
Freedom On The Net Report 2019 - suresh70
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614679/internet-freedom-is-declining-around-the-worldand-social-media-is-to-blame/
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larnmar
> A new menace: Disinformation—false information spread deliberately to
> deceive people—helped distort elections in 26 of the 30 countries studied
> that had national votes in the last year.

Describing disinformation as a “new menace” seems like... well,
disinformation. I would assume that disinformation has reared its head in just
about every election in history.

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mikece
“A new menace: Disinformation”

I think disinfoRmation has been around since the time before the Pyramids.
Instant global reach of disinfo is newer. “What is true is not printed and
what is printed is not true” — I think we would do well to read more books and
less of what passes for “news.”

Except Hacker News — this is essential reading!

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mschuster91
The problem with unregulated US-style definition of "freedom of speech" is
that this definition only works with (and it was designed with) the 17th to
20th century media model, with newspapers, radio stations and later-on TV
stations as "gatekeepers" to ensure that extremism (no matter if it's Nazism,
ordinary conspiracy theories or quackery such as MMS/homeopathy/antivaxx)
doesn't get too much reach.

With the Internet, this gatekeeper model got turned on its head - and the
village idiots peddling bullshit suddenly had a worldwide audience with
Facebook and, even worse, discussion forums in where they radicalized each
other. The results are known by now - measles have a happy time again "thanks"
to anti-vaxxers, the US elected someone to Presidency who by all measures is
unfit for this post, generally right-wing and racist rhetoric is spreading
across the world, and world leaders reproduce conspiracy theories from the
darkest corners of 4chan. In India, people have been lynched "thanks" to
virally spreading lies. The Brexit "referendum" was only decided "thanks" to
lies and propaganda of questionable financial origins.

Now, the problem is that at least in the US and in large parts of Western
societies the law was way too slow to catch up to the threats that the
Internet created/made possible. Some countries (e.g. China, North Korea, Iran,
Russia) went full-on censorship mode, some like Germany (NetzDG) tried to
catch up, and the US is all but incapable of doing anything with the
Congressional gridlock. Which is the root cause of the problem that the
article states... and it's bad news for the world, as countries will try their
own way of "fixing" social media and overreaching as a result.

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zozbot234
Extremism and quackery got _plenty_ of exposure in the 17th to 20th century
"media model". Even anti-free-speech attitudes themselves are not new. There's
nothing new under the sun.

If anything, the extremism and quackery of today are far milder than those of
the past - even the relatively-recent past. The wisdom of crowds is self-
correcting, _if_ allowed to self-correct.

