As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.

I absolutely agree, and it isn't even a scale, it's multi-dimensional. There are many different little problems that the internet solves, and they could also be solved with many different little alternatives.

cant you just disable resedential and non critical connections? ISPs etc. know whos who right? no need to take the nation offline. only the people in it (civilians, medium/small businesses etc)

u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic

I would argue that.. despite much greater attempts at control, the internet is much more wild now. Not because it is not being surveilled, monitored, botted, manipulated or any combination of those, but because the pace of change is getting a little hard to keep up with.. not just by orgs and govs ( they normally struggle with those ), but by even by above average humans. I miss the 90s, but the feels are the same now man ( minus the hope;p ).

It really depends on what ypu are dealing with - if you are worried about communication being too centralized and monopolized, it might be a good idea to start building and alternative. Doing that might avoid the situation getting worse, slow it down or even reverse the trend.

If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.

Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.

> sci-fi technology

You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.

So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.

Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)

It's possible that any such technology would be too complicated to ensure a clean supply chain or have weaknesses that would allow it to be tracked or jammed. Real devices have some kind of engineering tradeoff.

But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.

i like this idea. it does sound scifi, maybe quantum entanglement? i know nothing about this stuff tho :)

Or, hear me out, optical laser mesh

Wireguard traffic is easy to detect and block apparently

Trust... and encryption. That second one's quite important.

Does this exist already? Meshtastic doesn't do IP.

Who owns the spectrum?

Before 2021 I hated typos etc but now I like seeing imperfect text in this new age. I wouldn't have considered it could be a bot (and I don't think it is) but it would certainly have worked on me (to what end, who knows..)

If you don't know, China runs censorship program against radio signals beginning from the cold war time and it's not officially stopped yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming_in_China. Of course it's not blocking ionosphere level, but not that different than chaffing the air (at the receiver side).

Of course it's censorship. In china you can't talk about a certain quadrangle, and when they remove content about it, that's censorship.

You might be confusing two different things.

Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.

Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.

Not really. The past 10 years have seen huge masses of people mobilized worldwide for changing the status quo, and the status quo absolutely has changed as a result. Maybe not in the way you would have wanted, but it’s impossible to deny that the world in the past decade has changed dramatically.

A true test of one's desire for truly free and open society and speech is whether or not one's willing to stand up and fight for that "other" person's right to say something they hate.

I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.

> ... into a very left wing, violent, vehicle to export American political activism to the world

Reddit anecdotes and surveys don't currently reflect reality.

The far-right is responsible for *actual* violence by a large margin in recent history. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...

Over 80% of real world politically motivated violence between 1990–2020 is from far-right actors. Left-wing violence has increased over the past 5 years, but is still completely dwarfed by right-wing violence.

> They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...)

Seems like this is a direct result of being more exposed to the internet. I'm not sure it's their fault when they are raised with ipads in their lap and multi-billion dollar corporations are shoving propaganda (both sides) down everyone's throat 24/7. I wonder if boomers and gen x would feel the same if they grew up the same way.

> It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.

Not sure making people experience authoritarianism is the best way to make people remember why free speech is important. That seems more extreme than anything I've read on Reddit lately. Surely there are better solutions.

I think questions like this are so leading as to be useless, because they are presented in a way that don't trigger people to inspect their actual beliefs but rather their advertised beliefs. I could imagine a dozen ways to phrase to really bump that boomer contingent:

- [circa 2020] Do you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should be stopped by force?

- Do you think that a police officer should be able to physically prevent burning of the American flag?

etc

> libertarian, centrist community dominated by developers and geeks, into a very left wing, violent, vehicle

Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.

Upvoted, fwiw. Reddit is utterly insane

There are also several events around it that make it nice, like meeting random other FOSDEM attendees over a beer or dancing at ByteNight

Those sounds like largely unrelated concepts that just happen to overlap somewhat in practice, and are also very individual. As a private person I don't lose anything at all by not using social media, but if I owned a local pizza shop I'd be losing a ton of business by shunning hat avenue of advertisement.

Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.

It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.

That isn't the reality of moderation. Often moderation effectively acts as a form of censorship, and the two work together. Often moderators either power trip or misunderstand the situation and allow bad actors to abuse the rules to their advantage to have people shut out of the group.

This happens, btw, when there are the most rules and heavy-handed moderation. Places that are less moderated, this rarely happens because people will directly call this behaviour out and the moderators are only intervening on important stuff, e.g., threats of violence, illegal material, etc.

> can have online discussion without moderation

That's a big negatory.

>you publish on your site,

And your site gets a takedown for illegal content, or cops show up at your door and drag you out while beating you.

Life is heavily moderated in a million different ways. What we're talking about this point is just moderation or unjust moderation.

Yeah, that's not going to solve twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.

I'll make my position clear: many parties try to influence people, and quite a few of them do so with grave consequences. The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference. In the words of the article: it's already not "technology serving people", but rather "controlling" them.

If extreme right (or left) parties come to power, your freedom of speech and privacy is over. So it's either moderate moderation, or authoritarian moderation. And if it's up to me, it's not your choice.

What if the democratically elected government is emailing their pals at the platform owners to do the censoring on their behalf?

"The family had a lot of buffers."

Because this was definitely happening during COVID.

Platforms naturally coalesce into near monopolies due to network effects. It's far easier to get rid of a government than it is to get rid of something like Youtube at this point.

“simply go to another platform” stopped working years ago when Apple took it upon themselves to decide which platforms you are allowed to install.

RIP Tumblr

"Democracy Just Werks^tm" is starting to look like "The Free Market will solve it" more and more with each passing day...

20 years ago I heard "I'd rather China than Google" and I still think about it often

Ok Elon

> Still, if we could upend at least some of the underlying commercial interest or even the need to rely on advertising, it could be something.

This is some good brainstorming on the matter:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO FIND INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET. i sound insane right now because the internet is a store but it used to be a library

— <https://kind.social/@wehpudicabok/117317910370913792>

That just points out that another real problem with the internet is that everyone's voice carries the same weight in ways it didn't used to. Every city has a few folks who believe aliens walk among us or otherwise wear tinfoil hats, but their message was limited to AM radio and cable access, and it was clear their content was not of the same journalistic level as the three major networks used to be - used to, because they've also changed. For example, there is conclusive, repeatable and verifiable evidence that the world is not flat, and it shouldn't be so easy to make convincing content that seems like it is.

> gives dumb people access to each other

Was this a serious comment? It made me realise that prior to the Internet, information flow was controlled by journalists or through peer reviewed papers and academic forums. People without advanced education would, generally, be limited to people in their local area.

Not sure what your views on Destiny are, but he has a very excellent write-up on KiwiFarms specifically. It's from when Keffals weaponized the masses against them.

You don't have to like them, 4chan doesn't, but both of them just won for everyone worldwide by proving OFCOM has no right to police others outside their own country.

Awful people exist everywhere regardless of a site documenting what people willingly post. Because this allows others to see past the facade they get a lot of hate and unproven claims believed true. People prefer easy, which is fine, and don't typically verify leading to it being exploited by awful people.

> Not a single journalist seemed willing to do any homework beyond copying the work of other journalists before them. In the end, the “three suicides” caused by Kiwi Farms ended up being two misrepresentations and one uncomfirmed case.

https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...

I liked the idea of Gab when it came out but it ended up (last time I checked) being an unedifying cesspit.

Thus they are censored.

Part of the problem here is there are people that think any kind of censorship or moderation is wrong. I will not make any universal statement about the correctness of their position, but I will make a personal statement about their position. "They are fucking crazy".

Now, every once is a while you need a bit of fucking crazy to shock you out of the position you're in and reassess what position you should hold.

yeah and it looks to be scoped toward L2 / L3 censorship rather than broader socialmedia censorship. could be interesting. thanks for highlighting that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.

> If it is distinguishable, can’t the machines do the distinguishing?

No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.

> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?

The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.