[HN Gopher] Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before Assange'...
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Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before Assange's extradition
hearing
Author : akvadrako
Score : 67 points
Date : 2020-02-17 21:53 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yro.slashdot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (yro.slashdot.org)
| black_puppydog wrote:
| This might be a good moment to remind people that Assange has
| been the victim of a successful smear campaign since the moment a
| woman did NOT make a rape allegation against him in Sweden. Nils
| Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture, actually went over the
| original proceedings and gave a long format interview on the
| matter lately. He too took some convincing to even touch the
| case, that's how effective sexual violence as a smear tactic is.
| Which is a damn shame, given that there's plenty of _real_ sexual
| violence to go around, and which now once more gets harder to
| make visible.
|
| Here's the interview: https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-
| melzer-about-wikilea...
|
| tl;dr:
|
| Assange was right about everything that has been made
| falsifiable: secret indictment, spying on his lawyers,
| extradition to the US, no fair trial, the whole lot. He's showing
| every mental and physical sign of being tortured. He needs help,
| and he's being denied the very rights that western society
| purports to uphold.
|
| EDIT: and that is leaving aside the whole dimension of Sweden,
| the UK, Equador, and of course the US making (even more of) a
| precedent out of him. What this means for the free press, and the
| relationship between freedom (of expression, of information, and
| in this case of truth, really) vs national "security" (in this
| case, the national security to not be held accountable for
| shooting down civilians) should send shivers down everyone's
| spines.
|
| EDIT 2 To the people downvoting: care to express which part of
| the above exactly you disagree with? Do you think it's factually
| incorrect? How about correcting it then? Do you think it's
| inappropriate? Why so? Off topic?
| cheez wrote:
| I have no idea why this is getting downvoted. Odd.
| jjordan wrote:
| This is a growing problem. I'm not sure what the solution is, but
| something needs to be done to stem the absolute power that social
| media companies have to arbitrarily censor voices.
| riffic wrote:
| journalists and the press should be taking a long hard serious
| look at running their own ActivityPub installations.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Somehow to me the problem is that social networks are turning
| into implicit mobs, and that's surprisingly scary. The
| information highway became a confusion boulevard.
| root_axis wrote:
| The solution is not to rely on for-profit corporations to host
| your content for free.
| loceng wrote:
| The solution is easy: full data portability laws that "backs
| up" into a centralized database (could be blockchain to avoid
| manipulation) - and then each platform sets its own rules, and
| users then can utilize the platform of choice for their UI and
| UX - design and governance.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Fediverse?
| jbarciauskas wrote:
| I don't think the evidence is that that's the biggest issue in
| general, and certainly not in this case.
| steveeq1 wrote:
| blockchain?
| Notorious_BLT wrote:
| The solution to this seems pretty straightforward: force social
| media companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a
| "publisher", rather than a mix of the two that gets to claim
| the most convenient aspects of both.
|
| If they choose "platform", then they can take no responsibility
| for content posted, but also allow all content, and only remove
| content when it is required of them by the legal system (when
| the content is illegal and has been reported as such)
|
| If they choose "publisher" then they are free to censor,
| "deplatform", delete, or restrict posting of anything they
| wish, but if someone posts something illegal, they take their
| share of legal responsibility for publishing it.
| alexis_fr wrote:
| That is a solution only valid for US and for the current
| legislation since it was introduced in 2006. It can be
| changed at any time.
|
| For example other countries may use of laws (EU Arricle 13,
| for instance) to bend social media [1], and Facebook has
| accepted to have Marlene Schiappa's (our Minister of
| Equality) agents in-house. Law is the embodiment of the
| current political power balance, not a fixed referential to
| stake culprits upon. And for the moment, social media are the
| power in the balance, so it's hard to use the law against
| them.
|
| [1] https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/
| Notorious_BLT wrote:
| So you're saying that Social media sites have more power
| than the elected government of a country, and you're
| arguing that's a a GOOD thing? Or am I misinterpreting
| that?
| dwild wrote:
| That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way
| too much.
|
| > but also allow all content,
|
| Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If
| you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including
| spam, troll, etc...
|
| Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just
| push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no
| longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform
| exist.
|
| > but if someone posts something illegal, they take their
| share of legal responsibility for publishing it.
|
| That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider
| that impossibility to look at every piece of content, and
| this is why the DMCA exist. Look at Youtube which try to
| filter their content much further than the law currently
| require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of
| thousands, with some of the best kind of neural network,
| working on this and yet it fail so often.
|
| The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both.
|
| It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally
| the kind of platform you suggest. Someway to protect website
| owner from any legal retaliation. It would most probably look
| like 4chan, but still interesting.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| This would indeed be a good thing. I wonder if there's a push
| to do that already somewhere?
| Notorious_BLT wrote:
| I believe this proposal would more or less be the DEFAULT
| were it not for Section 230 of the Communications Decency
| Act of 1996.
|
| Section 230 has had both good results (bloggers aren't
| going to get in trouble because someone posted something
| illegal in their comments) and bad results
| (twitter/youtube/paypal were all allowed to nuke Alex Jones
| from orbit simultaneously, removing his ability to
| distribute content, communicate with followers, and accept
| payments).
|
| I don't like or agree with Alex Jones (he's a wacko, but
| people have made some funny videos out of his freakouts),
| but people have to remember: if it can happen to one
| person, the same could happen to anyone. People praised
| this "deplatforming" because they didn't like the target.
| But this is essentially praising these sites for crippling
| someone's career without any oversight.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| What is to stop a company from choosing to be a platform, and
| then use dark patterns to censor certain views? IE Google
| placing a competitor's sites on page 2 or reddit hiding a
| certain community from its popular page.
| v64 wrote:
| In this case, if it were regulated and there was evidence
| they were doing that, a lawsuit could be brought against
| them.
| buzzkillington wrote:
| Laws.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I think the big platforms would love to be treated as
| platforms only. But the problem is that the platform owner is
| the best positioned to police the content. If they have to
| rely on the legal system to take things down, there is going
| to be a lot more nefarious activity that goes untouched. And
| I don't think the public or our politicians have the stomach
| for that.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > If they have to rely on the legal system to take things
| down, there is going to be a lot more nefarious activity
| that goes untouched.
|
| The DMCA does a reasonably good job of handling that exact
| problem for copyright infringing content, while still
| providing due process.
|
| Edit: I have no idea why this is being downvoted, what I've
| said is completely true. If you're mad about YouTube's
| terrible policies, they're not related to DMCA. They have
| their own completely seperate (and highly oppressive)
| system for handling infringement claims (in addition to
| their DMCA obligations).
| noodlesUK wrote:
| This DMCA?
|
| https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/103692924465446
| 092... https://www.eff.org/takedowns
|
| The DMCA is fundamentally flawed and is a terrible model
| to base any future system on.
| pmilot wrote:
| Because they don't give tools to law enforcement agencies
| to enforce their local laws. As a platform, it would be
| within their power and their right to do so. I think that
| is preferable to them doing the enforcing themselves.
| [deleted]
| karatestomp wrote:
| More protocols, fewer platforms. Significantly reducing the
| money in web advertising and especially the
| monetizability/utility of data by and about users is probably
| necessary for that to happen.
|
| It's not for technical reasons that we stopped having a
| smallish number of viable standards with many implementations
| each, and started having many wholly incompatible and
| deliberately non-interoperable implementations of basically the
| same thing. I doubt Email could be invented today.
|
| [EDIT] point is capturing and controlling communication is
| currently a top priority of big tech players, and that won't
| change until it is, one way or another, no longer highly
| rewarded--until then, every no-funds or paid-for-by-actual-
| users solution is competing with bottomless pockets and "free".
| notlukesky wrote:
| The platforms have been muzzling speech for a long while and
| some through sneaky ways like making content hard to find or
| surface. So they can still restrict the spread of speech while
| claiming they do not interfere in the creation and publishing
| of it. So platforms will have to come clean on their algorithms
| and content discovery process as well.
| MagnumPIG wrote:
| I don't think any individual knows anymore, it's just ML
| optimization for getting the most ads, presumably through
| engagement.
| ycombonator wrote:
| Population of US: 330 million Twitter US MAUs: 68 million % of
| Bots on Twitter: ~ 15% So Twitter users that really matter: ~ 57
| million Way overrated.
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