This article is well made and uncovers very interesting thing. I love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile was a great experience, chapeaux bas, i love how great new formats are available to publishers in the digital era outside of serving autoplaying ads.
On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok
NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. I’m not sure about the BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they have a number of great in-house developers that churn out quality content and a great video streaming service (tv.nrk.no).
The BBC isn't allowed to run ads either. They are also generally can't recommend products without talking about alternatives. Always amusing on kids arts/crafts shows when they name a brand and then have to state other products that are available.
They can display adverts under certain circumstances though. Public billboards aren't censored in news reports, and adverts on the sidelines/stands of sporting events (like football) can still be seen.
It's only a requirement for content served inside the UK though; international content (such as BBC.com) is allowed to (and sometimes does) show ads because it's technically not covered by the licensing agreement for the UK.
Britain's transition to becoming more like a British RT happened post Iraq/David Kelly/Hutton Inquiry and even then it happened fairly slowly - it took time to pension off all the good journalists who asked the difficult questions.
The BBC under Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies was fiercely independent and objective though, until they were unceremoniously let go for not towing the party line on Iraq's WMDs.
People are stupid, so you should add links verifying your claims.
Also, noteworthy, is that most people can not remember, or talk about, the fact that certain nations lie to us so they can go to war. They also can't think about the whole actual reasons why what's happening is happening.
Always remember that 99% of all people only parrot what the mass media present to them, with no critical/analytical thought applied whatsoever.
My opinion of the BBC was formed long before RT even existed. One is a government funded state propagandist. The other is RT. RT emulates BBC as do a lot of state propagandists around the world. All RT and other state propagandists like CGTN, al jazeera, etc does is copy the BBC. It's because the BBC is the best at propaganda. It sets the bar that other state propagandists aspire to.
It isn't by accident George Orwell modeled the Ministry of Truth after the BBC. After all he worked as a propagandist for the BBC during ww2.
You truly have to be brainwashed to believe that the BBC is any different from RT. Just gotta tip your hat to the BBC. They do a good job.
> My opinion of the BBC was formed long before RT even existed. One is a government funded state propagandist. The other is RT.
I'm surprised that, having held such a strong opinion about the BBC for such a long time, you are still able to immediately make a factually incorrect statement regarding such common knowledge as where its funding comes from.
> The BBC funding is primarily through TV licensing fees, so it's essentially an optional tax.
That's a long-winded and highly convoluted way of saying government funded.
You have to admire the BBC. They've done such a good job brainwashing people that they jump through all kinds of hoops to hide the fact that the BBC is government funded state propaganda. BBC is what RT aspires to be one day.
No, see, that's but one example of how your unwillingness or inability to accept any complexity or nuance gets in the way of thinking.
The TV license system is set up specifically so that the institution is somewhat isolated from day-to-day politics. It's a completely different situation if the PM can decide on a whim to fund you or not, or if there's a difficult-to-change law that sets the fees that you get for a decade in advance
If you insist that everything is the same and all politicians are corrupt and all media are lying then you're just giving away any power you might have. Why would any politician not turn corrupt or leave id you are screaming invectives at them at the top of your lung, completely divorced from their actual work?
That's why RT loves cynicism and tries to amplify exactly that work view: it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The license fee is likely to be scrapped in 2027: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60014514. Alternative funding is almost certainly going to carry significant strings (either from advertisers or more direct control from government officials).
Arguably there has been a multi-decade push to extinguish the institution altogether, or at least to drastically shrink it and simultaneously bring it under more rigid government control. The trend towards official state broadcaster and away from public interest broadcaster has been ongoing for many many years.
I think the BBC is not exactly like RT in degree or in kind, but there is a definite trend towards its kind. It's also interesting to note that some of the official US complaints about RT influence on US public opinion are based on RT platforming legitimate social critics in the US. Dissidents for thee but not for me.
The amount of "whataboutism" and bothsidism when it comes to the comment section of any Western outlet (here included) is pretty wild. I would say this 2 month old account you're replying to is a great example of the typical output of such accounts.
> No, see, that's but one example of how your unwillingness or inability to accept any complexity or nuance gets in the way of thinking.
Or maybe I've heard the "tv license" excuse for many years now. Nothing you wrote is new to me. Surprised you didn't post a link to BBC edited wikipedia article.
> If you insist that everything is the same and all politicians are corrupt and all media are lying then you're just giving away any power you might have.
No. I insist that propaganda is propaganda. I've no problem saying RT is state propaganda because that's exactly what RT is. I've no problem saying that BBC is state propaganda because that's exactly what they are. I've no problem calling putin a corrupt politician. Just like I have no problem calling zelensky or biden or trump a corrupt politician.
What you are saying is my corrupt politician isn't corrupt because he is on my team. My favorite propaganda outlet isn't propaganda because they are on my team. That's the difference between you and me.
> That's why RT loves cynicism and tries to amplify exactly that work view: it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Where did I hear that from? Oh that's right, it's the anti-RT propaganda. Funny how that works huh? Funny how propaganda say X and people just repeat it endlessly? You are the one amplifying propaganda you heard not me.
But believe what you want. BBC is a government created and funded state propaganda. This is a historical fact. You can invent all kinds of excuses if it helps you sleep at night. But it doesn't change reality. How crazy is it that only our enemies have propaganda? Only russia, china, north korea, etc have propaganda. We don't have propaganda. Nope. Your comment is proof that we have the best propaganda.
> I've no problem calling putin a corrupt politician. Just like I have no problem calling zelensky or biden or trump a corrupt politician.
Don't forget Pol Pot. These politicians are all the same.
I'm reminded of murderers Oscar Pistorious and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Likewise the terrorism of the French Resistance and Osama Bin Laden.
What a unique and valuable perspective to have. I'm sure you'd agree that such enlightenment is a curse, which is why the more feeble minded of us hide our eyes from these blinding truths.
I believe you are thinking of the French revolution, not resistance. The latter term is generally used to refer to resistance against the Vichy administration.
In Finland, national newsmedia Yle is forced to serve mostly similar content because of some legistlation that it cannot purely act as normal news site (text only), as it is traditionally broadcasting company. They serve content like this to bypass these rules.
As a Norwegian, I have never seen the Norwegian word “mil” translated into English, because there is no English equivalent. Instead, we always convert into kilometers or miles, depending on the audience.
Something went wrong with the distance. As there is ~80km between Kharkiv and Belgorod and not 80 miles. If they meant to use Norwgian miles eight would have been correct.
AI-powered translation tools (Google Translate) can be terrible with this situation.
Naturally, I can't get Google Translate to do this now, but I see text like "Vi kjører 100 km. Det koster 30 kr" translated to "We drive 100 miles. It costs 30 SEK" -- km/miles is obviously wrong, and I think kr→SEK (even when it's either kr, kronor, crowns or NOK in English) is because there's more Swedish than Norwegian on the internet.
(I get unreasonably annoyed when people convert metric units into American when translating text into English. The English is used by a far wider audience than Americans, and outside the USA it's reasonable to expect Americans to understand metric units.)
Google translate isn't even consistent in how it translates "kr" - I have seen it go into SEK, NOK, ISK and DKK at various times, seemingly random even when it correctly tells me which language it is specifically translating from.
> I love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile was a great experience, chapeaux bas
Actually, my experience was the exact opposite on a desktop. First, I landed on a black page which showed some video for less than a second and afterwards the page didn't respond anymore. After switching from Firefox to Chromium, the page probably worked as it was intended.
Nevertheless, scrolling with a mouse I landed somewhere between the right positions. So I tried using the buttons on the left and while the positions, I landed were much better, it felt very awkward to continuously press buttons on the left while my hand was on the right (might be good for left-handed people). Furthermore, the videos played somewhat irritating, as if they continued playing when you went to the next part or paused a bit delayed. So when switching to a previous part you land somewhere in the middle of the clips.
So while admire the story, I didn't enjoy the experience.
You can't see 80km from the ground, and it's on the other side of a closed international border and the war itself. Residents of Belgorod can have little to no idea what's happening in Kharkiv other than the news. Well, that and the gigantic explosion of the local oil depot.
Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.
I've heard explosions similarly far away (although it was at the coast and in an unusually quiet place). Explosions in the air travel really far. And every time I heard explosions so far I looked at the news/social media.
In one of these incidents the news article seemed like it might be a coverup to me so I looked up user forums in case someone leaked the real information.
Do you remember what explosion it was that you heard 80km away? Because I seriously doubt any of the weaponry Russia has dropped so far can be heard anywhere close to that far.
Not OP, but I remember reports of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire explosion which wikipedia claims "Because of an inversion layer, the explosions were heard up to 125 miles (200 km) away".
Imagine an alternate universe where Canada and USA went to war. Do you really think that people in Seattle would have to depend on German social media apps to figure out what goes on in Vancouver while it's being bombed? Seriously?
Think about North v. South Korea: neither side really has the slightest clue how the other lives. If there were a famine or coup in North Korea no-one would have a clue except through the reports of spies.
There aren't any global German social media apps, and the US has a very different media landscape, so like all "what if the situation was completely different" hypotheticals, it would be completely different.
Picking a random story from the BBC front page, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-61002096 , what do you think is inaccurate about it? Do you think the MD has not resigned? That there have not been queues? That they have mistaken the names of people involved? That Manchester does not in fact exist and is a liberal conspiracy?
(The main problem with political news is disproportionate coverage, double standards of scandal, and the selection of who gets quoted - as well as a vast area of "op-ed" which is not technically news but is on the same websites.
As well as reporting on "future" or "possible" events, which by definition are difficult to be accurate about)
shower thought: could we improve things if we set up new rules for media so that we more clearly demarcate "descriptions of what happened" from "opinions and interpretations" and "projections and speculation"?
I intentionally didn't call "descriptions of what happened" as "facts", because that would sidetrack the discussion on how to determine what's true or not etc. Just force media to clearly separate "here's what our reporters saw" from "here's what they think it means"
If, in this alternate universe, Americans have no free press and live in fear of men with guns showing up on their doorstep and hauling them away, then - sure? Where else would they get news?
I understand maybe I exaggerated. It seems that in the US tv is clearly more free than in Russia tv. But it has many people and opinions that you don't see on tv. representatives of other parties (The Green party, even maybe communist party USA (yes, there are such :)) with the exception of Democrats and Republicans. You rarely see Richard Stallman on TV, Trump is banned in many sources, of course there were reasons for this, I take into account his eccentricity, but I am still for freedom of information...
It's not a question of "depending on" Tik Tok. The Russians on the other side of the boarder can definitely go online and search for news they want to read.
But that requires an active desire to go find the truth. Such people already know the truth of the war.
But plenty of Russian citizens are just following the state propaganda right now, and are consuming zero information outside of it. If such people saw the reality of the war while casually scrolling through Tik Tok, that might make it harder for such people to deny what's going on.
I understand that Russian ban of foreign media is not good, but some west countries banned Russian media too and created special difficulties for them early...
Generally I don’t support limiting free speech or even banning Russia TV channels in this case. But let’s not pretend that quasi independent government propaganda department are equivalent to western media companies.
As a Russian that make me sad that our media uses such a very hacky work strategy, sometimes add fakes some times try to color clearly events in the beneficial side. But I think that it's clearly in Russian media and Russian political view point has some clear truths that Western media not always want to show and our media could have represented their point of view much better. But I saw fakes in western media too, and quite often, although perhaps in smaller quantities... I even know one News TV presenter on Russian central channel it's strange, but it seems to me that he never say fakes, does not try to embellish events in one direction or another, but it only airs on Saturday evenings news and then not every time.
Comedy Central. Technically not an article, but Jon Stewart (also technically not a journalist, but imho he was better at being one than actual journalists) was pretty open about opposing the Iraq war. I assume in Russia he’d already be serving his 15+ year sentence?
Yes the US has problems. But Russia is just on another level considering that being a free and independent media source is literally illegal there.
You're joking, right? US media has published plenty of anti-war articles where the US was the perpetrator.
Even forgetting the Pentagon Papers already mentioned, papers have published the abuses in Guantanamo and the Iraq War Logs. Plenty of articles have documented killings of civilians by US drones. And plenty of editorial boards have written articles calling on the US to end whatever current war it's fighting.
Sure, big media probably kowtows more to the government than we'd like, but they absolutely are free criticize the wartime actions of the government.
This is a great visual and concrete example of how easily a narrative can be controlled.
This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media.
Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this.
As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.
This where sanctions could be used. TikTok is profiting by keeping this neutered version up in Russia, so US government could prohibit making money in US until they take it down in Russia.
Tik Tok is Chinese -- and was raged against by Trump for that reason -- and would constitute picking a fight with the CCP. That's a big ole can of worms to open up while running other big-deal sanctions and playing the brinkmanship game with Russia.
> I'd like to see the source code to their bots so that this experiment can be reproduced.
You don't need the bots source code to reproduce the experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the same results.
While no the answer you are expecting, but the answer nonetheless. If you have android phone (or android emulator wink wink, nudge nudge), you can install modded TikTok client[1], which has a bunch of settings. The one you are looking for is "- Remove most of regional restrictions". Change your region to russland, and try scrolling it for yourself.
If you are an advanced enough programmer, you can check out the changes made to the app in the github repository[2].
Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
Second paragraph is a response to @latchkey's question
> How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
And I'm replying, that the point of the report is to tell about information bubble. The same one you are describing.
> how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm
Bots' viewing rules can only change the *amount of war related videos* uploaded before March 4th, not the *reported lack of fresh videos* from the other side for the russian bot. And as such there should be no issues about the lack of source code.
Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel.
Incredible difference when you see them side by side.
It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
As someone for whom the conflict affect my childrens' wellbeing, and having good friends on both sides of the conflict, I would love if you would share your findings. If you prefer private conversation my Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
> It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
If you have any ideas, I can help code it or host it.
Whenever there is a flare up over there, it dominates US news sources, and I’ve been using proxies and VPNs since the 2000s to get another set of articles from other mostly Western countries
I like the systematic approach they have used, and am a bit scared by the results. In one way, it is not that surprising that a social media app is so tightly controlled and used as a tool by the Russian government to hide unpleasant parts of reality. But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this
The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea.
This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political censorship... And in Russia of all places.
TikTok is available in China. The app is called Douyin. And the content being shown to Chinese citizens is very different from what is being shown to Americans. Social media apps are the Trojan horse of politics today used by all sides.
China has being pushing Russian narratives on the war internally in state media.
So I think you might be disproving the "is not a tool for China" part.
Well what do we have NSA for? President complains about a spying app for months, can't they get off their ass and check? Or are they only good at spying on Joe the piblic?
If a company refuses to open source its software that it operates as a service, you should assume the absolute worst. The burden of proof is on the companies, to prove to us that they aren't spying or using their software as a tool for a government to spy. This applies to all services, including cloud providers.
It's the same with governments. Non-transparent governments which do not make its reports and internal statements public should be assumed to be committing massive crimes. It's up to them to prove to us that they aren't.
Why should I trust an organization that hides reality from me to not abuse its power?
I think everyone should also take a moment and question what we are seeing on our screens. How much of our social media apps are tightly controlled and used as a tool by our governments?
Well thats what you get with a glorified 'recommendation' algorithm and now it can be used by governments and other unpleasant people in power to hide and control what is seen and unseen from its users. Hardly surprising there and expected.
> But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this
If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or fiction.
Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells back from social networks like TikTok.
How can we criticise a platform that picks content for you? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, pick content for you. Also it's a Chinese app. Working as intended!
I mean this is exactly what you'd expect a capitalist company like TikTok (Bytedance) to do: cave to any local regulations in order to make more money, even if that means bowing to pressure of a dictatorship.
What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
Every company has to comply with local regulations or not operate in a country. The same applies to a nonprofit, non-capitalist collective. The alternative to that is fines, or in the case of more authoritarian governments, arrests and jailing of local employees. The choice is to either comply or leave the country, though in some countries it's possible to appeal to the courts.
Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral choice is to shut down services.
Directly, USAGM controls VoA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Wikipedia allows these as "reliable sources". Twitter doesn't tag them.
The current CEO of NPR is a former USAGM exec. PBS FRONTLINE has unprecedented access to interviewing top DoD/State officials for stories that advance their agendas. Interesting.
Indirectly, all the establishment media has close ties to national security. NYT admitted that potentially sensitive stories need to get screened by the government before publishing. That's state control over media where it counts.
...uhm, isn't TikTok practically irrelevant in Russia now that they've stopped allowing users to post new content?! I mean, this is what ppl use it for, viewing new content from ppl like them and posting new content hoping to get "famous".
With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.
Not sure what your experience is, but when I've used TikTok, only a very small percentage of the content I'm shown is recent. The vast majority is months old, which I think is part of the genius of TikTok; they don't discard good content just due to its age, and instead show it based on novelty to the individual user
To add on to this - a truism of the internet is that most people don't upload content. They only consume content produced by others.
It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.
It doesn't say much about TikTok's algorithm, but it did help me imagine something like the US invading Iraq and me not being able to find out because Twitter blocked new tweets here.
Unless you have a data on number of users, this is just speculation. One could also speculate that with other sources being turned off the young Russians would all turn to TikTok. This site [1] claims 54.9M active users in January.
I've tried uploading some SMM content to TikTok for Russian audience using proxy gateways in multiple states. It just ends up as "not found" when accessed from Russian IPs.
If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the internet very fast. However it's off by default. The internet is a bit slower. But your requests are being cleverly routed through random IPs that are not censored. These random IPs are provided by organisations but most importantly by peer users of the feature who happen to live in free countries. Sort of SETI@home but the goal is to increase intraterrestrial intelligence.
Having IP addresses whose most significant bits can roughly map to a location (because IP "blocks" are allocated to distinct ISPs that are in known locations) was a big mistake. It would be much harder, but not impossible, to graft geopolitical borders to the internet if every public address that a computer got was random.
I think Apple is roughly trying that with their VPN service? I'm not sure; I never used it since I'm not a full 100% Apple device person, and if I'm going to pay for a VPN I want to be able to use it on all my devices.
Westerners should stop projecting their culture and values on Russians when trying to make sense of what is going on. Russians are not these poor bamboozled fools. Support for Putin is real. Denial of atrocities and justification for war is not rooted in ignorance, but pride.
For years Kremlin cultivated in Russians a sense of injured pride, something akin to the “straight white male” victimhood and persecution complex you see in US fringe groups. Russians were told of greatnesses of their achievements of the past, and how it was stolen from them, how the West is weak, gullible, and corrupt, and is trying to sabotage the inevitable rise of Russia to it’s destined glory.
Russians have enough access to sources of truth, but their world view simply does not compel them to believe those sources that create dissonance with their righteous cause - they can’t be brother killing monsters that rape mothers in front of their children, crush people with tanks, bomb maternity hospitals - so it’s obviously all lies. And since everyone is accusing them of this - then it simply means that everyone is lying and will get what is coming to them.
How do I know this? I was born in Soviet Union, am Russian-speaking and I am unable to explain my anger and grief over what is happening to my own father who thinks that I am a fool to believe in propaganda staged videos full of crisis actors manufactured by Western media.
This is unsurprising. Every tech company does this. Pretty much all maps apps redraw boundaries of places like Taiwan and Crimea to suit local sensitivities. Search engines selectively censor content, etc.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative.
The social platforms became weapons in this war.
Anyone noticed they blocked accounts of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned?
Or Google deprioritised or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)?
Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.
> Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative.
This is demonstrably not true and easily disproved. All the official Russian accounts are on twitter and keep posting lies after lies, lately main topic is denial of massacre in Bucha. For example: https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/1510649349482635265
With the fog of war there has been more embellishments coming out of Ukraine than Russia. The tank running over, Ghost of kiev, shopping mall fiasco, snake island deaths, russian death squad (turned out to be ukranian border guards) , ukraine claiming russians bombed babi yar....
Even with maternity hospital bombing, the women in photographs said that the Ukranian army had occupied the hospital and forced them out of the maternity wing.
Like the other poster said: it's fake news on fake news. Two different bubbles.
Currently Russia doesn't have a singe reliable news source. We all have seen the pro-Russian narrative - there's no war, we're not murdering the civilians, all Ukrainians are nazis developing bioweapons targeting "slav DNA" and to be delivered across the border by birds, etc. Those are not news.
Needless to say that this propaganda also targets people in other countries with large ethnical Russian population, specifically the Baltic states and incites those people to riot and hate the land they live on creating a bridgehead for possible Russian invasion.
However "unreliable" these news sources are, they present a different opinion that is being censored. And since there are just two sides in this war, you can only see just one side of a story.
The Russian statements are easily available. Starting from special military operation, actually west forced us to do it, Ukraine is not real country, the calls for denazification, ultimately towards de-Ukrainiation. Continuing by saying civilians in Bucha were actually killed by Ukrainians and including that Marinopol is actually bombed by Ukraine itself. It is super easy to find what Russian embassies and politicians are saying. Full statements are available on their twitter accounts, Facebook pages or general websites. It is super easy to find Russians writing in English complaining about sanctions or voicing their opinions about Russia.
Full history of changing official Russian narrative is available.
There is no problem to find Russian official statements at all. The issue here is that you ignore what they are saying in order to pretend it is not available or that it was somewhat convincing.
Russians doing what they have been doing for a hundred years: lying, blaming, spreading clearly false propaganda, stealing, murdering and raping people.
Meanwhile people in the west, or at least outside of the conflict zone, discussing about free speech.
meduza.io is one of a few you can use to get alternative view. They may be somewhat biased towards Russian opposition but way, way more objective compared to state media.
https://www.rbc.ru/ and RBC tv channel maybe called somewhat like independent source... But reliable news source on tv does not existed at all on almost all TV channels in all countries, they all promote profitable to them point of view... Only if you watch different sources you may try to imagine something close to reality.
Given russian media is legally only allowed to spout government-approved propaganda, it really makes sense to ban them from social media. This does not equal to only allowing pro-Ukrainian media.
Why don't you call pro-Ukrainian media "propaganda"? They did recently ban all but a few pro-gov political parties, and all their media is equally under total government control
The goal is not a media free of bias because it's generally agreed that's simply not a possibility. So instead, the goal is a media that attempts to limit and acknowledge its biases. Western media usually attempts this (with mixed success). Russian media does not attempt this. That is the difference.
If you consider that the Ukrainian conflict is a war between US and Russia, then yes all western media are pro-Ukrainian (it serves US interests at the moment).
You can't use "What about", because that makes people shut their already extremely underutilized brains off ... even more so when it comes to all the far worse shit the US have done over the course of decades. Generally, though, you simply can not disagree with the content the masses consume, because obviously you must be wrong.
People are stupid.
In the same breathe you can, in fact, never ever bring up how genuinely worse the US is compared to any other country on this planet, while actually sparking a useful discussion. You do not find such conversations on the top, be it here, on reddit or on any level where it is actually both useful and spreading.
Social Media big tech in collusion with party propagandists is poison in the internet freedom dream. Ideologues owning big tech is a dream come true for authoritarians. How are we going to fix this I have no idea.
Govs get to determine propaganda/narratives within their borders via legal instruments. TikTok follows domestic laws to continue operation. As it should be versus Twitter/FB caving to US foreign policy pressures / propaganda world wide.
Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that:
1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok taking pressure around it.
2. It mostly isn't algorithmic deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.
>Ukrainian Nykolai gets to see men in military attire singing patriotic songs about loving Ukraine. Or talking about it being a man's duty to sign up for battle.
>Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes.
Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?
Why do you think they will watch Ukrainian videos? In Telegram there's plenty of Russian war videos. Probably, hundreds of channels with tens-hundreds of thousands subscribers.
It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.
The number of people unwilling to accept and be critical of Ukrainian propaganda has been eye-opening to me.
The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there.
No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it comes to actual standards of acceptability.
And this is one of the means how China will sway future democratic elections around the world - by brainwashing all the TikTok zombies and presenting to them the China manipulated story.
This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine.
But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not.
We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are able to explain and frame our experience!
Great point. In my circles I have far too often seen people criticizing other governments of propaganda, while also accepting the narratives we live in without question.
An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a downvote.
The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
Content moderation is de facto censorship. If someone is sharing a honestly held opinion, not threatening anyone - that should be allowed.
You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc.
Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice?
All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
It simply is not. And the proof is that you can see in this very thread a bunch of flagged, dead comments that are still visible, still citable, and (importantly) whose posters are not guilty of crimes for their creation.
I'm sorry, but no. Difficulty of finding information is not the same thing as censorship. And we have to stop pretending that it is.
> Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days?
Nope, actually I don't. But interestingly: I absolutely know that Alex Jones' rhetoric is still pervasively accessible to anyone who wants to hear it. Here's his site, if you're having trouble finding it due to all the, ahem, "censorship": https://www.infowars.com/
If major platforms de-platform you, in a co-ordinated fashion that's not censorship?
This is all works on account of corporate policies - not law. Law would dictate that unless what was said was illegal, that a person had a right to say it.
Which is supportive of the fact that we are living in a fascist (corporate + governance) system. That the legal system is now a joke.
> If major platforms de-platform you, in a co-ordinated fashion that's not censorship?
Not in a world where you can continue to post on Infowars or 4chan or reddit or HN or wherever instead, no. Why would it be? You really don't see the difference? In Russia, it is illegal to report on international perspectives about events in Ukraine. That content doesn't exist, and you can't link to it without committing a crime (and, likely, also using a ban evasion tool like a VPN).
Do you have an example of an idea or perspective (even one!) that is being suppressed by "major platforms" in a "co-ordinated fashion" that I won't be able to refute with a simple link as I did above?
Yes, you can have a website and your own voice. But if you are being excluded from public platforms - not because you are doing anything illegal, but because a majority or even just the owner doesn't like your opinion - this is a genuine problem. You will live in an echo chamber.
These are legal issues and there is legal framework already in existence to prevent illegal acts. Shops cannot refuse service to the public. But an online public platform - eg Twitter - is able to refuse. The ability to refer to a terms of service document that can justify stopping your usage of a public platform when a person has done nothing wrong, should not be legal. That you can be silenced can interpreted as a political act, eg Trump. You might agree with the political slant (but then how would you even hear about alternative views?).
I really don't get how you can think or argue that voices are not being censored in the public domain.
> if you are being excluded from public platforms [then] this is a genuine problem
Maybe. But it's not "censorship" as commonly understood in a historical context. And it's absolutely not, in even the remotest sense, comparable in severity or impact to the kind of criminalization of discourse that is happening in Russia right now. And any attempt to conflate the two is just ridiculously inappropriate.
It is not effectively censorship. Censorship is not effective if it merely makes communication slightly less convenient.
>Do you remember when Trump was banned from Twitter?!?
Yes, and he deserved it. And yet everything Donald Trump says and does still gets national press coverage, and he's starting his own social media platform with a backlog of millions of followers. It's garbage, but that isn't censorship's fault.
Being banned from Twitter isn't censorship. Donald Trump wasn't "censored" for having a different opinion. Nor was Donald Trump "censored" in any way that actually interfered with or hindered his ability to communicate.
People really should stop picking Trump as an example of a martyr to the cause of free speech, he's a really bad one. I know they want the narrative to be that "cancel culture" was just so powerful that it silenced a sitting President but it's just not working out that way.
Very good points. Including the shadow banning that takes place here and everywhere. Different opinions and views are increasingly censored by those that are empowered. "Power corrupts". Unless a fair system is in place of checks and balances, there will be those that will abuse it whenever they can get away with it.
Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians.
Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing, the better for the world.
Maybe I'll get a lot of downvotes. I just write my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. It's clearly a certain number of people in Ukraine sympathize Russia. Yes it seems that more sympathize The West in the latest times, but this is not much of an overwhelming majority. From that majority has some small group of nationalist. And there are detailed recordings of their bloody crimes. Maybe sometimes Russian media exaggerates it, but you can't say that was no crimes. Western countries have never condemned any of these crimes. The Us could give just one guaranty to not accept Ukraine(maybe even for some time) in NATO to prevent war. And western media have many confirmed fakes too. And Zelensky not very different from dictatorship from the point of view of a simple person. He was banned many tv media and parties in Ukraine. It is difficult to clearly value the actions of the rulers. We don't have so much information that they have on their level. Government does not consist of one person. Sometimes what we think is dictatorship is necessary to save the country. In Crimea for example most people really prefer Russia and speak russian. Minsk agreements could be least damaging to people on both sides. But if they were not fulfilled, How else could this issue be resolved? It's very very complicated situation... It's only my humble opinion. I may be wrong.
> We don’t have so much information that they have on their level.
I wish more people understood this. There is SO much more going on in this conflict than any layman can fathom. There’s deep context behind it spanning years, and the situation itself develops at a breakneck pace, yet everyone is suddenly an expert on the culture and history of the entire region and fully informed on what’s going on.
Isn't tiktok's whole thing that it shows you very personally curated content based on data about you including demographics and most users see different content? Wouldn't users from Ukraine and England or ones from Mexico and America also see different videos?
Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the real news rather than the experiment that just shows how different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I missing?
Are you serious? In the time it took you to write this comment you could have actually read the article to find the exact answer to your question. It's basically the whole point of the post.
At least on phone it only gives you one sentence per page with a slow transition, so it wasn't as quick as you suggest to go over it again to confirm.
Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and only relevant information actually is that the content is banned.
If you think Reddit isn’t highly curated too, you’re wrong. Perhaps you could make that argument 10 years ago but no longer. In the last few years Reddit has taken on hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to morph the site into a more mainstream advertiser-friendly offering. They’ve silenced lots of controversial communities by outright banning them or neutered them with “quarantines”. Over the years, Reddit has succeeded at pushing out people who don’t have palatable opinions and retained a core base of advertiser-friendly true believers. “Advertiser-friendly” in the contemporary era means “left-leaning with no reservations“. This is about the furthest thing you can get from a “balanced view”.
This is an absurd statement. Reddit is by far the most effectively gamed and manipulated social media platform that exists. There’s countless examples of how powerful mods are on Reddit on shaping narratives.
reddit is one of the absolutely most gamed social media on the internet. Don't forget that the "head of content" that was hired few years back is from NATO with no technical background. Reddit is on harcore mode right now deleting entire subreddits and permabanning people that even slightly critique NATO or Ukraine.
/r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with mindless flinging of feces.
Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the grass.
Of course russia is bad. it's an absolute corrupt hellhole, I know that. My point is that so is Ukraine. Not sure why we are taking sides in a war between two former soviet republics both run by corrupt oligarchs
Kremlin Press Secretary Dimitro “the cockroach” Peskov openly boasted about using VPN. Nothing prevents RU citizens to use VPN to get the full access to the TT content.
This was my first experience using TikTok as well — I think those videos will always appear to new users because they get a lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll likely never see them again.
If you weren’t offended enough, many of those G-cup Megan Thee Stallion fans are self-admitted minors crying “stop sexualizing me! I’m a kid!” while they gyrate. I deleted TikTok shortly after I installed it. (Not just because of that. The last thing I need is another attention-optimized vapid rabbit hole.)
You must be on a different TikTok than me. I'm using TikTok from Germany and I neither get NSFW content nor war stuff. It's all silly dance videos, lots of stupid pranks, wonderful musicians and a bit of English as a Second Language content for me.
Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be very different for different users.
A lot of people are praising this article's design, but I personally did not appreciate it. I get it - it's a TikTok story that's made to look and work like TikTok, probably made to appeal to the TikTok class. As one who prefers clear prose over "consoom the content!" video snippets and soundbites, I felt distracted from the message by all the dynamic media.
I have noticed that TikTok is more likely to show the content from my current location as I travel between countries. Must be the geo tagging that makes it easy for the . 80km is a long distance when it crosses national borders.
I don't understand how they're able to just "change their IP" to something that's located in those 2 cities. How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations?
> How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations?
Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine. Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia and Ukraine.
You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.
Hm... Pretty solid argument in favor of federated/decentralized protocols, this. Is there anything out there that doesn't suck? Not for chat. We've got Matrix and chat is usually not censored anyway.
How well would a federated social network hold up to an attack from a government like Russia? Either to flood it with propaganda, or simply to bring it down?
Nobody in power wants it. For example, look at how alternatives to reddit that gain any traction are treated (they have a reputation that only bigots, incels, other unsavory characters use it--any such platform is overrun by government trolls).
I already kind of knew intuitively that this would be happening in some form, but seeing it examined like this really puts it into perspective.
I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map, Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the US and Dominican Republic lately.
I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my connections with different political views, or different interests, are being fed completely different realities. Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen information war.
As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events portal.
I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war, and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is really happening.
There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron Curtain.
I feel like the article is dodging the reality of what they are asking: How many people are employed by TikTok in Russia? What is their responsability and how do they influence product decisions? What would happen if TikTok refuses to comply with local laws?
I’m not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no influence on the product, and depriving their family of their support is the ethical choice.
What is ironic is surely the dancing video mentioned and not that a publicly funded Norwegian government-owned media, NRK, (Jens Stoltenberg from Norway is the head of Nato) publishes a hit piece on TikTok all the while ignoring what FB, Twitter and many other social media have been doing to people in their own counties including the US for years.
You clearly have no idea what are you talking about.
Here's what NRK has published about Facebook: https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F
facebook
Feel free to search for articles about other social media.
Yes, that's what I literally did. And that's what you shoul've done before writing all that nonsence about how they are ignoring what other social media is doing.
since HN is a technology oriented site, can someone explain what technologies are being used in this article? The graphics are amazing! Is it mainly three.js?
It would have helped if they had made it more prominent that you're supposed to scroll down. I was watching the first video, expecting to see a second one for comparison or something. I already closed the tab again and only later saw a coworker browsing HN who clicked on the same link and saw him scroll :)
I was asking [0] for strong evidence of TikTok being a tool to manipulate the west and it seems that this is all the evidence that satisfies this claim.
It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today.
Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thing to say that "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet". At most it is the direct opposite and it is even worse than Facebook.
The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media.
So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.
The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention.
We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens.
Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).
Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc.
With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of reasons you indicate.
The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions.
Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?
the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozen
At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.
Humans are not geared for our "village" to be this big. The expansion of our sphere of "care" flies directly in the faces of thousands of years human evolution.
The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc.
Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.
You're just looking at the first hop and that's excessively gloomy. What about all the sites that authors you read have read?
Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to.
Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation.
There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.)
This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway.
(Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)
We can surely build apps and devices to enable the see of a billion voices. After all everyone now has a computer in their pocket connected to the internet.
The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the internet.
The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.
The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.
Like the zen koan, does a piece of information exist of no one is around to read it? Self-hosting is mostly pointless because the problem is the walled gardens trapping global attention. Many people barely see a browser window, and consume all online information inside the walled gardens. Whether you publish outside that garden or not it is effectively the same, because they will never see what you write.
I’d say you have to know your audience but it seems to work fine here. Plenty of self hosted blog posts make it to the front page of HN. I don’t see anyone writing for the broader masses and maybe that’s more the type of writing you think will be quashed, but writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine.
" writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine."
Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.
I'm pretty happy that i havent had to read celebrity news sites because i have an algorthmically light diet, especially in the last few weeks with Will Smith etc. Do you really think this nichemaking is bad inherently bad? The natural course is that good niches fill and grow until they become the mainstream and the folks who are nudged out go make new niches. this even happens with Big Media... It even happened here.
What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches
Such survey results cannot be used to infer anything without understanding how the survey was worded. For instance, if one of the answers were "I use Facebook, but not the internet" then A) some people will choose it just by virtue of it being there, and B) it could occur to some people that the survey was poorly worded but meant "I do not use the internet for anything other than Facebook".
I remember a rash of such loaded survey questions going around my country a few years ago, it looked like it was specifically designed to be answered with answers that could be used to slander my nation with "N% of these people think this" results. It's usually not disinterested parties investing the time and resources to run these survey, rather, it's usually people for whom the investment will pay off if they can get the results they want.
> It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal
That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression.
The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such network, they go as far as creating their own little net to protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names might be different) in their own little net to keep democratic force in check.
Internet is democratic, there should be no question about that.
The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.
> The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.
With all due respect the problem with the internet is that you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is.
You and many others believe the Internet is what the internet is capable of. It's not. The Internet is exactly what it is to the vast majority of people that use it. And that's Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok...
It doesn't matter that the internet could be what you want it to be, not that it once was. But it's not now, and history isn't on your side - ask usenet or IRC.
So here we are and yet again technologists are shocked or in denial after believing that the existence of a technology would somehow overpower the interests of the powerful and the system they've built - instead of realizing it will be co-opted by them.
The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
If you are a technologist and failing to rigorously think through the negative cases and faults of your tech, or how your tech can be used against the interests of people or society you are a failure of a technologist. It doesn't matter if you're building an ML model, crypto, or a TikTok app.
As an example, where does crypto end?
1. High efficiency money laundering, permitting sanctions evading (like Russia would love to do right now on a massive scale), and the medium for illegal business like digital extortion / ransomware
2. Just as regulated as the existing banking/credit system, centralized in a few exchanges, failing at any anonymity, no better than existing banking and CCs, while using up massive resources.
Neither is any good and yet tons are in denial that that's where we'll end up.
Technology does not exist independent of society at large as much as we'd like it to.
If I understood it correctly, here is the key point of your comment:
> The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
While I do agree a technology should be designed with good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too idealistic.
Most technology that we utilize today were invented not actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge. Further more, technology itself is not static, instead, it iterates too, sometimes by different people in different organization at different place across different time.
Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the Internet don't exist.
I appreciate the response, but a few errors in your comments.
> To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
No I don't belive a technology can only be used for it's intented purpose. In fact exactly the opposite - almost every technology will be used for purpose other than what you intented it to be used for. So understand what common, or motivating alternate purposes you are enabling with your tech and make sure you evaluate the consequences of them.
An example (not ideal because it is not how history happened): Inventing/discovering atomic enery also invents the atomic bomb. Don't jump start spreading the atomic energy everywhere touting its benefits unless you understand you'll also be spreading atomic bomb tech everywhere. Don't be surprised later when it happens and say "it's not supposed to be used that way". "They've corrupted the ideals we had of cheap clean energy for everyone".
> but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Noone has absolutely/complete control over anything. (And a side point, frequently when arguments describe absolutes they are often standing up straw men)
> Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
This I strongly disagree with. You cannot an should not "only hope you've designed something good". You should also have evaluated in designing something good that you're not also designing something bad. That is your responsibility as well.
Don't make an information harvesting platform and then be dismayed when people use it to harvest information you don't think should be harvested. Don't make cell hacking software then be shocked that authoritarian govts use it to hack their citizens' phones. Don't put backdoors in software then be apalled that the "wrong" people use them.
> Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy,...
It is now. And I sincerly hope it continues to do so in the future. History, all of the above and the linked article on TikTok shows that "[letting] the progress of things take care the rest" means that it likely will not continue to do so in the future without diliberate concerted effort to ensure it does. When most of the internet looks and behaves like TikTok.
If you actually watch the video you can see they are no longer allowed to upload content so I think you're wrong. It's also going to be very difficult to host anything when the government has a total crackdown on internet. You host some videos of war there and I can guarantee it would come back to you very quickly.
It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
My great hope in the early 2000s was that all you had to do was provide a route for information and the effect of propaganda would crumble once people had access to the truth. And, the internet did provide the route that did not exist before it just didnt matter.
Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a disproportionate level of political influence in the UK because he dominates media through which people watch and read about sports.
And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.
Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.
> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and, as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.
The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple people.
You're effectively saying the same thing as me...?
Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves.
The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both hurts and deepens the hole.
Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time. The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have been exploiting it for years.
Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused to take sputnik because why the fuck would you inject something into your arm because Putin told you to?
> them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves
You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)
Youre victim blaming, no? The problem is the lack of ethics of the people in the know, who are creating the propaganda, and tools and disinformation on behalf of the Robert Murdoch's in exchange for money. All this stuff is done by people like us.
> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons.
Is it really so irrational? How many people have the technical know-how and access to equipment to personally verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption? (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not conspiracy theorists who wonder if the vaccine will secretly kill us or render us infertile.
There are often good reasons to trust the official narrative. There are often good reasons to distrust it too, but placing trust in people and institutions is often not so irrational.
This is basically how science works in practice too. If you want to publish a paper and make an impact, better make sure you publish in one of the important journals/conferences. And if you’re trying to figure out if a source is trustworthy, it probably make sense to see if it was published in a reputable journal.
Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made that very easy. But trust is still something that needs to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have trustworthy institutions, I don’t think it’s something we can easily replace with technology.
Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without really verifying it. It's impossible to do so. Can any single person truly know how everything in their computer works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be manipulated.
It is completely irrational to have no skepticism, though. On any subject, including ones in which we trust the authorities (e.g., scientists). Because both the authorities and the rest have some agenda, and it isn't necessarily mine.
I'd argue it's deeply unhealthy to have any trust at all in governments that have shown themselves to be authoritarian or oppressive.
>placing trust in people and institutions is often not so irrational.
The question is which institutions and people do we place trust in? When they contradict each other whom do you believe? Should we believe them sometimes but not others?
That's where people get irrational and antivaxxers are just one example of that.
Yes, it's blindingly self evident that you cant run your own vaccine trials.
This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time.
For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.
This is TikTok only after a despotic government created a law about fake news that can result in a 15 year jail sentence.
your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.
TikTok has a lot of CCP propaganda in it (fake influencers paid by the CCP). It's not just a happy place to see cute dance videos.
This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
You are parroting an old tired “it’s only protected speech when it’s the government meddling”, and to that I ask, did you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the Russian government decided to jail people over “fake news”? Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom of speech?
Your parent is still right, though: that's what the internet largely is. Companies that try to make a quick buck by grabbing attention. And while there are still many other sites that allow open discussion, Russia can block them quite easily for a very comfortable majority of the population.
On my TikTok page I watch stand up comedians, cooking videos, comedy sketches, political commentary, engineering videos, goofy out of context clips, song mashups, video game footage, and yes very occasionally a dance video.
I see this comment and others like it. It's important to also know where the mindshare is. Where are most average individuals spending most of their internet hours? It is likely not niche-blog.com. TikTok is quickly becoming "the internet" for all intenents and purposes for some people. It's also how some folks get their news, etc.
You don't even have to go that far to shoot down GP's argument. The blogs can be censored just like TikTok, as long as ISPs are incorporated in local states. Whether censorship happens by telling TikTok the rules, or telling the ISPs the rules seems inconsequential to the democritized availability of information.
Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in a way that states can't block, but it seems people are working on that...)
Wouldn’t Starlink just be beholden to the US government and it’s laws ?
As I see it no corporation can be state agnostic unless you want a corporation more powerful then states themselves and you don’t want that either because a corporation is not beholden to the people.
The bigger issue is that you may own your blog content, but if your blog is publishing undesirable opinions, it'll be difficult to find a host even in democracies with freedom of press.
In other words, you may have a legal freedom to express your opinions but nobody is forced to give you the platform to do so. It can become arbitrarily difficult to actually disseminate your opinions at the extreme. E.g. I may vehemently disagree with Trump's opinions, but I have to admit that I feel deeply uncomfortable with private entities controlling whether he gets heard or not.
At the same time, I don't have a good solution if I'm fully honest. Private entities absolutely should have the freedom to determine what they want published on their platforms. Maybe we need (as a society) realize that the social media has become a de-facto utility that needs to be provided as such, regulated as such and taken away from the hands of private entities?
> You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your provider or registrar getting the word out becomes practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little ghetto that nobody reads.
Because blogs and websites aren't getting blocked in Russia or what? The only way content can be a little more resilient against blocking is P2P hosting. But even that can be made hard to access by blocking the on-ramp ( websites, app for the tools to get access to P2P ) or the protocol.
Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing force.
All three of those are centralized authoritative forces. Mediawiki (distinct from Wikipedia), Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Lemmy, Owncast, etc. are better examples of democratizing forces on the internet.
Exercising your freedom would start by not using such a closed platform where you have no control over the content you provide and are subject to arbitrary rules.
Things like retaining ownership/copyright to said content, determining yourself who gets to see it (probably everyone, but maybe not), the ability to delete the content, etc…
The Internet has never been a "democratizing" force. Even now there are hardly any large services and/or platforms that use anything even close to a real _democratic_ process when it comes to dealing with content and moderation.
At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy.
That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.
The old dream is gone, but now that we saw what corporate takeover and commercialization brings, maybe we can reconsider and attempt to save the pieces that we can.
At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.
Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time.
EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).
> EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).
Why? Neo-nazi sites have a long history of getting banned everywhere.
It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion and virtue signaling.
RT was targeted multiple times in the past - this is not exactly a new thing. RT itself was not really censored either (not in the way specific information is outright illegal in Russia for example) - you can still go to the source if you really want to. (See the comment below about domain blocking though) They're just forbidden from using the national broadcast, since that was always controlled by various orgs. In most EU countries you get in trouble for lying in adverts, (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/consumer_laws...) so I'm not surprised Russian-gov-masquerading-as-news got affected too.
In a McLuhan sense, I'm not sure the "message" of the medium of the Internet is one that's compatible with free society, ultimately, once we get past the idealism and look at how it works in practice. Which is... not great.
Their in lies the power of the internet. It exposes who and what wants to control the narrative. This is what needs to be quelled. The need and want for control is toxic and needs to end.
I disagree. The connectivity of the internet still has the ability to shine the light on the darkness. The problem is that, writ large, we don't care. (me included, we just post a grumble online and get back to our lives)
Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.
I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the internet. We are all of us here discussing this matter, after all.
More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous.
World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany.
All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace.
The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win.
By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge.
During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters.
What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is.
The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them.
But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented.
The internet is not to blame.
The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).
It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted.
The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively.
The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now.
If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it.
Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast.
I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.
There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches.
The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far.
I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet.
It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.
People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know.
and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona.
I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network.
There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.
That was a very thoughtful post. You bring up many reasons for why we started https://you.com - to have less junk, more control over one's sources, no ads, less engagement loops that you see on social media and Google, etc.
> Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom.
Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc.
It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies.
Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.
Aggressor nations have the privilege of lying to themselves on the consequences and reality of their wars. The defenders do not get the privilege to ignore that.
Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol.
Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20 years building it.
I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me with 15 years of jail for it.
The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up. (Putin did not.)
Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on. In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now, though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say is there is room in the American system for course correction.
I don't really think if you will do peaceful express your opinion against war in Russia maybe with single protest you will get a real term in prison only a monetary fine and even this is not always the case.
I don't know all cases, but I know people with blank posters was detained and just had a preventive conversation with them and then they were released. And I think in most cases if you don't resist and don't fight with the police, and don't do something very dangerous, then no very serious punishments will be applied to you. Perhaps there are exceptional cases, but they need to be considered especially, perhaps there are special circumstances, . The Western press uses the same techniques as the Russian press often chooses only cases that are beneficial to them and exaggerates their number, so you need to carefully examine different cases and study sources from different sides if possible. I'm not saying that everything in Russia is perfectly democratic and free, I just want to show that everything is not as gloomy as the Western media want to show.
Moreover, some specific individuals have been murdered for speaking about Putin. Anna Politkovskaja and Aleksandr Litvinenko were both murdered for questioning the official narratives on Chechnya.
In Chechnya In these times was real chaos and war. There were there a lot of actors who didn't obey anyone, so, of course, there were a lot of crimes. It took a lot of effort to establish the control of the authorities over what was happening. It's hard to clearly say that Anna Politkovskaha was on Putin's orders. Alexandr Litvinenko was different case. He was an defector and former officer not a peaceful human rights activist maybe I can believe it. But not all his statements and his writings has clearly proofs. For example Julian Assange faces the death penalty in the US. And some even claims that was attempts on him... Many developed countries of the world have a history of some strange crime cases and human rights violations. It seems in real world all is so complicated you even can't easy say that these crimes were not deliberately constructed by hostile agents. Only in case than you have very very accurate evidence sometimes only if you have personally seen them... I would like to live in a truly free and democratic country, but I doubt that such a country can exist in conditions when there are necessarily hostile and unfriendly among many other countries...
> For example Julian Assange faces the death penalty in the US
I really doubt this would happen.
He would probably face a lesser punishment, and you could argue about it being right or wrong, but this doesn't cancel out Russia's terrible track record.
Maybe. I wouldn't say that Russia's terrible track record relative to other countries. But I agree that there have been some bad events that we should strive to prevent in the future.
Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did, and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.)
From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn.
The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations.
Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.
My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Russia was in the process of working with them to put nukes in Tijuana I wonder if the US would sit idly by? Meanwhile was have Condoleezza Rice without a hint of irony on the news agreeing that invading a sovereign country is a war crime (does Iraq ring a bell?)
I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin.
My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1.
Your perspective is the same tired idea that the US is the only country that controls world foreign policy and everyone else just plays along. What of the Ukrainian people?
Not to mention that leading up to this transition of power we backed a violent coup of their democratically elected government in 2014.
What of the Ukrainian people in Eastern Ukraine who have been getting bombed for 7 years in a civil war? The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
I wouldn't say this idea is tired at all, it's the opposite, it's banned and unspoken on corporate media that serves as the mouthpiece for the US government and arms industry.
There was a major decrease in ceasefire violations in 2020 and 2021. Looks like to Russia that sounded like it's time to escalate and fix "the problem" whatever that is, by starting a major war and invading straight to Kyiv of all places. I'm sure poor people of Donbas will benefit greatly from a major escalation caused by Russia, that's going to reverse all this. Whole year of reported civilian casualties by OSCE now happen in a day.
> The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
Why OSCE SMM observations of agreement violating weapons are consistenly much higher in the separatist areas, by a large margin? (80/20 or so)
> There was a major decrease in ceasefire violations in 2020 and 2021
Yeah, according to your own linked report there were only "93,902 ceasefire violations" in 2021 with the violations clearly growing by the end of report period. I don't know anything about the credibility of this report, but your own evidence refutes your argument.
>> he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him
Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
It's probably good that Twitter is banned over here at the moment. Overnight, my feed filled up with a nasty mix of ethnic cleansing and "collective guilt" calls coming from Ukraine in response to the massacre. All directed at people who've been on their side by all legal means they have available. I don't know how to react to that.
On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok