under what circumstances. The key here is that outsiders don't get to mess with it or try to arrest you for this right you have in the US. If they do try, it's OK, they just can't get a visa to come here. Small price to pay.
So, yeah, nothing to see here. This is actually good. It means someone who, from, for example, Poland, acts to affect your free speech rights in the US or have you arrested while you visit Europe for something you posted online while in the US will not be allowed to come into the US.
Stop being lazy and ignorant. Take the time to research, read and understand before forming ideas and, worse, opening your mouth.
This move makes sense in the context of content moderation on social media forums. There are numerous forums where mods shape and influence culture and discourse, and often that discourse is geopolitical in nature. I don’t think HN necessarily counts as a forum where there’s censorship based along geopolitics.
[The message here is very clear: the people who make online communities safe are not welcome in the United States. Trust and safety is a very wide field, which encompasses the policies, processes, and technologies online platforms use to protect users from harm, ensure a secure environment, and maintain user trust. Compliance ensures that safety rules are adhered to. None of these activities constitute censorship.]
I welcome this rule. In fact, I could imagine many more. I don't want people here that don't share our values.
What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals.
> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.
I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.
To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.
ICC judge, the fact that he's French didn't have an impact. He's also far from being the only one.
In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges.
So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
Values are case-by-case basis depending if trump (GOP?) likes something (most like got paid cash) or not.
Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.
Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".
Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.
America's founding documents only let white men vote, and in case their mentality wasn't clear enough from those founding documents, one of the first laws they passed was the Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited immigration to free white people of good character.
Just to be clear, who is diametrically opposed to these values, again?
That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it"
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible"
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.'
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
In the context of the Constitution, government censorship is the only thing that the United States cares about.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
> You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
In the past, when "private property" was literally property, a whole town owned by a company (used to be very common), American courts decided that the company owning the town couldn't restrict free speech in that town.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
When that "private property" is a larger business than many countries and can literally sway elections then yes we should not treat it the same as your personal blog.
Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration:
Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
> Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
When people say “our values” or “Western values”, it’s just a made up term that means European Christian values. When it should mean classically liberal values.
Always took it to be synonymous with "enlightenment values", created in Europe and by Christians. (Who I believe were at least somewhat secular). I am unsure if we are, at present, a bastion of said values.
The most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode.
Sad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
What ever happened to the marketplace of ideas?
When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.
The "marketplace of ideas" narrative was always a trick. And it worked.
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.
> What ever happened to the marketplace of ideas?
It has the same flaws that plague the marketplace of goods and services, but fewer consumer protections.
And what is your proposed cure? You and your preferred proxy get to limit the marketplace to ideas you agree with?
Perhaps we could jail people who post contradictory ones?
Do recognize, you're voluntarily participating in a highly moderated forum. If one were principled in their opposition to moderation, one would not voluntarily choose to use said forum for nearly a decade ;)
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
The most snowflake of all is those who love using the term snowflake.
Chuck Pahlaniuk then? He devised it.
The Wachowskis coined "red pill", that's not how it's used though.
The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them. Jefferson Airplane used that metaphor to sing about psychedelics. The Matrix adapted Carroll's pill motif to represent an alteration in one's perceptions of reality. In the broad sense, yes, in the narrower sense, no.
The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc.
Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
I think you've experienced a bit of Mandela effect. Alice in wonderland is in fact mentioned as a metaphor in the movie. However, Alice would eat cake and take pleasant tasting potions to change size.
I believe that was the point of both what I and GGGP wrote. Pahlaniuk would not be one of "those who love using the term snowflake", in its current context.
> The pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them.
Wasn’t it a cake labeled “EAT ME” and a drink labeled “DRINK ME” in Alice in Wonderland? I don’t recall them being pills at all.
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:
> One pill makes you larger > And one pill makes you small > And the ones that mother gives you > Don't do anything at all > Go ask Alice > When she's ten feet tall
I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
> Chuck Pahlaniuk then? He devised it.
He devised it, but Chuck was pretty clear—Tyler Durden wasn’t the good guy. So don’t take what he said as an endorsement by Pahlaniuk.
Media literacy is dead. At least among conservatives.
The most ironic thing to me is just how fast the political pendulum swings.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
> taking the knee
Taking the knee to say what though?
1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.
2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.
I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure. Remember the soccer matches in places like the UK, where some continental teams or players were booed for not doing so?
Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.
Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
> who was the Prime Minister
> how much does milk cost
> the count of black people shot by the police
Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)
The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...
So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
> Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
Definitely gonna need a citation on that
> Taking the knee because everyone around you is taking it as well. Pure social pressure
Pure social pressure. Whereas now everything is completely political pressure dictated from the top down. Idk social pressure seems more organic at least. Biden didn't order that anyone who didn't take a knee will be deported to a torture prison in Guatemala
By the grace of first past the post, winner takes all. This ancient system prevents people from picking shades of grey parties, since they simply don't exist in any significance. And from the other end it doesn't allow parties to split, since it will mean than the smaller block is immediately equal to zero (zero votes, zero seats). In when parties aren't allowed to split, they trend towards reactionism and radicalism, when radicals can hold the whole party "hostage". Applies to both sides btw.
The standard complaint is the opposite. In a generic first past the post two party system you should end up with two barely distinguishable centrist parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
This did not happen fast though, but over decades.
On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.
When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
> the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work")
Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.
immigration is a scapegoat. it's not the problem. reducing immigration would not improve anything.
> immigration is a scapegoat. it's not the problem
When you tell people their problem isn't real, you'll more likely drive them to somebody else than gaslight them into siding with you.
> When you tell people their problem isn't real, (...)
Their problems might be real, but they sure are not caused by immigration. The Trump administration boasts about having deported 1M immigrants, and yet everything turned to shit, there are less jobs, pay hasn't increased, and things haven't became more affordable.
The first step to fix a problem is to identify it. Failing to do so risks aggravating the actual problems.
i am not telling people that their problem isn't real. i am telling them that their understanding for the cause of their problems isn't what they think it is, or what they are being told it is.
the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
Tons of morons bought the Trump administration lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets. Their problem isn’t real. They are complete idiots with zero critical thinking skills who have more influence in elections than more rational populations due to this stupid ass country’s prioritizing empty land over actual citizens. Isn’t it funny how when “centrists” compromise with conservatives it always seem ruin things for decades if not centuries?
I had some hope as a millennial youth that we were “evolving” past the conservative mindset. It was insane to me that an ideology that has been consistently wrong from supporting slavery to opposing women’s suffrage would continue to have any support. But here we are still talking about gay marriage again because fucking conservative bigots cannot let anyone live in peace. But I’m sure you consider their “concerns” to be very valid and worth entertaining.
well, the concerns do need to be addressed. it is important that everyone gets an opportunity to voice their grievances and not be ignored. but grievances that come from lack of understanding the reality can only be addressed with education.
People are tribal, and the clash of values between Islam and postmodern secular Europeans is very real.
again, that clash is not the cause for the problems we are facing.
People/institutions didn't want to fix real problems. This unwillingbess/inability causes problems to spiral and more and more problems to appear. Including the clash.
Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weren't killed by capitalism or global climate change.
Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.
But that attack wasn’t representative of any large population, it was the result of terrorists doing terrorist things.
IIRC the results of the "Did they deserve it?" polls among the European Muslim populations weren't particularly encouraging.
Well, roots of everything are long. We are a long-lived species and our political attention spans decades or longer. People still think of the Roman Empire and write in Latin alphabet, after all.
But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.
Imagine left leaning orgs being as organized and funded as the right.
GP made the same mistake by putting the AfD on the right and anything else on "the other side that ignores problems". This other side is not the left, its the center or the non-left, which gets good funding too.
The decades of political development were always meant to bolster the current power structures, and i am not talking about pol. parties or the interests of the many and their problems. From that angle, the current political swing is not suprising. Musk and Co are winning their war on the left mind virus, which is much older then them.
> This other side is not the left,
How is that my mistake??? YOU came up with "left". I very deliberately did not say such a ridiculous thing, given that any "left" party has never in power.
I would also appreciate if you did not paraphrase what I wrote when what I wrote still is right there, or at least don't attribute your words to me.
I always find it fascinating, and quite disturbing, how people rewrite what other people wrote to base their "counter-"argument on their rewrite.
You wrote:
> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.
Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
The left has a nasty problem with autophagy.
If you are left (I am not, but I have observed it) and you agree with 90 per cent of the ideas of some group, but disagree on the remaining 10 per cent, they will turn on you in fury, denounce you as a traitor, hate you more than an actual opponent. Deviation from orthodoxy is a capital sin.
(This is not new, see how Trotskyists were extirpated by their Stalinist comrades 100 years ago. Heresy is simply not tolerated.)
The right wingers of today are a lot more capable of building a bigger tent, at least right now. Personally, I am somewhat rightwing, but very secular, as usual in Czechia. I still get invited to Christian events even though they know that I am not a believer, and they won't grill me to convert.
The same can be said about the right, but you are correct, infighting is stronger on the left.
But...
Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.
The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.
I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
I think you underestimate the complexity of the right. It is not just secular nationalists all the way down.
First, there are still religious people there, and this very wing is splintered among several groups at least. Famously, many Catholics including JDVance were in a value conflict with their own late Pope Francis. The actual religiously educated people tend to be very good at writing, because the schools that they graduated from are good at teaching persuasion.
Second, there are libertarians, not very numerous but somewhat influential, especially in tech circles.
Then, there still are some trigger-happy neocons, nowadays marginalized, but they may yet come to the fore in case of a bigger war that directly involves the US.
Then, there are reactionary types like Curtis Yarvin, who dismiss any nationalist ideas as blind alley of "demotism".
Even the practical question of "how many people from which country should get a visa yearly and under what conditions" will hit enormous ideological differences in the right-wing tent.
To me, religious people, simple racist and libertarians all suffer from a identity-based cognitive bias. "Our groups or my well being is the ideal to project onto the nation/world." (Neocons dont fit in here, i have to admit. Maybe its abuse of power pleasing the monkey brain, but resulting wealth certainly too.)
I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason.
But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left, because, again: tribalism taking over higher order reasoning.
The reality is that Northern Europe is the safest, most free and wealthiest part of this godforsaken planet. People don't know how good they have it.
It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse. When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
People don't compare themselves with countries on other continents, but with their neighboring countries or with the memories of their own country (how it was in the past).
Swedes look at the statistics of bombing and shooting incidents in this century, while Finns look at economic growth, GDP and salary growth in the last twenty years, especially compared to other Nordic countries.
The economic difference between rural former GDR and, say, Denmark, is pretty huge, and AfD mostly dominates in the former GDR regions, where local industries collapsed almost overnight and all talents got picked off by West German employers.
I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra.
This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.
If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.
Right wingers have always run law enforcement. While there was some performative stuff from left wing lawmakers, nobody really defunded the police.
Don’t mistake what you see online or in the news as evidence of broad agreement.
Plenty of people might disagree but choose to keep their mouth shut.
Never underestimate the amount of people that just go where the wind blows
> One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere,
Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..
> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.
Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.
There is no society without suppressed problems, but that does not rule out the social media contagion either.
Every real problem can be made worse by putting histrionic personalities in charge, and the current digital environment promotes and rewards hysteria.
This is a Reddit-tier quip that keeps being repeated. It doesn't spark curious conversation:
"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."
"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"
"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "
"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."
It's very tiresome.
I'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased, often ignoring or softening the controversial topics that affect their side. It's the same old journalism trick where they claim to be neutral and dedicated to the truth but in reality they all have their own agendas, which seems unavoidable (nowadays or since forever?). The main issue is people believing that their favorite fact checker is the most neutral and thus using their content as absolute truths.
Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias.
Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...
And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence.
Do the following exercise.
In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.
Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.
It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.
Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc.
A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
What agenda?
Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them.
I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.
As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers, they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?
You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
Bias != Agenda
And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.
I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.
If you gave even just one example we would understand better
Nobody is going to give a singular example because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased. But if you point out what you believe the fact checker's bias might be, that in it of itself is a bias, and now you're no longer trustworthy by the metrics you yourself set forward.
> In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.
> because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.
A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?
> To me, it was just journalism in disguise
It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.
I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.
Do you have any proof of this?May be it’s just the matter of they don’t have resources to fact-check everything?
The fact-checking organization "Correctiv" (which was one of the first that got the privilege of marking shared links on Facebook as "disinformation") falsely claimed the right-wing AfD party planned to deport millions of non-Germans in a secret "Masterplan" ("Remigration") which of course did not happen which was confirmed by a court and later by Correctiv themselves.[1] This false report was repeated on every TV station, print and online magazine but the correction was not as widely shared (most people don't even know that the report was fabricated). Keep in mind that the Correctiv report lead to mass protests against the AfD and reactions from a lot of companies and government officials, so it had a HUGE impact.
The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlu...
You just engaged in this Sealioning (see sibling reponse), and it worked :)
Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it.
Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.
I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.
> Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.
Maybe instead of "fact-checking", they are instead called "rebuttal" or 'counter-point'. This framing may be more accurate most of the time. But for the instances where the initial point is objectively provably false, like 'the earth is flat'.
This is not new. I can call myself Bearer of the Unassailable Truth Who Is Beyond All Doubt or Criticism but that doesn't make me any more accurate than the next guy.
The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.
The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.
I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Mike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries.
Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.
And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
Mildly amusing if true, but I can't help but notice that some things the article mentions, like "fact-checking", are never in fact a direct quote from the supposed memo.
Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says?
How are we supposed to fact-check this!
> How are we supposed to fact-check this!
You aren’t.
Yes, I've been told that "doing my own research" is bad and I should just listen to the experts.
The chose you are given is to either not listen to anybody and stay uninformed or listen to "experts" and become mis/disinformed.
It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
There are other options besides those. You have two pieces of information: If you trust experts or "do your own research" and if you are correct or not. This leads to four choices:
- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right
- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong
- You do your own research and are right -> You are right
- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong
Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.
> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?
We miscommunicated past each other.
I did not mean that those 2 choices I mentioned are the only ones. I meant that the "deep legacy media"/"experts" are trying to convince you that only these two choices (listen to the "experts" or not to listen to anybody; "don't trust anybody else, trust me when I tell you that") exist. This leads to the 2 outcomes I painted: being not informed or being misinformed. Everything else that doesn't fit the current official narrative is branded with bad words.
Obviously, this is a false dichonomy and one should do the right thing (educating oneself with different sources, to form a full picture) despite the namecalling.
I don't have any study (I don't know if they exist) and was purely talking about the topic dear to my heart that I have following on for 25+ years: the Finnish expertise on Russia/Putin. It is horrendous. And I am not even talking about crazy expert opinions that one can disagree with, but core problems with logic and basic facts.
It is even sadder because Finland is trying to brand itself as The Russia expert in EU, is succeeding and this incompetence has real consequences.
The quality of expertise in this example is so terrible that we get the incredible situation when not informed people, using only their common sense, have a higher percentage of reasonable/truthful takes than people who are trying to be informed using "homegrown talent". This is an unbelievable consequence!
I am not saying that this is a general trend or that "experts bad". It's just in this particular case I know the topic and have the knowledge to access the correctness of people who are performing as experts on Russia. I have been having presentations on this topic.
Also, obviously, political "sciences" is different from actual sciences.
This reminds me of the Onion's expert panel on Nigeria, with the difference of journalists also being clueless (not their fault, they can't ask critical questions and challenge "experts", if their whole world view also comes from these "experts"). https://youtu.be/Pwom49awRKg
Because to the vast majority of people doing their own research involves reading random pages on Facebook and consuming fakes.
I am sorry but that's how it goes and that's how I see it in my country. Self proclaimed free-thinkers who eat everything that's on FB.
Right. I shouldn't do my own research because other people believe what they read on Facebook. Nor should you either, of course. Never research!
Forming your own opinion is so last-year. Now we have social media and AI to automate this.
@grok is this true?
I keep seeing this post on HN. Does this trigger some grok workflow only for the user or is it a joke?
It works on Twitter, but not here on HN. It's a joke akin to commenting "Press X to doubt".
It's a joke.
@ doesn't do anything on HN.
I can form my own opinion on things I know about. If I don't, then it's natural that I will defer to those who I believe know better.
Learning without thinking is useless but thinking without learning is dangerous.
I for one trust that the mass media would never lie to me or twist the facts to support a specific narrative!
That's insane.
I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?
Did you remove questions that were not about Rampart?
You'll find out once the government's masked goons drag you off.
As nutty as it may seem - All moderation is part of the “censorship industrial complex”.
Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.
The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.
Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.
This conversation needs to be had.
Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.
We need to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of anonymity on public online forums. It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication, most of us see the harm, but we also don’t want to swing towards mass surveillance(which is a very real risk).
EDIT: By unnatural I am referring to not knowing who you are talking to, not knowing the slightest thing about them, our brains don’t process this aspect for what it is, instead we fill in this identity with our imaginations. Perhaps there was a better word for this than unnatural, but to me its especially unnatural because it doesn’t really occur in nature(at least not easily), where as communication across long distances or time happens all the time in nature. TLDR: It’s unnatural that we no longer even know if a comment was written by a human.
EDIT2: I am not strongly in favor of removing anonymity from the internet. I don’t know what the answer is.
Plenty of people are happy to publish calls for war crimes in the newspapers under their own name, or on the Secretary for Defence letterhead.
I’m not sure how this counter argues my observation. You seem to be implying that the end goal would be to stop people from saying certain things you find abhorrent. Humans won’t ever stop doing that, it’s that it would sometimes be nice to know that the person presenting themselves as a disillusioned American voter is actually on the opposite side of the planet.
The dystopian surveillance state is already here: https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Any form of communication other than grunting and howling from trees is "objectively an unnatural form of communication."
Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.
We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.
Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.
While the point made on unnatural communication is undefined, these three positions are in conflict.
- The updated visa instructions
- we have had this conversation
- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.
I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.
Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.
If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.
>I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.
It has been had. But you seem to require some objectively correct and universally agreed upon consensus that will never exist.
>Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
"censorial powers on private platforms" are and have been acceptable since the dawn of mass communications. Even Ben Franklin when he ran a newspaper refused to run stories he considered too libelous (although he just as often ran such stories, exercising personal bias in his decisions.) The entire rationale behind the First Amendment is that it binds the government from interfering with free expression, because that right belongs to the people, implicit as it is in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and freedom of association.
Again, the conversation has been had, and the matter has been settled at least for most people. That the current regime disagrees doesn't prove anything any more than disagreement with anything else. People disagree that the world is round, that doesn't mean the matter is still in dispute beyond a reasonable doubt.
>and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If they commit crimes, have them arrested for those crimes. If they violate TOS (even if they happen to be a sitting President), ban them. Otherwise even criminals and traitors have the same rights as everyone else. Again, this is well established and shouldn't be controversial.
> If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well. > If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
what kind of force is "must" implying here, and how is "well" being defined?
We do have legal frameworks in place intended to do what you're proposing, but people are imperfect and may make mistakes or act in ways you might consider to be in error, without falling afoul of criminality. But that's acceptable. We don't abandon rights because they can't be defined or defended perfectly.
Perhaps this will translates the ground reality into the framework you seem to be using.
1) The conversation has been had
2) There are people who are making a concerted effort to overturn the status quo
3) They have decreed that content moderation workers are a category of workers which is not to be granted entry to the USA.
You can say the conversation has been had, as much as you want - which is your freedom and right. However some people have decided they don’t like the status quo and want to change it.
You are preaching to the choir here. I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.
>I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.
That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.
Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?
Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?
Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?
There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.
I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.
Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?
You get that by dealing with the absolute capture of the news and media ecosystem, something that has been lumbering along since the 1960s.
People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.
I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.
I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.
There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.
> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication
Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.
I don't think of myself as anonymous. I am a glittering grain of sand on a beach. I am anonymous only as long as nobody cares to pay attention. If somebody (or some three-letter-agency) decided to focus on me, I'm fairly certain they could decipher my identity and 'de-anonymize' ('demonize') me. But as long as I don't glitter too brightly, don't call too much attention to myself, I can remain safely pseudo-anonymous, just another caw in the cacaphony of the crowded beach.
> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication
I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.
There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.
((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)
There's nothing more dangerous to dictatorships than the truth, so it's only logical.
And there is nothing more dangerous to the truth than someone who claims authority over it.
Do fact checkers ever "claim authority" over anything (especially in news organizations)?
Perhaps time to get that wild claim fact checked by yourself.
I will tell you the truth, and you will be safe, believe me, because I know what is true, from my personal experience.
This is the truth over which I can claim authority. My personal experience, that small portion of objective and infinite reality that became mine, once I'd perceived and diced my tiny slice, stored and explored and retrieved and believed. I know what's true, just ask, I'll tell.
Which the President is doing with these orders right now
So called fact checking often is not about truth, but subjectivity.
I hear this a lot. I never see examples.
The fact checking I've looked at starts with something like a claim, then dives into context, then lists supporting evidence of either verifying that claim or disproving it, leaning on that supporting evidence.
For fact checking not to be valuable, either the supporting evidence is wrong, the reasoning leading from that to the conclusion is wrong, or something third is wrong.
If that is the case in fact checking, that should absolutely be criticized, and any fact checker with integrity would put up a correction.
For all the vague critique against "fact checking" I've heard, I've never actually seen anyone give examples.
If the critique instead is "they selectively only fact check this and not that", the conclusion should not be that fact checking is bad, but that more is needed.
Surprisingly few things are solid facts. Many of them are opinions, especially in politics, culture and celebrity reporting.
Snopes is one of the most beloved fact checking services, yet I have seen them make questionable claims. I remember they tried to say once many years ago that snuff videos don't exist. How could they make such a blanket claim? It would have been more honest to say that most of them are fake. Not only would it be possible to make such a video, there is considerable evidence that some have been made. Saddam Hussein and his son are said to have enjoyed watching videos of executions. Now that may be propaganda against Hussein, but he would have been capable of sourcing such material and watching it. At least one murder was streamed on Facebook Live and someone was arrested for it. I'd say that counted as such.
> I remember they tried to say once many years ago that snuff videos don't exist. How could they make such a blanket claim?
I'm curious about that too. Is there an archive link or something you can provide? I can't seem to find that claim.
You’re going to argue with the Snuff Videos Truther?
This is the funniest example of “Which views exactly? / Oh, you know the ones.”
Snopes excluded itself from archiving. I let you guess why.
My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE. Imagine if it was archived and available now?
Ok, can you link that one? Did someone write a blogpost/tweet/reddit post/take a screenshot of it at the time?
Have they rewritten/erased all their erroneous fact checks?
If so, is that bad or good?
Are all the fact checks currently on the website valid?
How can I link it if they are excluded from the time back machine and they pulled that "fact" since then? I have no clue if someone wrote blog post about it. I also don't read all checks currently on their site so cannot answer your question about them. I have only read the one about masks because someone at work sent a mail about masks available and another person responded with an angry critique, complete with a link to snopes ( I am sure that couple of weeks later the same guy had been driving around with a double mask and reported unmasked to the police)
If you read my original post, do you feel that anything in it was addressed?
I did read your original post and pointed out that there is no archive of Snopes "checks" because Snopes excluded itself from the service. Do you have any ideas why would they do that? As far as I know, it's opt-out, the Wayback Machine indexes everything by default so Snopes not being indexed required some action from them.
> Did someone write a blogpost/tweet/reddit post/take a screenshot of it at the time?
For a claim you are making, you seem to not be able to find a single piece of evidence. How did you ever find out there was an original article that they edited? Is this purely from personal experience?
The claim I am making is that Snopes excluded itself from the Wayback Machine during 2020, here is the evidence: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/snopes.com Apparently they enabled indexing only from the end of 2021.
No, you also claimed Snopes edited an article about masks, and claimed something about the contents it was edit from and to:
> My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE.
This is what I am asking about
Yes, that was my experience. I don't have proofs for most of my experience. I don't even have a proof I woke up this morning. Do you?
Can you link any examples or no?
So what is your proposed mechanism for attempting to maintain a commonly-observable reality? People have shown throughout history that they have an incentive to bend truths to suit their narratives, often to the detriment of society. How would you address this?
The first would be being honest enough to say that many statements are not hard and fast facts, but opinions. If we say ice is frozen water, then that is a solid fact (leaving aside dry ice etc). But if we say such-and-such is a good/bad leader that is often mostly based on one's opinion of what good/bad leadership entails. In many cases, one person's good leader is another's bad leader.
While technically true, you have censored and suppressed the truth.
Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such.
Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s
The folks that are selectively using "facts" to push a narrative can continue to do so, The US DOS is not stopping them.
Only the words that drip from Dear Leader's mouth are the golden truth.
Every day I check Truth Social to find out what I think.
"Dear Leader" contradicts himself within the same sentence. I've witnessed it myself.
Where exactly is the dictatorship here? Or is this just a vague line meant to imply something without actually saying it? If you have a point to make, just say it plainly.
The man who constantly says he will find a way to have a 3rd term, who commits war crimes and also suggests the death penalty for his political opponents a few weeks before carrying out war crimes because his opponents said militaries should not commit war crimes even if ordered to.
The leader who announces, illegally, that all his predecessors' orders are null and void.
I mean we could go on and on, no?
It's all a bit Orwellian really
Ignorance is strength, facts are censorship.
"Face checker" is such an Orwellian term, and right enough, in many cases, they are pushing subjective interpretations and their own biases for someone, rather than solid facts.
What happened to Free Speech they are trying so hard to promote?
Extremely on brand activity for a group of fraudsters who managed to lie their way into power via a firehose of misinformation.
That's their goal.
Nothing's true anymore, everything's permitted... And at one point they'll get you to a point where you are unable to tell what's true or false. So you stop caring. And they win; your apathy is what they need.
With the given topic, might be more accurate to describe the group of fraudsters as a group of fascists.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151466)
Would be nice to see the actual wording in the cable, but I suppose Reuters are not allowed to publish that; we get a cable paraphrasing a cable.
They’re also forcing visa applicants to share their social media publicly, like the authoritarian America is supposed to be better than:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
Guess I'm not getting in as someone having no social media. Not that I'd want to.
You can list your GitHub as your (only) social media. Has always worked for me so far without comment.
Make a fake profile with basic AI generated fake content?
Feels like a startup idea: "where do you want to go?" And it generates a virtual life for you compatible with the current despot.
You've upgraded a visa denial to a Federal crime. Congratulations!
That and the TSA circus is actively dissuading me from tourism in the US. I don’t need their bullshit in my life certainly not when trying to have a nice holiday
The "TSA circus" is not any different in other countries' airports.
It is in my experience - easily the most unpleasant experience of all the countries I’ve visited.
Even places with intense security concerns like Israel was better. More intense than the US but less powertripping assholes (no doubt this comment will get me into trouble too given their invasive social media bullshit)
Really depends on a country. Most countries's border crossing is not comparable to USA/UK/Israel.
To be a bit more precise:
Asking people for their social media accounts is not new, it's a part of the visa application process since Trump's first term.
What's new is that now on top of that, they're asking people for those social media accounts to be public.
It has been asked in the ESTA for a long long time, afaik even before Trump.
But can we please remember that there is a huge huge difference between being asked to provide it optionally, to being required to provide it.
Okay, let me be even more clear then: it is required to fill out every social media handle and every phone number you've used for the past 5 years as a part of the DS-160 form (AKA online non-migratory visa application for countries not covered by ESTA).
That's been the case since 2019. Before that, asking to hand that info out even voluntarily was widely seen as an overreach. Now, it's required for countries not covered by ESTA and still voluntary for ESTA countries.
I don't have any "social media" accounts. I guess they won't believe me, and would deny me a visa based on the assumption that I am lying.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
(I have family and lots of close friends in the US. I miss them all. But I don't intend to visit given the way things are over there these days. _Maybe_ after the next administration change? Depending on how things change? But I've come to accept I may never visit again.)
I already missed a funeral on account of all this bs. But it just doesn't seem worth the hassle any more to go there. It is frustrating because I have more friends on that side of the Atlantic than I do in the EU. But the last interaction with US border patrol was enough to sour me for the rest of my life.
I've been to the US multiple times this year and it's really not much different from how its been for the last decades. If you are choosing to to not go to events that you would want to attend over this you only have yourself to blame.
Your experience does not necessarily have to equal my experience. Note that I did give a reason.
I only have bluesky with only work posts, nothing else. I've gotten a visa in last few months. Even though I never went because of the situation. Needed to get a visa for potential work related stuff which eventually could be worked around.
The US probably has the ability to call your bluff on that. NSA says hi
> I don't have any "social media" accounts.
You do have an HN account. And it's public! Just don't get caught giving a shit about facts.
As far as I can tell from the Reuter’s article, the memo reads “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”.
To me that seems like a good thing?
But the very carefully placed quotes around censorship in the article makes it seem like it would be unfairly painting activities like fact checking as censorship?
Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
"Anyone involved in harming the country" is easy to say. It's much harder to know what "harming the country" means in this context. One persons censorship is another persons fact checking.
If the government is going after anyone "censoring free speech", they can pick and choose who to apply that to because there is no clear definition of a civilian censoring another civilian (because legally this does not exist).
> Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
I’ll be curious to see this when it finally leaks too
> “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing?
It seems like it until you remember that the current party in power considers things like a private business saying “we don’t tolerate hate speech” as infringing on free speech. At this point, the right uses “free speech” as a battle cry to shut down people who don’t agree with them. The government telling anyone they can’t have DEI practices, or forcing compliance with their views on what’s appropriate by withholding budget, or targeting citizens for their social media posts - these are actual free speech issues.
The irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly, but not the people who cry “hate speech” and “DEI”.
Why is that? We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.
The land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course free, as long as you want to shoot school children, not if you want to openly express yourself. Brave as long as it's a defenceless third world country, terrified, if it is someone who is transgender or intersex or free thinking or compassionate or not Trump supporting or not Israel supporting..... And so on.
Is fact checker an actual job?
In serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published.
To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
I see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.
Mainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many.
In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.
Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly.
Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.
I'll use a non-American example. Such outlets present themselves as more serious than they are, particularly the BBC. The BBC presents itself as neutral, for example, when it is no such thing in many areas. When it comes to British foreign policy or the Royal Family, its biases are clear. The BBC tried to bury the Prince Andrew story repeatedly.
I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.
Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.
I don't know how any of that has anything to do with what I explained to you. Two completely separate topics, I'm not here to indulge your every gripe you have with news.
You wanted to discuss so called fact checking and we did discuss fact checking. It is not always about facts, but projecting a narrative.
No "indulgence" whatsoever.
I think what you wanted to do is to rant.
Not what I was thinking, but thanks anyway, pal!
> BBC
> State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble
Very good example, BBC has criticised the government many times, and even did embarrassing investigations and fought in courts to get to publish them. A very good one is them fighting like hell to publish that MI5 are shielding an informant who is a pedophile. And they got to publish it, and directly say that MI5 tried to stop them via the courts on the grounds of "national security", but the courts disagreed.
So yeah, no.
> Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners
Depends. Le Monde is a French left-wing newspaper (top 2 in France alongside the right-wing Le Figaro), which is majority owned by a holding company majority owned by one of France's premier tech billionaires (Xavier Niel). But everything is structured in such a way that he barely has any control (he can't even sell the holding company without approval from the remaining owner of Le Monde, a representative body of the journalists, staff and even readers). It has full editorial freedom.
The people doing that job are not the ones being targeted here.
> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.
You're quoting the NPR article, which misleadingly conflates the people we're talking about (who work for news agencies to verify their stories before publication) with social-media moderators, not the State Department directive, which (if we can believe the Reuters reporting at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders...) is fairly clear that it's only talking about the second.
How do you know?
Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:
> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
Yes, there are many situations where it would be illegal or detrimental to publish falsehoods, so people are implied to check facts.
Now it's turning into a situation where it's illegal or detrimental to publish the truth.
Big press outlets have been publishing fibs of one kind and a other since as long as I can remember. A certain Australian's newspapers have had problematic statements in them for decades.
> problematic
This is so vague as to be meaningless.
Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.
To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.
(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
That isn't "vague", it's a way that I can express disdain without opening myself up to legal repercussions. A lot of dubious content appears in mainstream media, usually to push people in whichever direction that media desires. I catch YouTube doing it all the time, it's always trying to pull me in one direction or another (often ones I disagree with or am not interested in).
American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.
On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.
Can you point to a law that states it's illegal to publish the truth?
Only the wrong sort of truth.
It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.
Tgis is straight up fascism. The united states is a facist country. I'm disgusted at how It turned so easily.
Never thought dystopian novels would be so on the nose. I always thought they were being extra for the sake of art...
I mean, that was free speech advocates and centrist (read pro-right but pretend not to) position position for years.
Typical free speech advocate was considering criticism, fact checking and mockery of right to be attack on free speech for years now. Even in HN, you frequently seen the definition of free speech as "dont mind nazi speech and is actively helping nazi when they are in trouble". It never applied to nazi opposition.
This is downvoted, but "defending Hitler" was a test for free speech defender for years on HN. Never ever it was "defend a feminist or progressive". Those were supposed to be shut up.
Now the nazi are in government and free speech advocates are mostly silent. They focus on criticizing ... anyone except radical right wing.
This entire thread is emblematic of the type of willful ignorance that seems to permeate certain HN discussions going back quite a few years. A full display of ignorant outrage for all to see.
First, this dates back to MAY of this year. Nothing new.
Second, it is obvious that nobody took the time to research, read the policy and understand it. Most comments are nonsense based on a complete lack of context.
Finally,
The restrictions apply to foreign nationals who are involved in:
- Issuing or threatening legal action, such as arrest warrants, against US citizens or residents for social media posts made while they are physically present on US soil.
So, any foreign official or person who threatens to, for example, arrest a US citizen based on what you post online WHILE YOU ARE IN THE US will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this?
- Demanding that US tech platforms adopt content moderation policies or engage in censorship that extends beyond the foreign government's jurisdiction and affects protected speech in the US.
Someone not from the US who tries to censor you in the US and beyond the limits of their own national jurisdiction will be denied a visa. Or, government officials in Peru demanding that HN prevent you from posting your drivel while in the US (outside their government's jurisdiction) will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this one?
- Directing or participating in content moderation initiatives or "fact-checking" that the US administration considers a form of censorship of Americans' speech.
Anyone that, from foreign soil, attempts to limit your right to free speech in the US while hiding under the "fact checking" or "content moderation" excuse will be denied a visa. Remember that your constitutional right of free speech in the US does not come with a fact-checking or content moderation limitation. As this thread easily demonstrates, you can post absolutely nonsense, lies and distortions and you would be protected. Fact-checking isn't a magical tool that allows someone to bypass constitutional rights to silence someone else.
What's your problem with this?
Of course, there are nuanced and not so nuanced elements to what constitutes free speech, where and under what circumstances. The key here is that outsiders don't get to mess with it or try to arrest you for this right you have in the US. If they do try, it's OK, they just can't get a visa to come here. Small price to pay.
So, yeah, nothing to see here. This is actually good. It means someone who, from, for example, Poland, acts to affect your free speech rights in the US or have you arrested while you visit Europe for something you posted online while in the US will not be allowed to come into the US.
Stop being lazy and ignorant. Take the time to research, read and understand before forming ideas and, worse, opening your mouth.
It's essentially a very mild diplomatic response to the UK's attempt at forcing foreign websites/companies to implement their censorship apparatus.
This move makes sense in the context of content moderation on social media forums. There are numerous forums where mods shape and influence culture and discourse, and often that discourse is geopolitical in nature. I don’t think HN necessarily counts as a forum where there’s censorship based along geopolitics.
[The message here is very clear: the people who make online communities safe are not welcome in the United States. Trust and safety is a very wide field, which encompasses the policies, processes, and technologies online platforms use to protect users from harm, ensure a secure environment, and maintain user trust. Compliance ensures that safety rules are adhered to. None of these activities constitute censorship.]
I welcome this rule. In fact, I could imagine many more. I don't want people here that don't share our values.
I don't need former members of the NAZI Party. Nor Do I need people who want to live Sharia law. You want sharia law? Go home!
And I don't need people that contradict our values.
This makes me happy.
What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
The hypocrisy https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...
(A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals.
> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.
I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.
To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.
ICC judge, the fact that he's French didn't have an impact. He's also far from being the only one.
In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges.
So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
I'm looking forward to the reaction from the public when he adds Russia to that list.
It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.
So about as effective as the ICC in the first place.
It would be quite unfortunate if the next government thinks your opinion is wrongthink.
I don't like the idea of "fact checking" as a job or position but denying Visas to people like this is a horrible idea that sets a bad precedent.
Fair comment.
Are you familiar with the First Amendment?
> our values
What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
Values are case-by-case basis depending if trump (GOP?) likes something (most like got paid cash) or not.
Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.
Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".
Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.
America's founding documents only let white men vote, and in case their mentality wasn't clear enough from those founding documents, one of the first laws they passed was the Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited immigration to free white people of good character.
Just to be clear, who is diametrically opposed to these values, again?
You say that, but over the past decade he's got around 50 percent of the vote. Like it or not, this is what America is.
That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
And the previous election he lost by a whisker. America has been lapping this up for a decade now.
Our values are whatever Trump says they should be!
An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :)
https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H
> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it"
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible"
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.'
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor#dictionary...
> censor (verb): to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable.
> also: to suppress or delete as objectionable
Government censorship is a very notable class of censorship, but the word has a broader meaning.
In the context of the Constitution, government censorship is the only thing that the United States cares about.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
Censorship is free speech?
No they are saying choosing what to publish or not is part of private property rights.
If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
Just use a different system that didn't do that, it's your choice.
To that extent, government censorship isn't really censorship either then? You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
> You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
In the past, when "private property" was literally property, a whole town owned by a company (used to be very common), American courts decided that the company owning the town couldn't restrict free speech in that town.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
When that "private property" is a larger business than many countries and can literally sway elections then yes we should not treat it the same as your personal blog.
Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979
98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
Obviously that is what the great leader wants for the greatest and most free country on all the earth
Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
> Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
What legitimate business does a German censor have in America? If they just want to sightsee in the Rockies, they can go see the Alps instead.
Those things are not protected expression in the US.
Then why is the state department telling to deny visas to people who worked on Trust & Safety at social media cos?
(Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
> Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of CSAM.
I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...
Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
What the "something" is actually matters.
I guess the how the government cracks down mattered to somebody too
"Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM."
Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest.
We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.
When people say “our values” or “Western values”, it’s just a made up term that means European Christian values. When it should mean classically liberal values.
Always took it to be synonymous with "enlightenment values", created in Europe and by Christians. (Who I believe were at least somewhat secular). I am unsure if we are, at present, a bastion of said values.
Spot on.
Christianity does not necessary implies fascism. And "our values" or "western values" here in this context do.
Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.