As time passes on; I get happier that I know the existence of FOSS social media (and the fediverse).
Old enough to remember how the west derided Chinese firewall.
But this is different! It’s privatised, which signifies American freedom!
That’s right as long as it’s the megacorporations and not the government deciding what you’re allowed to see then everything’s fine.
It’s absolutely better, after all you can just not use reddit. What are chinese people supposed to do?
It’s absolutely not better because the government is accountable to the public to at least some extent. Meanwhile, private entities are by definition not accountable to anyone but their owners. When all your media is owned by a handful of megacorps then it’s far worse than having media owned by the government.
Er… it is different. The Chinese firewall also includes massive censorship of what can be said internally, and it’s far beyond whether links can be shared and discussed.
What do you mean by “what can be said internally”?
Doesn’t the free market Great Firewall of USA do that? There are lists of topics that, if you express support for them, will get you automatically banned from facebook etc. Social media sites sell information about your activities to data brokers who in turn sell services that help decide what jobs or loans are available to you. Reddit blocking an entire ccTLD is pretty over-the-top but demands for more censorship have been in vogue in the USA since 2016.
Actually not 2016, censorship trend increased when GamerGate happened. Things went off the cliff on the internet ever since, of course accelerated by the specific kind of people Trump in USA and India’s Jio mobile internet democratisation mobilised.
Okay, but there’s a difference between removing solicitations to join ISIS and shutting down every criticism of Xi Jinping. Facebook is also being a lot more transparent here about its actions. China can be incredibly opaque from my understanding, so there is a significant degree of self-censorship.
Maybe its opaque to you because you dont speak Chinese. Why would they bother to publish the details in English?
It’s not that rules are entirely unpublished. It’s that the laws that exist are so vague and broad that it’s opaque what rights you actually have. Case in point: it is unlawful to “injure the reputation of state organs”. Uh… okay. So I can’t bad mouth the reliability of state media while in China? Well they don’t exactly say, but that seems a safe inference. This has historically been a complaint of companies, that they don’t know where the boundaries are so they have to be extra conservative with restrictions.
Its unclear for you because that concept doesnt exist in your country, and the translation is likely missing some of the nuance. For someone who grew up and went to school in China, its probably pretty clear.
I’m not judging what you’re saying, but Facebook is anything but transparent.
Yeah, I’m talking comparisons more. Transparency around moderation is hard, even with the most well intended moderators. I moderate for a subreddit with a little over 250k subscribers and seven moderators. We try to be consistent and transparent in what the rules are, how they are interpreted, and how we came to conclusions. Some unevenness is inevitable in what is a very human judgement (was this rule broken?) and there are some things we have to keep secret to avoid people working the system. I suspect that Facebook runs into the same issues and more, but at a larger scale.
Meanwhile, China seems like it just doesn’t particularly give a fuck. Like, The Epoch Times knows exactly why they’re blocked, but otherwise it might be kind of a crap shot. And from what I’ve heard, this means the authorities could show up at your offices if you’re less than diligent about censoring your users according to the unwritten rules. So companies do a little extra censoring… just in case.
I’m expecting that more Russian users will switch to the Fediverse.
Unfortunately, I kind of doubt it. There are plenty of closed Russian platforms.
This is pure insanity. Cold War stuff.
The 2nd Cold war begun some years ago, it just gone (a little) hot recently
Considering the magnitude of what has happened - a full fledged invasion of a sovereign country - I’m more impressed that this shows no signs or true escalation beyond some bluster from Putin. I just hope it remains contained and is resolved soon. Unfortunately, that’s going to be cold comfort to the people whose lives are now bombed out apartment buildings.
Yes because there has never been an invasion of a sovereign country in this century. Certainly not in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen or Iraq.
Half of those (Libya and Yemen) were as much an intervention in the outbreak of a civil war as anything else. Afghanistan… the Taliban was harboring terrorists who had just delivered a devastating strike on US civilians. Forgive me if I dismiss that one. I agree on Iraq. Sometimes I compare Bush to Trump and think “maybe Bush wasn’t so bad”, but then I remember the Iraq war. Bush lied, people died.
But this war was not necessary and the area was stable before Putin barged in. That’s the difference.
Your comment would make sense if u.s. propaganda represented reality, but it doesnt. The 9/11 terrorists were all from saudi arabia, but that country was never attacked. And Ukraine was not stable, it waged a war and genocide on its own population in Donbass since 2014.
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Oh yes, comparing similar things is insert buzzword here.
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Ukraine stopped being sovereign in 2014. Check the Nuland-Pyatt leaked call, and for more context the relationship between Kolomoisky and Zelensky, and how the democratically elected Yanukovich was forced to flee.
I read through that transcript. There’s no hint that the US has any role more than helping the democratically elected leaders to come to an agreement on forming a government. And they were apparently working to freeze the Svoboda party, which has been accused of Nazi ties, out of the political process. Meanwhile, they’re now being invaded by a man who hasn’t experienced a free and fair election in what, two decades?
Then how is Svoboda and Right Sektor active and thriving now? Nazi Black Sun medal soldiers must be also a coincidence, right?
Because Ukraine is a sovereign state and people will vote in ways that the US wishes they wouldn’t.
And Ukraine stopped being a sovereign state since 2014. See, you are using circular loop logic now.
The war is being used as an excuse to let out all the pent up racism against Russian people. It’s the same thing as what happened to Japanese-Americans during WWII.
Reddit didn’t approve many of my posts anyway. You can’t post sci-hub links on Reddit, nor Springer links. And sometimes communities don’t even give a reason why your post was not approved/published.
This was to be expected.
This is dead simple to bypass BTW. Just load the webpage through a site like archive.org.
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That’s just as easy to bypass with the same strategy though.
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And they said Trump would raise a wall. This is the biggest wall we’re getting for a long time - it’s just a wall around the first world, and me, as a third world citizen, am not complaining. I welcome it.
‘It’s going to be a big, fat, beautiful wall!’, as Trump said. Give it to me.
what
All these sanctions imposed to Russia will extend to countries who support Russia. And this will extend to the rest of the world basically, since it involves China. A big fracture entails. Third world countries not necessarily will take a stand to either side, but will definitely be excluded from what would be an opening on the first world.
A wall around the first world.
