This just seems completely backwards. We lament every time a country in crisis/civil war blocks Internet for its citizens: Sudan, Kazakhstan, Burkina Faso, Yemen, ... and then we cut Russia from the Internet on our side [1]<p>If the point of sanctions is to get the local population to rise and make it difficult for the government to keep its course, why cut out their access to independent news that would let them know what to protest? That will leave them with only state-controlled news. And now they can't submit that to Reddit to discuss it?<p>I get that Reddit don't want to be left out of the PR bandwagon, and as a link aggregator all they can do is block links. But this doesn't feel like helping.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-service-provider-cogent-cutting-off-access-to-russian-customers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-service-provider-coge...</a>
This is so ridiculous.<p>For christ's sake, I use Yandex translate because it's better for Russian. I now can't link that on a language learning subreddit.<p>I'm not Russian.<p>It's not as if Russians can't just register .com domains either. This is just fucking people around purely for the sake of it.<p>What should I do here? Fly to Russia and tell Mr Putin to stop?<p>It feels like corona all over again. Bad thing A happens, so you react by doing something that's about ten times more damaging.<p>The whole 'least worst case' scenario in which the West being directly responsible for a revolution is somehow less likely to cause fallout than just getting involved in the war is insane. The actions of people (e.g. the Russian government) aren't a set of if-then-else chains that you can find a loophole in.
War and everything else aside, this is a remarkable sentence (as a rationale for Great Firewalling a ccTLD):<p>- <i>"Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign."</i><p>I'm afraid the future of the internet really will be a small oligarchy of walled gardens, each of which only permit mention and reference to other walled gardens, in the interest of controllability ("integrity", "security", "safety"). The independent, non-corporate internet will slowly die out in the kernel of the hyperlink matrix.
I see people, government, corporation, media... say about "No war", say about they want peace. But their actions is actually spreading feud, tbh.<p>Media is manipulated by government for their politics. Some people are forcing their own viewpoint to others. People blindingly spreads hates without deeply thinking. Many users from social platforms think they know very well about politics and say like a professor when arguing with others.<p>Such a crazy time.
I get this whole “let’s all push Russia to enter into a peaceful conclusion” mentality. But I can’t help but feel that we’re entering 1984 territory when we’re trying to close off any and all possibility of Russian communication or products to reach us.
“But it’s propaganda” sure, fine, but no one is censoring Pro Ukrainian propaganda, so it’s not being blocked just by that fact. And myself and others would very much like to hear the propaganda from both sides even if one is clearly in the right and the other in the wrong.
This anti Russia bigotry is out of control.
Disagree with the fighting all you want, but Russia is a big place with a lot of normal people just trying to live their lives.<p>Everyone cheering for this should be ashamed of themselves for their blind Russiaphobia.<p>A government is not its people.
Truth Social will be far right and have bizarre views but unfortunately that is where I would have to go to with the immense censorship in the mainstream internet and media. I really wish this wasn't the case.
>We decided to do this due to the heavy cyber component to this war and the chance of manipulated content<p>The ironic thing is, this can apply to most of reddit. If they were really so worried they should shut down the entire site as it's rife with manipulated content and competing agendas. This internet era red scare is very strange to me
The only fake stories and propaganda I’ve seen so far are from the Ukrainians:<p>- Ghost of Kiev using ARMA Footage.<p>No evidence this person exists.<p>- Miss Ukraine fighting in Kiev.<p>It was an airsoft gun. She says she isn’t fighting.<p>- Snake Island soldiers killed after heroic standoff.<p>They all surrendered.<p>- Nuclear Reactor shelled, radiation rising.<p>A training building was involved in a relatively small firefight. Reactor was never in danger and radiation levels didn’t change.
The training building that caught fire was outside of the perimeter of the reactor complex and there is no evidence of “shelling”, which means heavy artillery.<p>—<p>People debate if this is a needed part of the information war, and I’m not here to go back and fourth on that.<p>I am curious what Russian propaganda or information ops look like in the west because I haven’t seen them yet. (I’m not a social media user)<p>Does anyone have examples?<p>Edit: Added details for clarity.
I’m a trained former nuclear submarine sailor, and current Army Officer, so this engagement sits at a nexus of my unique experience.
Top comment from an admin:<p>"""
We decided to do this due to the heavy cyber component to this war and the chance of manipulated content. Even seemingly innocuous links could be hosted by someone that is less benign. We certainly recognize that this is a pretty far reaching decision but there are generally other ways for most people to share the type of content that is being described.<p>As to why this wasn't communicated, there is a lot of things going on right now and sometimes moving fast means missing steps along the way (like sharing with mods). We did not intend to hide this decision.
"""<p>So it has little to nothing to do with attempting to censor.
Of course they do.<p><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/05/war-conflict-enemies-of-truth/" rel="nofollow">https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/05/war-conflict-enemies-o...</a>
Two days ago I was trying to convince somebody who was very anti-war and sceptical of the mainstream media narrative on Ukraine, that Russian propaganda targets people like him, and that it's moderately effective. I posted these two YouTube videos [1] [2] of a journalist described as an "Independent Canadian Journalist" which got close to a million views between them, and proved that they were not independent and affiliated with RT by linking to RT [3]. RT.com has also been banned by Reddit [4].<p>Banning .ru sites doesn't actually undermine Russian military interest. It just undermines people like myself who want to link to Russian sources to expose Russian military propaganda. It drives sceptics towards unreasonable echo-chambers where they're more prone to and less aware of foreign influence. It causes Russians to host their propaganda on .com's where people will be less sceptical of it which is just correcting your enemy while they're making a mistake. If you were going to censor them, a targeted blacklist would at least have the benefit of letting through anti-war .ru's, it's not as though everybody in Russia supports this war. A .ru ban fails at the very goal it's trying to accomplish.<p>Banning 5 million .ru domains [5] is also just so destructive. The vast majority of websites blocked with have nothing to do with politics or news or the war. Fuck the people who run and use those websites, I guess?<p>The Russian perspective is also valuable to listen to, even if their government is horrible. If a Ukrainian war criminal in Ukraine rapes and murders a bunch of people, by censoring Russians who are uniquely capable and motivated to expose such war crimes. We're going to help war criminals get away with and continue perpetrating their crimes. War criminals regardless of country benefit from wartime censorship. Hearing the Russian perspective and engaging with Russians also helps to end war diplomatically and peacefully. It's the best situation if we hear the Russian perspective, but we're AWARE it's the Russian perspective, so as not to be misled by bias and to be sceptical of potential slanders.<p>A .ru ban totally fails at its intended goal, it hurts a lot of bystanders, and it undermines the goal we should be aiming towards.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/g1VNQGsiP8M" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/g1VNQGsiP8M</a>
[2] <a href="https://youtu.be/Z9F-cHc5Qog" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Z9F-cHc5Qog</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/370618-syria-sources-bartlett-rt/am" rel="nofollow">https://www.rt.com/op-ed/370618-syria-sources-bartlett-rt/am</a>...
[4] <a href="https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/reddit-bans-links-to-russian-state-media-1235195612/" rel="nofollow">https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/reddit-bans-links-to-r...</a>
[5] <a href="https://statdom.ru/tld/ru/report/domainscount/#8:date=20220205-20220305" rel="nofollow">https://statdom.ru/tld/ru/report/domainscount/#8:date=202202...</a>
the targeting of conspiracy theorists and right wing (wrong think) opinions, in the market place but especially by silicon valley, has all been a warm up.<p>this is an authoritarian feature of our merger of state and market that will continue to grow and find increasing number of avenues for application.