China's New Wave of Internet Censorship

[Andrewkar]

So, this is huge. I'm just hoping this disease IMHO won't spread to other countries. In my opinion any gov control over freedom of speech is too much. Quote from potential supporter who would like to ses law like this implemented in USA:

Freedom of speech is a US citizen right. If you anonymize yourself, there's no guarantee that a legally permitted citizen is the one exercising that right. Strange as it sounds, I agree with China's law, though maybe not their real underlying reason. The same should be done here. If you're going to excercize your right to freedom of speech, you should be required to have your name identified and displayed next to the words. A little resonsibility to one's own words might sober their cavalier attitude toward others. My bet is that a lot of hate speech and bullying would disappear under that provision of exercising that citizen right. It's not such a far out idea either. Facebook mandates accurate identity for posting...

What are your thoughts? Would law like this change your daily work if it was forced in your country also?

 

[GrandMaster]

If you're going to excercize your right to freedom of speech,

That's not a US citizen. That's a troll. No US born citizen would write or even mistakenly write "exercise" with a Z- even in a typo. It's definitely a troll that didn't catch their error when proof-reading cause it looks natural to them.

 

[Ryuzaki]

That's most definitely coming. You can see companies competing towards a single sign-on without overtly saying it because it's sinister but it is inevitably coming. I don't mean this to be political nor to open a political discussion, but it's a technological & sociological one that deserves context.

We're moving to increased globalization and high-tech, which is creating unique opportunities for bad power players to grab more control. Orwell laid it out completely with the intentions of us having no privacy or anonymity or control in our consumption or freedom of expression, to the point where I'm not sure if he warned us or gave them the idea. Huxley laid it out completely that when the powers that be lose control over the flow of information (thanks to the internet), the next step would flooding us with too much info to handle, specifically loads of B.S.

That's what this #FakeNews epidemic is. Right before Obama left office he started setting the stage for all of this. He "modernized" the Smith-Mundt Act, with an act of double-speak (which we'll be seeing a lot of, right out of Orwellian fiction).

To amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences, and for other purposes.

What that says is, propaganda that was intended to be used on other countries can now be used domestically on the US's own citizens. They called it "counter-propaganda". Then you have Bezo's buying up the Washington Post and taking $600 milly from the CIA for Operation Mockingbird propaganda, and there's all of the obvious other players in the game as well, with CNN being the worst offenders.

Obama also finished off the deal with ICANN (source on CNET):

Under a plan that's been in the works for years, the US Department of Commerce shuttled control of the DNS to a nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), whose multiple stakeholders include technical experts, as well as representatives of governments and businesses.

Andrewkar, it's already in the US, it's just slowly being tested. They're careful about shifting the Overton Window slowly instead of immediately, because you can dodge a lot of resistance. Senator Ted Cruz said the exact same thing you're talking about:

"When ICANN escapes from [US] government authority, ICANN escapes from having to worry about the First Amendment, from having to worry about protecting your rights or my rights."

They insisted nobody had anything to worry about, but this past week or so ICANN has been yanking every domain a certain hate group keeps trying to use, they just keep changing extensions. While nobody wants them to be a hate group, the danger of changing the law to silence the opposition is that those very same laws are guaranteed to be used on you next.

So we already are being flooded with propaganda and being censored, and Silicon Valley is doing some weird stuff to help shift the Overton Window of what amount of censorship is acceptable or not, and which topics aren't appropriate for the public domain or not.

Then of course you have the saga of the NSA and the other Five Eyes agencies that people swore you were an insane nut job for talking about in the 80's and 90's. Now it's just accepted as a part of life. It went like this:

• We can't and wouldn't spy on you. We don't even have the tech.
• Just kidding, we've been had the tech, but we aren't using it.
• Well, the Patriot Act (double speak name) says we can choose a target to spy on to keep you safe.
• I know we said we'd choose a target to watch, but it's easier just to watch everyone and collect all data and analyze it later if needed. We'll never unmask anyone without a warrant (tying data to an identity).
• Just kidding! We unmasked all of our political opponents.

It's a slippery slope. Do you think it's a coincidence that stuff like the Amazon Echo and these weird little cylinders that serve no purpose are being marketed hard right now? Or could it be that they want you to willingly place surveillance in your house? "It's just marketing and retargeting."

Like it or not, fear it or not, it's already here. And if it's not the government doing it, we do it to ourselves with upvotes and likes and other internet points that begin to shape acceptable behavior, and downvotes and angry emoticons punishing dissenting behavior.

China actually released a social gamification system called Sesame Credit that gives you incentives and punishments for being a "good citizen." It's optional right now but they're talking about mandatory usage by 2020. It's sinister to the point where it can affect your ability to get a loan, get a passport, have real life friends (if you have a low score you can drag theirs down), get a job, etc. It's like an episode straight out of Black Mirror.

All that weird dystopia stuff is coming true, minus the post-apocalyptic parts (so far). We're transcending the need, or reasonableness, of war in meat-space so now the war is being waged on our minds. Phillip K. Dick had a lot to tell us about "thought crimes" too. They're already tossing people in jail in the UK for "wrong-speak" on Twitter and the like.

The other problem with letting everything hinge on "content and meta-data" is that both can be faked easily, and now we're talking about blackmail exploding by the enforcers.

Yeah, freedom of speech is important, because open discourse without any other concern for anything but the information is what pushes humanity forward. Look at the physics community right now. They used the peer-review process to bully people and form a consensus in order to control the grant money, and now we haven't made much progress at all for decades when it comes to sub-quantum work. They've been harping on the non-scientific string theory all this time and will continue to do so because it's where the money is at because there are no other choices because they choked out the opposition. And we all suffer for that. Meanwhile other breakthroughs end up being sucked out of the patent office and shuttled into black budget projects for military applications that we hope will never see the light of day.

I think for me, as far as having a name attached to every comment, if I could put a business name next to it that'd be fine. Ponying up for LLC's isn't a big deal. But if I had to peg my name next to each comment, I'd simply stop commenting. Because when there's no name, there's no target. When there is a name, there's a target that sick people feel impelled to go after. Just like case study sites. People want to hunt them down simply because there's a thread about them, but they don't worry about the billion other sites out there. It would definitely impact the way I and others would interact in the community, which hurts all of us.