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RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 9, 2019
"Self regulation is not working"
Definitions and expectations vary. As always, I appreciate your curiosity.
Thanks!
"Self regulation is not working"
Definitions and expectations vary. As always, I appreciate your curiosity.
Thanks!
Right, and it's easy to argue that "self regulation is not working", but the hard part is left undone. No one demonstrated that there's any other option that would be better. As Thomas Sowell always reminds, "Compared to what?"
Most folks aren't significantly impacted by such mechanisms in ways apparent to them, and thus remain on such platforms. As mesh networks remain nominally discouraged, by the time that impact becomes apparent - existential, in other words - the development and adoption of mechanisms able to disseminate free speech will be virtually impossible.
Falun Gong, Uighurs, and other dissidents in China today are strongly provided incentive to exercise free speech, but are shown to be incompetent to develop and deploy mechanisms able to do so. For more than a decade such dissidents have been horrifically oppressed by having their organs terminally removed and sold, their families torn apart with men going to concentration camps, and their women and children given as chattel to politically acceptable men.
In the West deception and restraint by state actors has maintained the willingness of the public to utilize platforms demonstrably using disinformation and propaganda mechanisms, such as the bots under discussion, while the window of opportunity to develop and deploy alternatives that provide censorship resistance and security increasingly shrinks.
Today it is too late for Chinese dissidents, and their deaths and enslavement in droves exemplary of their inability to do so. Hong Kong dissidents have deployed mesh networks competent to enable free speech, but they remain dependent on infrastructure that is able to be prevented from providing that capability. China could easily end that communication today, but apparently uses that network for surveillance and future enforcement activities for various reasons.