[HN Gopher] Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn aga...
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Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising
authoritarianism
Author : gigama
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-12-11 22:25 UTC (34 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i think one key passage from Muratov's Nobel lecture is the
| following:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture...
|
| ""Peace, progress, human rights - these three goals are insolubly
| linked to one another."
|
| These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the
| Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a
| great thinker.
|
| His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on
| Thursday, December 11, 1975.
|
| I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov's words here, in this world-
| famous hall.
|
| Why is it important today for us, for me?
|
| The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore.
|
| The world has become disappointed with the power elite.
|
| The world has begun to turn to dictatorship.
|
| We've got an illusion that progress can be achieved through
| technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms."
| cletus wrote:
| > How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity
| of facts?
|
| This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what
| standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people
| disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the
| time. There is no universal objective truth.
|
| You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just
| clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem.
| You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about
| action being needed.
|
| Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the
| elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole
| "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which
| is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it.
|
| So what could the US do? Three things:
|
| 1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw
| boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections.
| This should not be done by the legislature;
|
| 2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday;
|
| 3. Make _appearing_ at a polling place mandatory. This one is
| controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don 't have
| to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed
| off. That's it; and
|
| 4. Preferential or ranked choice voting.
|
| Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter
| suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically)
| tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring
| you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to
| suppress the vote.
|
| I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not
| informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of
| democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to
| the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded.
|
| The tech giants have very little to do with that.
| mc32 wrote:
| Facebooks lawyers claimed that their fact checking was opinion
| (not fact). So there is that too!
|
| Facts can be opinions instead.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is
| controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have
| to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed
| off. That's it; and
|
| How is this enforced?
| echelon wrote:
| This issue is so complicated.
|
| Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There
| will always be people that want to consume these materials and
| believe them.
|
| The alarming thing are the calls for censorship.
|
| Look at how bad the media has been about covid. Lab leak, adipose
| inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were
| censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions.
|
| When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon
| they'll censor women's health issues.
|
| Censorship is a threat to democracy.
| toss1 wrote:
| Active amplification of disinformation is just as much a threat
| to democracy.
|
| Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling
| the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which
| is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach
| would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS
| to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an
| entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every
| minute.
|
| Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much
| every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types
| of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or
| inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
|
| If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises
| is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything
| resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too
| simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving
| to censorship alarms is no less simplistic.
|
| People and companies need to be responsible for the
| consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying
| disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling
| a moral compass is not sustainable.
| anjbe wrote:
| > Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty
| much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain
| types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded
| theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
|
| And that sentiment--that very example, even--has been used to
| justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or
| should put up with today, such as opposing the military
| draft.
|
| "When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in
| time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their
| utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that
| no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional
| right."
|
| -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, _Schenck v. United States_
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything
| resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current
| technology
|
| _As a share of current events information_ , it was greater,
| often virtually monopolistic, for not just "yellow
| journalism" generally but often a fairly unified single
| viewpoint of yellow journalism. (In terms of divisiveness,
| the actual problem today isn't greater proportional influence
| of yellow journalism, but that there are _alternatives_ ,
| both opposing equally yellow journalism and less-yellow
| journalism, with widespread reach.)
| philjohn wrote:
| How much of that was people passing those things off as fact,
| when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The problem is,
| everyone thinks they've become an epidemiologist and virologist
| over the last 18 months, people jump onto pre-prints that
| haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want
| - some of the trials that claimed to show Ivermectin as a
| wonder drug were plagued with badly designed trial protocols,
| and flat out suspected fraud.
|
| Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin
| clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely
| misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If
| people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people
| did, without being "censored") that's different.
| mantaraygun wrote:
| > _Soon they 'll censor women's health issues._
|
| Surely you mean "people who menstruate"
| karl11 wrote:
| Just to make sure I understand this -- the argument is that in
| order to combat authoritarianism, Silicon Valley companies should
| censor more content?
| anjbe wrote:
| That's how I read it too. It's interesting to see how
| platforms' freedom to moderate as they please is being
| assaulted from all sides--some groups are claiming they must be
| forced to moderate more or be punished for what their users
| post, while others are claiming they must be forced to moderate
| less (or not at all) or be punished for what their users post.
| roenxi wrote:
| The people calling for that have really not thought their
| positions through. The SV companies have a lot of flaws, but
| they do appear to be genuine in their belief that their
| censorship is helping. That is arrogant and not good enough
| ... but there isn't going to be a better option than that.
| The alternatives to them having control enable people who are
| more arrogant, less able and do more damage when mistakes
| inevitably get made.
| philjohn wrote:
| What's your solution then?
| chroem- wrote:
| Nobody is "saving democracy" by denying people the right to
| participate in the democratic process. In fact, it does quite
| the opposite by destabilizing the political discourse. The
| "solution" is to stop trying to control people.
| philjohn wrote:
| How is content moderation "denying people the right to
| participate in the democratic process"?
| vimy wrote:
| Ironically, the title on HN made me think they were warning
| against Silicon Valley censorship.
| gorwell wrote:
| No worries, this time is different. We are the good guys who
| want to censor you. We'd never abuse such power. We're saving
| you from the bad guys. Pinky swear.
| kaplun wrote:
| The problem is not that everybody can access information. The
| problem is that click-bait false information is pushed by
| ranking algorithms more and more in front of the eyes of people
| who are ready to believe in them. The information bubble then
| is making people more and more radicalized.
| hugi wrote:
| Not to mention that we now have literal armies dedicated to
| spreading propaganda and disinformation.
| toss1 wrote:
| Refraining from wildly amplifying is not censorship
| seneca wrote:
| It's a bit unnerving to see this stuff so often, really.
| Demands to censor speech you don't like, and which almost
| uniformly comes from your political opponents, in the name of
| fighting authoritarianism is blatantly contradictory. It'd
| startling how popular this sort of thinking has become.
| chroem- wrote:
| Correct. I am absolutely done with this level of doublespeak.
| smt88 wrote:
| A better interpretation would be that Silicon Valley should
| stop algorithmically promoting anti-democratic, pro-
| authoritarian content.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| If they were going to give their award to a truly deserving
| recipient it would have been the tortured and imprisoned
| journalist Julian Assange who is an advocate of free speech and
| an independent media and voices. Instead they gave the awards
| deliberately to censorship advocates. It's the journalistic
| equivalent of giving war criminals and killers of children Nobel
| Peace Prizes like Kissinger and Obama.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
| mc32 wrote:
| That would be impossible. Can you imagine: United States
| imprisons Nobel prize laureate.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| I can imagine them imprisoning Nobel Prize laureates as they
| have bombed Nobel Prize recipients as well.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-
| bombi...
| whitepaint wrote:
| Aren't governments (especially Germany and Australia for what
| they are doing at the moment) way more scarier than big tech? I
| am not scared of Google or Facebook at all. I am, however, scared
| of governments. Especially seeing how the pandemic was handled
| and how little resistance the handling got from the citizens.
| smt88 wrote:
| Those governments (and the ones in the US) are at least
| beholden to voters.
|
| Large companies have no accountability, and if they disrupt the
| democratic process, they have no consequences either.
|
| Mark Zuckerberg is the authoritarian ruler of an extremely
| powerful entity that, in some countries, is more powerful than
| any local government.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| At least governments (in a democracy) are subject to public
| scrutiny and accountable to the electorate. As far as I can
| tell, the big tech firms aren't answerable to anyone.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I agree. Facebook can try to show me target ads, but that's
| pretty benign compared to what my government can do to me with
| absolutely zero recourse.
| grover35 wrote:
| That was the same "authoritarianism" that saved us from a violent
| insurrection and another Donald Trump presidency.
| playguardin wrote:
| Trump 2024 bitch
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(page generated 2021-12-11 23:00 UTC)