Indian Government recently made Twitter do similar things. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/twitter-under-fire-over-deletion-of-critical-covid-tweets-in-india" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/twitter-under-...</a><p>Do you know what's worst? A guy was booked yesterday for Tweeting he needed oxygen cylinders which according to a state government is spreading fake news. <a href="https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-sherwani-oxygen-smriti-irani" rel="nofollow">https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-s...</a><p>While COVID hasn't been kind to the people of India, The current regime's attempts to curb democracy is quite disturbing.
The media control and censorship here in India is definitely getting our of hand!<p>Setting aside the absolute criminal mismanagement and planning of the Covid situation in the past few months, the fact that the people in power are still applying their brains and might into figuring out how to manipulate the narrative and how to squash dissent in this moment when the country is going through an unimaginable disaster.<p>Just today, a guy was slapped with some serious charges (which could lead to Jail time) because he tweeted that he needed Oxygen for his Grandfather. [1][2]<p>I know this is sounding alarmist but I've seen the change in the past 8 years and the country is heading in the direction of China at breakneck speed right now (not in the good way).<p>[1] <a href="https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-sherwani-oxygen-smriti-irani" rel="nofollow">https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-s...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/mzx3zb/youth_sought_oxygen_for_grandfather_via_tweet_up/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/mzx3zb/youth_sought_...</a>
I've always wanted to ask the HN community about this problem, what exactly can be done from a technology standpoint?<p>I feel we're already at a point where tools are available to make a censorship resistant social network.<p>The main challenges would be:
- Kickstarting a network is a difficult problem
- A way to ensure sane content moderation (child porn / abuse, etc) while still keeping the decision-making decentralized enough
- Easy enough for the first time mobile internet users to onboard<p>Would love to hear your thoughts. In my opinion a blockchain based solution seems appropriate (I know there's a lot blockchain-hate on HN but requesting for constructive comments).<p>I know something needs to come up soon because the situation on the ground is actually quite bad.
This headline is at best misleading and at worst intentionally dishonest. How I interpreted it when I first saw it: “Facebook is considering hiding these posts” (looking into, as in planning to do something). Censorship, bad, etc. What it actually says (after reading the article and the referenced tweet): “Facebook is investigating why these posts were removed” (looking into, as in investigating an action that happened).
Shocking. What do the pro censorship people say all the time when defending Facebook or Twitter: speech is free but not free from consequences. I believe that's the line.
When your side is silenced it's 'censorship', when the other side is silenced it is 'moderation' or 'removing misinformation'.
It is funny to discuss free speech on hn where people want to downvote you because they do not like facts that contradict their opinions about India of which they know nothing about :)
Facebook is a private company. They can decide not to provide you a platform for any reason or without any reason. If you don't like it create your own Facebook and post comments there.
The willingness of the big social networks and Google to submit to authoritarian rulers makes it obvious that any difficulties we have in the US with them are a legislative failure, not a Silicon Valley one. They're not evil, or twisted, they're sociopathic; they'll do whatever they're told, but we refuse to decide what to tell them. They'd love to be made into common carriers as long as they could still run ads.
Whether you think it is good or bad, Facebook is going to abide by "local laws and regulations". Why risk getting kicked out of the country and lose money? Unfortunate but most of us know that corporations value money over morals, despite what their PR departments may say.
The way these companies openly engage in politically biased publishing and selective enforcement in the USA made this kind of thing inevitable.<p>During this past election the New York Post was banned because of a story that painted candidate Biden's son in a poor light, and nearly everyone who works in these companies wanted candidate Biden to win so they used their positions to protect his image, knowing that there would be no real consequences for them.<p>Now we have a crisis in my country and we are unable to criticize the government publicly because our posts can just be suppressed on a whim. We know all about the coveted "muh next billion users" meme that these companies obsess over - some of you probably hear about it at work all the time. They aren't going to have the cooperation of the government unless they do as they're told.<p>Just like with the NY Post incident, some song and dance excuse will be concocted about this and everyone will blindly accept it, and expect the rest of us to go along with it like fools, when it's pretty obvious what is happening here. This has even been published in the news a few months ago and the country's policy head got caught telling employees that they had to do their moderating duties in a partisan way so that it did not "damage the company's business prospects in the country", and had to resign (link below). Now we are supposed to believe that this was her personal position and literally zero people in company leadership had the same idea. (<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995</a>)<p>Next year is a Midterm election in the USA, so I fully expect more coincidental and highly unusual yet conveniently partisan stories like this coming up where some scandal gets buried and some out of context quote gets amplified. We have seen whistleblowers from Facebook talking about features like "deboost" being employed in a partisan manner. By then everyone would have forgotten about this and I'll be seeing "boosted" clips from all the late night TV "comedy" propagandists talking about some obscure senate or house seat in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance lest the evil red party take control. Pathetic.
I’m disappointed in Facebook and saddened by what’s happening in India. Modi is slowly erasing secularism in favor of Hindu nationalism. People speaking out against him are accused of being Pakistani agents. And his governments response to COVID has been a disaster.
Democrats had stopped critical vaccine raw materials just when India most needed it, just to score a political millage or for big pharma.<p>Careful when you are on high horses, if you fall it is a long way down.
The democrats tried to stop critical raw materials for vaccine production in India. These are raw materials that the US itself did not need for its vaccine production.<p>They only relented after it was pointed out India was supplying critical raw materials for Pfizer.<p>India has been supplying vaccines to the wider world and prioritizing those in a crisis. Indian exports made up 80% of UN vaccine program for poorer countries.<p>It was only natural that we would expect the world to offer a hand when we are in a crisis.<p>Perhaps for once you can focus on exporting what we need instead of exporting your leftist hypocracy and hollow ideology.<p>For all the aloofness the US and EU have showed themselves to be the pettiest global players, not to mention Xitler the creator of the coronavirus.
This is what people who defend censorship when it comes to their own opinions of Dems Vs Reps support.<p>You can't pick and choose your censorship and government intervention.<p>I don't expect to convince those who are used to make "rules for thee but not for me"
They're unable to handle their child pornography problem but they can still find the resources to rig democracies.<p>Why people let any of their software near their computers is a very interesting psychology problem.
Facebook and other social media platforms (even Google manipulating and sacrificing search integrity to prevent unearthing alleged misinformation much to the detriment of academic research when we need long tail results) are already censorship platforms and have been for a while. They even censor academic conferences on censorship.<p>Outcomes like these are to be expected when you also commit censorship (including shadow banning, algorithmic downvoting etc.) blatantly.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217</a><p><a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...</a>