If only it were that easy. For me as a parent, my approach is to implement a "Great personal firewall" - that is, internet restrictions that decrease over time as they mature, and starting with essentially zero access. Unfortunately, it's probably doomed to fail as other kids their age (5 + 7) and in their peer groups are already walking around with smartphones.
To put it bluntly, too many parents are too unenaged and lazy (or self-centered).
Now it's just outright forbidden to have anything with a chat. And no Internet.
The problem is that other 10 year old have mobiles, free PC access, etc, so there constant peer pressure.
At home measures are at best a delay, not a fix. What you also have to do is actually communicate with your child. If you're strict about what they can and cannot do on the internet, they will feel shame for doing it anyway, which may also mean they would be too ashamed to talk to their parents if for example they are getting groomed online.
I'm sorry, but if you're threat model is your kid getting a fucking burner phone, I don't know what to tell you.
Even this law won't fix it! Why, couldnt your kid just save up and buy a plane ticket to the US?? Oh no .. we need a global law don't we?
Or, maybe, we throw away that thinking and acknowledge that the problem is not that big and solving 99% of it is MORE than good enough.
Your kid is way more likely to die in a car wreck. Focus on that or something.
Kids go to school, have lessons, right ? And few minutes breaks between lessons ? How that parents want to censorship what kids talk about ? Not to mention phones use. And why exactly ?
Thing is as it always is: parents make fundamens in culture/world view eg via their views and religion they subscribe. And then society and reality takes over. What society you have ?
I don't remember this in my late 90s LAN chats.
I tried setting up parental controls on Fortnite and it was a nightmare, having threats multiple accounts with multiple providers, it felt very much designed to force people to go “ahh forget it”.
They do; in the UK, if you want to have access to porn, you need to tell your ISP and they will unblock it.
Of course, that's a game of whack-a-mole because you can render porn in Minecraft servers or join one of many communities on Whatsapp or Discord if needs be. It mainly blocks the well-known bigger porn sites.
The conclusion is, it's a service problem, not a howto-block problem
kid-friendly content is under supplied and often bad maintained.
To quote GabeN: Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
But it's not forbidden or hidden away, so kids aren't curious about it.
Yes, but the problem is, many (if not most) of those content or services were created by adults and dispised by kids.
pick one your kid's most interested topic, are there enough kid-friendly content/services that fulfills all the needs?
My oldest girl is 5. She's already very aware that other kids in her class have access to tablets and phones. How on earth do I responsibly explain to her the dangers? I have enough trouble asking her to get dressed and keep her nappy dry at night.
I say "I consider", because skills self-evidently essential to a good life (emotional regulation, focus and attention span, ability to read other people's emotional states, effective communication, physical skills) are increasingly not generally considered that way.
By who, and for who? My kids (ages 5+7) watch significantly less TV than their peers (as well as currently almost zero internet access), and are frequently complimented on their command of vocabulary and ability to express themselves.
>And if we are talking about the internet in general and not just twitter/tiktok, then its largely NOT doomscrolling and ragebait.
By amount of time that people spend on the internet, it is mostly doomscrolling and ragebait. If only we could take that part of it away.
ages 0-6, increased vocabulary with increased screen time https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13927
> My kids (ages 5+7) watch significantly less TV than their peers (as well as currently almost zero internet access), and are frequently complimented on their command of vocabulary and ability to express themselves.
Compliments are nice I suppose, but theyre a poor metric when regarding vocabulary size.
> By amount of time that people spend on the internet, it is mostly doomscrolling and ragebait. If only we could take that part of it away.
"most" people I assume doesnt include you? Youre too smart to fall for it, obviously.
>theyre a poor metric when regarding vocabulary size.
I'm talking about school reports, among other things.
>"most" people I assume doesnt include you? Youre too smart to fall for it, obviously.
It's something I struggle with daily, and have put a lot of thought into what I want from my use of online technology. Eg, I don't have a smartphone. How can a kid be expected to make good choices if I can't?
Follow the science bud. The science is telling you to give them screentime
>I'm talking about school reports, among other things.
well yeah, you are now.
> It's something I struggle with daily,
this actually explains a lot
1. Educate children about bad actors and scams. (We already do this in off-line contexts.)
2. Use available tools to limit exposure. Without this children will run into such content even when not seeking it. As demonstrated with Tiktok seemingly sending new accounts to sexualised content,(1) and Google/Meta's pathetic ad controls.
3. Be firm about when is the right age to have their own phone. There is zero possibility that they'll be able to have one secretly without a responsible parent discovering it.
4. Schools should not permit phone use during school time (enforced in numerous regions already.)
5. If governments have particular issues with websites, they can use their existing powers to block or limit access. While this is "whack-a-mole", the idea of asking each offshore offending website to comply is also "whack-a-mole" and a longer path to the intended goal.
6. Don't make the EU's "cookies" mistake. E.g. If the goal is to block tracking, then outlaw tracking, do not enact proxy rules that serve only as creative challenges to keep the status quo.
and the big one:
7. Parents must accept that their children will be exposed at some level, and need to be actively involved in the lives of their children so they can answer questions. This also means parenting in a way that doesn't condemn the child needlessly - condemnation is a sure strategy to ensure that the child won't approach their parents for help or with their questions.
Also some tips:
1. Set an example on appropriate use of social media. Doom scrolling on Tiktok and instagram in front of children is setting a bad example. Some housekeeping on personal behaviours will have a run on effect.
2. If they have social media accounts the algorithm is at some point going to recommend them to you. Be vigilant, but also handle the situation appropriately, jumping to condemnation just makes the child better at hiding their activity.
3. Don't post photos of your children online. It's not just an invasion of their privacy, but pedophile groups are known to collect, categorise and share even seemingly benign photos.
1. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/tikto...
i know, freedom of speech, it's your money and not mine, etc.
how does this relate to what i said? i get the "we're a free platform where everyone can do everything and no one is responsible for anything", just a cheap excuse from my POV considering the unhinged, doxxy culture on there. sure, there are cute boards, nice. i am talking about the inhumane, unhinged slurry of shit.
"Sure my neighbour has a couple of cadavres in his cellar, but have you seen the pretty flowers on his balcony?"
but per usual you can't criticize 4chan in the slightest without its warriors appearing to defend it. i get it. 4chan did and does cool stuff. it also does absolutely disgusting things, surprisingly this always gets dismissed as 'it's only the couple of rogue boards which are crazy'.
i agree :)
> people buy their blue checkmarks there all the time
sadly, yes.
maybe this is my bias, could very well be. maybe i should give it a 10th chance and browse the more useful boards.
i guess /g/ would be a start, do you have other recommendations? i mean i'm open to change my mind. for me 4chan stands for alt-right pipelines, spreading far-right ideology online etc., so i just really have a sour taste in my mouth when thinking about it.
That certainly used to be the case pre-2012. All the former hactivists have long since left. marriage, kids, real life, etc... Now it's mostly handfuls of edgy boys on cell phones in school and 4chan-GPT creating and responding to threads. I wish I were wrong. The site went mostly dead for about two weeks when USAID was defunded and had to shift funding sources then all the usual re-re-re-re-re-posted topics in /g/ returned. Some of them are on this site too ... inb4 they reply. Adding to this now the general public have the real names, IP addresses and locations of all the moderators so they are less likely to participate in doxxing.
There was a quote, "4chan is where smart people go to act stupid, facebook/reddit is where stupid people go to act smart". That probably needs to be updated.
mfw I'm in a lying competition and my opponent is Bender
That would seem to be least intrusive option.
Using the internet in the UK/EU is such a horrible experience, every cookie pop-up is a reminder how badly thought out these rules are.
Edit: also something like this needs deep OS integration.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
A client checking for a header is more than sufficient to block small children from seeing porn and that is 100% more than we have today. No extra memory or CPU required important on tablets or phones handed to children. No privacy invasion by daemons or other third parties.
Kid: "Mommie they said go to pornhub.com for games but it ask for password"
Mom: "Dumb trolls are picking on you, I will deal with them."
Also remember that the pop-up is an industry choice, the rules only mandate that a user should opt in, not how. No laws mandate the cookie banners, no regulations say they should be obnoxious.
What's to stop that same kid to buy a porno dvd? Or to download a torrent of a porno? Or a porn magazine?
There's no need, that's already the case.
All phones (the network account attached to the SIM actually, not the phone itself) comes with a content filter enabled by default in the UK, adult or not.
Neither resident nor frequent visitor to the UK, so I'm behind the times when I ask: I beg your fucking pardon?
Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror, ideally via a Wikipedia article on the law or gentleman's agreement amongst the carriers?
Furthermore, is this more common than I assume, and I simply don't notice because I don't stray too far from the mainstream?
Yep, my thoughts exactly when I first encountered it.
> Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror
I tried to look something up but it seems the articles and news about the (new) Online Safety Act has taken over all of the search results (and it's not something I want to search too hard at work). I even asked an LLM but it couldn't provide sources and simply said it was "voluntary" and "industry standard". The rest of its output was drowned in the new Online Safety Act.
I suppose thanks to the OSA the old system is now history.
All the routers also come with filtering settings as well and ISPs ship with the filtering on by default, since that is the law and has been for several decades.
This policy was pushed by David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-porn...
White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.
Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.
That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.
There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.
* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.
The regex are: (^|\.)youtubei\.googleapis\.com$ (^|\.)ytstatic\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube-ui\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.com$ (^|\.)googlevideo\.com$
You can create groups and assign devices to them, and assign the block rules only to certain groups.
The only annoyance with this is that it blocks logging into Google since they redirect to YouTube to set a login cookie as part of the Google login process. If you're already logged into Google though, everything works as normal, and you can always disable pihole for five minutes if for some reason you got logged out and need to log back in.
Technical cookies don't require any consent so every time you see a cookie banner the website owner wants to gather more data about you than necessary. Furthermore, these rules don't require cookie banners, it's what the industry has chosen as the way to get consent to track their users.
Check the banner next time, you'll see how many “partners” they do sell your data to.
When purchasing an internet-enabled device the UK could regulate that large retailers must ask if the device is to be used by an under 18 year old. If they say yes, then they could ship with filters enabled. They could also regulate that all internet-enabled devices which could be sold to children should support child filters.
If we did this then whether or not a child views NSFW material it will be on the parent, instead of the current situation where whether a child can view NSFW material online depends on the age verification techniques of Chinese companies like TikTok or American companies like 4chan.
All mobile network connections already come with content filters enabled in the UK, adult or not, and has to be explicitly disabled.
Like you can configure your browser to do whatever you want with cookies - blocking them all, blocking only third party ones, etc. - there is no need for government regulation here.
But the legislators are completely tech illiterate and even the general public supports more interference and regulation.
The question a user should ask is why is this website collecting my data. Marketing and adtech companies are trying to shift this question to why is the EU making websites worse.
> there is no need for government regulation here
You don't need to care about this if you respect users' privacy in the same way you don't need to care about waste water regulation when you don't pump waste into rivers.
I'd welcome a ramp-up of the legislation: outlaw the kind of tracking that needs the banners currently outright. I'm sure a lot of websites would just geo-block EU as a result (like how some did because of GDPR), but I bet the EU-compliant visitor tracking solutions would suddenly skyrocket, and overall, nothing of value would be lost, neither for the users, nor for the website administrators.
It’s not possible to rely on browser controls as-is, because they do not differentiate between necessary and optional cookies.
Browser vendors could agree standards and implement them, exposing these to users and advertisers in a friendly way.
But they haven’t shown any interest in doing this.
I wonder why?
That's what the advertising-dependent implementers who deliberately made it shittier than necessary (stuff like "you have to decline each of our 847 ad partners individually") want you to think, at least. It's mostly malicious compliance.
What do you mean? Parents can easily set this up before they give them to their children.
I don't see anything wrong here: Sure, Ofcom can have the legal authority to regulate online safety worldwide. It's just that this... legal authority... isn't quite enforceable outside the UK jurisdiction. How unfortunate!
They can say whatever they want, but the UK can't conduct an extra-territorial police action in france. They can bar subject from traveling to france instead. The onus is on the UK.
I'll concede that it's not terribly far fetched. If the french entity produced a good that is illegal in the UK put it in the post to be delivered to the UK, then we have something like an analog to producing HTML in one place and displaying elsewhere.
However, the thing about sovereignty is that you don't have it if you can't enforce it.
NZ agreed to cooperate with the US request. That made all the difference. If the US agrees to allow UK to proceed, then that's trouble for 4chan.
How exactly do they do that? Do they have peering agreements with UK-based ISPs?
This has become far too normalized due to decades of bad behavior by the US, and it’s going to come back to bite us as US power declines. Just wait until 30 years from now when you can’t safely visit anywhere in the far East because you made a subversive comment about China. Although I’m sure the same people will hypocritically wail and gnash their teeth about the laws made by those people, when of course our extraterritorial laws are just fine.
This has been happening long before the US started doing it.
If anything, it's normalized in the US because of the bad behavior prior to the US doing it. China's a great example. What does brutally crushing dissent internally and abroad without even a facade of a single care about human rights get you? Well, in their case, damn near superpower status. Been that way since at the very least Nixon's administration.
The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy". The concern for human rights shown since the end of WWII in the West (particularly the US) is an exception, not norm, in history.
> UK bans selling cocaine in the UK and tries going after a Colombian cocaine dealer in Columbia.
(I'll less-neutrally note that this is also absurd, and probably criminal.)
And gambling, too. Remember in 2013 when all those celebrities got busted for gambling in Macao?
> After getting caught gambling illegally, Shinhwa’s Andy, Boom and Yang Se Hyung received their punishments.
> On November 28, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Andy, Boom, and Yang Se Hyung to monetary penalties. Andy and Boom must pay 5,000,000 won, while Yang Se Hyung will pay 3,000,000 won.
> The fines were dependent on how much money each person bet. Andy spent 44,000,000 won, Boom 33,000,000 won, and Yang Se Hyung 26,000,000 won.
> The three are all currently pulled out of all schedules and self-reflecting on their actions.
> Meanwhile, Lee Su Geun, Tak Jae Hoon, and Tony An are waiting for their first trial to take place on December 6. They bet more than several hundred million won.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140215040022/http://mwave.inte...
Many entities assert extraterritorial jurisdiction [0] for a broad range of activities. The critical question is if the offense would be categorized under an existing extradition treaty's list [1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction
Kiwifarms stopped serving UK IPs, not because of fear of enforcement but rather because they don't anyone British jailed. The UK landing page straight up says 'use Tor'.
That's exactly what anyone wanting to save face would say though.
> they don't anyone British jailed. The UK landing page straight up says 'use Tor'.
There's a contradiction here: if you want to protect British citizens from being jailed for accessing a website then you should tell them not to use your website, not “use an alternative way to connect", because that will still get people to jail if they get caught by other means (I don't think you can, in fact be jailed for accessing a website in the UK in the first place).
It also continues like this:
> This does not mean that the Act extends to all use of in-scope services globally. […] “The duties extend only to the design, operation and use of the service in the UK and, for duties expressed to apply in relation to ‘users’, as it affects the UK users of the service”
Wouldn't this mean that the Act only applies to services explicitly design/targeting UK users/visitors? So if you're building a general service for no particular residents/citizens, the Act doesn't apply to you? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Clearly not considering that there's nothing in 4chan that would make it explicitly targeted towards the UK. Unless Ofcom is saying something and doing the opposite.
Presumably if the latter, one may express their support of the flag of their choice; or indicate their heritage; or any number of other reasons.
If the former, and considering the existence of a .uk TLD, they probably are considered to be “targeting” that market.
It explicitly says that 7% of their users are coming from UK. If UK blocks them, they will loose noticeable part of advertising revenue. If there was no money at stake, they could just ignore Ofcom and sleep well. But they appear to be very agitated about the fact that they may loose their second biggest market.
Honestly, I don’t understand anyone on 4chan side here: they are de facto in UK jurisdiction because they earn money from that user base, so either they comply or they leave. All of this freedom-of-speech and US lawsuit hype is just a distraction circus.
Lots of laws are stupid. If you think they're stupid, you're allowed to try to fight them.
This is important because if it was advertisers, it would be much easier for UK to have actual power over them, since the UK business actually would be under UK jurisdiction.
It doesn’t matter. They loose the audience - they loose advertising revenue. The only difference is that UK cannot seize the money to collect the fine (the fine now is the price of the return ticket), but the fine wasn’t big anyway and complete loss of the market has bigger economic consequences. UK doesn’t have power over US corporation, but they have power over their distribution channel and they have full sovereign right to exercise that power.
The difference is significant.
> What should I do if there is confidential information in my response?
> You must provide all the information requested, even if you consider that the information, or any part of it, is confidential (for example, because of its commercial sensitivity).
> If you consider that any of the information you are required to provide is confidential, you should clearly identify the relevant information and explain in writing your reasons for considering it confidential (for example, the reasons why you consider disclosure of the information will seriously and prejudicially affect the interests of your business, a third party or the private affairs of an individual. You may find it helpful to do this in a separate document marked ‘confidential information’
> Ofcom will take into account any claims that information should be considered confidential. However, it is for Ofcom to decide what is or is not confidential, taking into account any relevant common law and statutory definitions. We do not accept unjustified or unsubstantiated claims of confidentiality. Blanket claims of confidentiality covering entire documents or types of information are also unhelpful and will rarely be accepted. For example, we would expect stakeholders to consider whether the fact of the document’s existence or particular elements of the document (e.g. its title or metadata such as to/from/date/subject or other specific content) are not confidential. You should therefore identify specific words, numbers, phrases or pieces of information you consider to be confidential. You may also find it helpful to categorise your explanations as Category A, Category B etc
> Any confidential information provided to Ofcom is subject to restrictions on its further disclosure under the common law of confidence. In many cases, information provided to Ofcom is also subject to statutory restrictions relating to the disclosure of that information (regardless of whether that information is confidential information). For this reason, we do not generally consider it necessary to sign non-disclosure agreements. Our general approach to the disclosure of information is set out below.
> For the avoidance of doubt, you are not required to provide information that is legally privileged and you can redact specific parts of documents that are legally privileged. However, where you withhold information on the basis that it is privileged you should provide Ofcom with a summary of the nature of the information and an explanation of why you consider it to be privileged. Please note that just because an email is sent to or from a legal adviser does not mean it is necessarily a legally privileged communication. Further information is available in paragraph 3.18 of our Online Safety Information Powers Guidance.
So ofcom's position is:
We want your data, you will give us your data, the GDPR does not apply to you, and if it does, we will decide whether it does. You must explain yourself to us. You must not redact anything. Even if you think you can redact anything (you know, because GDPR) you cannot redact anything. The GDPR and data protection laws do not apply because we have said so. You are required to break confidentiality agreements. We will not sign an NDA because we do not need to and we will not justify ourselves to you in any way shape or form.
We are the UK, and therefore, because we asked you to, you will comply with our every demand, whim and whimper. Otherwise we will continue to send strongly worded emails.
And fine you. And block you. Because that's the only thing we can do. And you best not advertise VPN's or we'll...Send another sternly worded email!
Good job UK!
(I cannot see how that paragraph is in any way legal, it must break the EU/UK's data protection laws in trying to compel disclosure of third party data. I cannot see any court in the UK ever upholding that paragraph if legally challenged as it's way above Ofcom's remit to be demanding confidential data. In any case, they should absolutely be required to sign NDA's)
This generalises very well for all Government. Shame we're a couple of generations into education being about producing pliant workers over independent, thinking human beings.
The government shouldn't be dropping things. It should have the power to pick those things up in the first place.
It's like a fishing stop. Even if you get off with a warning the whole interaction just shouldn't have happened.
???
Do you really believe that?
We must resist and do everything we can to shrink government power and grow our personal rights and freedoms.
In one of the more enlightened things Elon has done in the last few years, he fought back, and he won.
Interestingly, here in AU, there was a storm of media outrage at the time, saying all kinds of nasty things about Musk, making all kinds of assertions about how he was super arrogant and wrong to insist on upholding american's freedom of speech, with no attempt to justify why. It was almost like we were just expected to assume that AU law applies everywhere on earth.
Here's a fun sample of a totally unbiased article from the time: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-20/elon-musk-reacts-to-e...
Strangely, when the court order wasn't upheld because AU laws don't actually apply outside our country, and the gubmint that was so outraged and "ready to take him on" lost badly on every point, there was no huge storm of media coverage about that.
Just because UK internet users are able to establish a network connection to 4chan’s server via ISP peering agreements does not mean 4chan are subject to UK law.
Suppose North Korea sends you a letter demanding that you take down a blog post joking about Kim Jong-un being chubby, because that's illegal in North Korea. Do you feel obligated to comply with that demand? After all, your blog could possibly be read by someone in North Korea.
I don't have anything against the UK. They've been our good buddies since a spat we had a couple hundred years ago. But I feel every bit as obligated to follow UK law as to obey North Korean law, which is to say, not at all.
Ultimately all of these sorts of regulations rely on people feeling the need to comply. 4chan feels no needs, least of all to comply.
It's the immovable object of online forums. It has not encountered a true unstoppable force. I doubt it ever will.
If they want it "gone" they'll have to both block it at the infrastructure level leading into the country and keep people from using internet infrastructure that isn't subject to these blocks from within the UK. That's... not really possible.
But I can see how this argument would make sense in the retarded mind of a lawyer. The first amendment doesn't give people rights: people already have those rights. Instead, the first amendment constrains the power of the US government to infringe upon those rights. It doesn't constrain the power of any other government.
Says who? Prove it. Go to Russia and say something bad about the government and see how well this right you think you magically get holds up.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Why would an US constitution amendment have any effect in Russia?
https://freespeechunion.org/us-threatens-uk-officials-over-f...
1. Tell 4chan or its registrar l to take down .co.uk urls (maybe?)
2. Tell UK ISPs to ban UK visitors from viewing 4chan
Hell look at HN and literally anywhere
When was the last time anyone visited an unmoderated usenet group?
ridruejo•9h ago
cdfsdsadsa•9h ago
Edit: In a nutshell - almost every other transfer of goods and services across national borders is subject to quality standards. Why do we give a pass to a system that allows deep, individualised access to people's personal lives and mental processes?
probably_wrong•8h ago
I don't want the government to decide which thoughts I can access and which ones I can't, but I also understand that allowing a foreign power (let's say Russia, although "the US" works just as fine) to freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns without any recourse doesn't look good either. And while I agree with "when in doubt aim for the option with more freedom", I can understand those who share your position.
oytis•6h ago
cdfsdsadsa•5h ago
Step 1 is reduce your attack surface :) As a second point, democracies are propaganda campaigns - it's a feature, not a bug.
I believe that national cultural and societal norms play a key part in self-regulation. I think it's too much to ask for those balancing forces to work as effectively without first turning down the firehose.
oytis•5h ago
By closing up we defend us from some threats, but open gates wide for others. Foreign actors compete against much stronger domestic media machines and as you mentioned have to operate in foreign cultural environments. Gaining true influence also always involves financial flows, not just propaganda campaigns, so it is sure possible to mitigate these threats without closing information flow.
Consider the opposite threat of democracies being undermined from within. If some internal "threat actor" gets control of the executive branch and of the media and also can prevent information flow from the outside, very little can be done against it.
I think it is critical to keep in mind this second possibility even when the first threat seems more urgent.
cdfsdsadsa•3h ago
Propaganda is not necessarily to gain influence or money. Eg: Country x just wants to mess with people's heads and turn them on each other to weaken a rival country. Or: Country y runs a crafted propaganda campaign against a rival. As a result, some sector of its own economy starts doing better at the expense of its rival.
>If some internal "threat actor" gets control of the executive branch and of the media and also can prevent information flow from the outside, very little can be done against it.
I understand the scenario (it's far from new), but that's what the design of any particular democracy is supposed to minimise. Term limits, separation of government powers, etc.
cdfsdsadsa•6h ago
That would be an interesting discussion in itself, but even so - accessing material in isolation over the internet removes all of the benefits of cultural and community self-regulation.
>freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns
I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost.
iamnothere•4h ago
This is a very fancy way of saying “censorship”.
> I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost.
If the open, unfettered exchange of culture and ideas is such a threat to our system then we deserve to lose. If my only option is to be stuck in a system that enforces ideological conformity on its subjects, then I’d rather it be the Chinese system. At least it’s not so dysfunctional!
If we are receiving all of the downsides of a liberal democracy without the benefits, what’s the point anymore?
ants_everywhere•48m ago
The question is: is there a defense against this?
Your answer currently is there is no defense because creating an illusion of unanimous ideological conformity counts as an exchange of ideas and that exchange must not be hindered.
The debate is over whether the right to conduct Sybil attacks is more precious than the right to freedom of thought. The question is vastly harder than many people in this thread seem to believe.
My personal take is that the right to freedom of thought is more fundamental and that the value of freedom of speech is via its support for freedom of thought.
stinkbeetle•1h ago
Who is we, and who won? What did they win?
energy123•1h ago
tokai•1h ago
That's just as bad of an argument as so-called intellectual walls of text. Nothing needs to be done, the outcomes are not bad. My argument is as strong as yours.
energy123•28m ago
array_key_first•42m ago
Is that a made up problem? IMO: yes. That's a PARENT'S responsibility, not mine.
There are legitimate arguments in favor of a national firewall. Nobody is making them.
oytis•6h ago
Sovereign firewalls are mostly used by countries that have them for censorship and surveillance, and I think letting governments use a pretext of digital services being able to avoid tolls and taxes to establish such a powerful tool would be a huge mistake.
Aachen•17m ago