One of the tweets removed from view was posted by Moloy Ghatak, a labor minister in the opposition-ruled West Bengal state, where Mr. Modi’s party hopes to make big gains in an ongoing election. Mr. Ghatak accused Mr. Modi of “mismanagement” and held him directly responsible for the deaths. His tweet included images of Mr. Modi and his election rallies beside those of the cremations and compared him to Nero, the Roman emperor, for choosing to hold political gatherings and exporting vaccines during a “health crisis.”
Another tweet from Revanth Reddy, a sitting member of the parliament, used a hashtag that blamed Mr. Modi for the “disaster.” “India recording over 2 lakh cases everyday,” it said, using an Indian numbering unit that means 200,000 cases. “Shortage of vaccines, shortage of medicines, increasing number of deaths.
>>unsurprisingly their priority becomes keeping those who might regulate them happy.
Unsurprising, and not necessarily unwanted. IDK if you mean people or politicians by "they," but (in a democracy) they're the ones who make rules. Whether it's mandating access, limiting access, moderating, censoring, allowing freedom of speech or just mandating that stated policies are followed consistently... I think social media is unquestionably a "public concern" currently.
That doesn't mean that I support Twitter censoring on behalf of Modi. But, it does demonstrate on how broken the new media is. Zuck and Dorsey have no sense of responsibility, and no idea how to take responsibility even if they did have the sense.
It goes without saying that Zuck and Dorsey have no journalistic ethic. They're not journalism, they just ate journalism. No counterpart to a journalistic ethic, or even a lip-service to one. So... they control the important chunk of media worldwide, and they truly don't know what an ethical approach would even be.
Makes Murdoch look like a saint.
A big part of the problem here, ironically, is that Twitter and FB can get away with absolute arbitrariness. It makes it easy for thuggish political types to get their way.
Companies who run social media sites are not in a position to be journalists, or even editors. They are mostly moderators, trying to navigate around regulatory rocks and PR disaster storms. I suppose they would happily not curb any speech, just because it increases engagement (and with it, ad revenues).
Actual journalists, that is, people reporting things, are those who have to demonstrate the ethos. But in social media, the people who white the posts are the users, in other words, ourselves.
There is a lot of criticism of the government on social media right now. I'm not saying this government isn't trying to control criticism on social media, but these are small drops in an ocean of tweets and fb posts on this.
ResignModi has been trending on Twitter for days now. My FB feed is full of people angry at the government.
There is no 'censorship' of 99% of such posts. You can't really censor stuff in India, its way too big to control narrative that way.
I don't want to make this post political by mentioning names but this post has good information on the founders and their political background https://www.quora.com/Is-Thewire-in-biased
Did you read that article? The guy's grandpa did not need oxygen, but died of a heart attack instead.
During this time of crisis, it's common for governments to crack down on speech. You've heard of the "shouting 'FIRE' in a crowded movie hall" analogy, right?
I seriously hope that I won’t have to resort to name calling here on HN but are you for real? Oxygen and advanced life support is not unique to COVID and his tweets don’t say so either.
How the hell is this equivalent to shouting “FIRE” in a crowded place?
To be fair, anyone looking for oxygen in the current situation would assume it is for Covid. Not saying 88 old grandpa of his cousin did not deserve attention, but the guy got called from cabinet ministry, thrice.
That principle was never intended as a reason for censorship. People shouting fire in a crowded theater should receive a trial. Facebook and Twitter aren't known for having a formal appeals process, and you're lucky if they even give you any attention.
Did you read that the statement of it being a heart attack came from the police (that are being used to intimidate people) and not medical professionals.
COVID is a catastrophe in India because the government's core is religious extremism and other forms of bigotry, and those have driven its response, including cabinet members promoting folk remedies above vaccines and encouraging large religious gatherings (including an upcoming one).
I guess in America there is a lot of the same with some groups of people believing they can pray the virus away or that it simply doesn't exist and is part of some satanic cults agenda.
Seems like a very caricaturish characterization of what people actually believe. That sort of broad contempt and unwillingness to understand the range of perspectives on the issues besides the "official" (read: oligarchic) narrative is unfortunate.
> He mentions hating “fake news”. He says, “I don’t think covids is really more than a flu.“ I clarified, “Now you think differently though?”
> He replies, “No the same. I should just take vitamins for my immune system. They (news) are making it a big deal.”
> I’m at a loss for words. Here I am basically wrapped in tarp, here he is in a Covid ICU. How can you deny the validity of covid? How is this possible?
From the point of view of the rest of society, there is no difference at all. The coronavirus doesn't care if you believe in it or not, it only cares if you're vaccinated.
Some people definitely believe stuff like that, and it's not even only uneducated people. My mother-in-law went to the doctor for an annual checkup, and the doctor told her that it's pointless to get the vaccine because covid is man-made, and whoever created it will just release a new variant that is immune to the vaccine. Luckily my wife convinced her otherwise.
What is "religious extremism"? That term always struck me as odd. Either the truth claims of a religion are true, somewhat true, or false.
If they're true (read: have sufficiently good reasons to believe them), then it's not extreme to live in accordance with them. In fact, it is arguably insane not to live in accordance with them. Imagine if someone said "Oh, I believe things fall to the ground when dropped, but I'm not an extremist about it". What does that mean?? That you only sort of believe that they fall to the ground? That you only sometimes avoid jumping off of bridges?
If they're somewhat true, then they need refinement and correction because they contain error.
If they're false, then it would be an error to follow them in any way.
So really, if what's being done is evil or wrong, it should maybe be called religious error, or just error.
I would expect that most of the window of peoples' perspectives in most religions fall in the "mostly true, but we don't know which bits, so we'll be tolerant of people who disagree about which bits". Extremists are the people who say "Absolutely true, thus anyone who disagrees on any of it is a *"
As an example, I believe that things usually fall to the ground when dropped, but I've seen a number of counter-examples, and I'm aware of some disagreement at the margins over exactly how quickly those things fall. An extremist would say "Anyone who disagrees that things fall with an acceleration of 9.8m/s^2 is a transgressor".
What you are alluding to are different observations of the truth. The concept of reference frames depends on the universality of the laws of physics, which by definition means that there can only be one version of the truth. By the time your reference frame catches up to another, the observations converge.
seer and seen are described from the vedic times. there is a third element called the enabler.
person, box, light all are required for the person to declare there is a box. I dont see a box is an observation which is correct for a visually challenged person or person in the dark. they dont become truth.
Most people say they believe some of the ideas in their religion, but often act like they don't.
Extremists believe many of the ideas of their religion with certainty, and act in accordance which can lead to behaviour that is illogical from an outside perspective or ethically unhinged. Extremists are the ones who take their religion too seriously.
You can be an extremist about other ideas too. Like a raw vegan. Arguably regular vegans too - there's no health reason to be 100% vegan vs 95% - probably the contrary.
I don’t think extremism is about whether the claim is true or not. It’s about what the claim is. If you’re a gravity extremist, it would suggest that your views on gravity are very different from what’s considered mainstream.
Seems unrelated to Hindi (via Sanskrit) दिन 'din' meaning 'day' though. (Not that I expected it because 'day' and 'religious' are similar in meaning, just curious because there is overlap, and borrowed terms (well, with Persian, but those in turn often derived or cognate with Arabic, at least in my idly curious Wiktionaring experience anyway).)
It makes me think of "dan" too as in the Tribe of Dan in the Bible. Dan = judge. Daniel = god (el) judges me. The Tribe of Dan supposedly spread out and, some say, seeded other civilizations up the Dan-ube river up into Dan-mark. For real.
Ah! Ok, dīn, turns out it is borrowed into Hindi (दीन) with the same faith/religious meaning, I just wasn't aware of thag so didn't twig, and yes, thought 'Aladdin' had a short 'i'. (I suspect that predates Disney.)
Do you guys still need oxygen there? How is the situation there really? I called a few of my contacts, and get very diverging pictures. No interruptions in Kochi, to some stress in Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, to total apocalypse in Noida.
I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it. It's tragic seeing the lack of something so seemingly trivial costing so many people's lives.
Anyways, if anyone really need a really emergency only O2 source:
1. Get a 200A-300A DC welding machine, most importantly with as much safety features as possible.
2. Reasonably fine stainless steel mesh, use most pure stainless you can find. Carbon felt if possible. Roll up in tubes. Weld/braze thick copper conductors the top, make sure they can handle the current without melting things. Make sure to cover exposed copper with something less electrically conductive, in worst case, smoking hot cooking oil. Make sure it does not get onto stainless.
3. Either a U or H shaped vessel from PP or PVC piping, available at plumbing supplies. Alternative, a plastic bucket, and two drinking water bottles perforated a bit in their lower part. Put electrodes into them.
4. Find something to cap vessels, use original caps from bottles. Make holes in them for conductors. Then find hoses you can get through those caps. Use reasonably thick plastic hose to survive hot O2. A proper oxygen hose would be idea. Drill the caps, get hoses through them, and seal any openings with hot glue, silicone caulk, or, in worst case, chewing gum. If you can't find anything to seal it, use the thickest plastic bag you can find, and tape it.
5. Make some semblance of bubblers. Small plastic beverage bottles work well for this.
6. Fill with drinking water, or settled tap water. Make sure there is no chlorine in it. Make sure that water does not reach copper parts, even if they are well protected.
7. Add a table spoon of lye, or soda to water. Mix.
8. Connect electrodes to welding machine.
9. Test it starting with smallest current.
10. If things work, connect hoses to bubblers. Make sure the hydrogen hose goes outdoor, to a very, very well ventilated place.
11. Make some semblance of a breathing mask for the apparatus. Connect it to oxygen supply through a breathing bag. Make some holes in the breathing bag. Eye the calculation so that incoming oxygen displaces at least 10 times the volume of exhaled CO2.
12. Top off water as the thing works using something to protect yourself from being zapped.
13. Adjust the current, holes in the breathing bag, lye/soda content, and bottle position (if used the bottle version) for optimal output.
14. Replace water if it gets too muddy from dissolving impurities from anode, or anything else in the system. It it does, think of finding other materials.
With 200A 220V supply, you can make 1-3 kg of oxygen per hour, 4-5 kg in the most ideal scenario.
They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.
> They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.
Right now, I believe from reports on the ground, that they need just any oxygen to hold on for 2-3 more weeks.
First hand report I got is that LO2 tankers been all around on TV, but despite that all hospitals in the area been empty of oxygen for 3-4 weeks without any resupply coming in sight, and this is in one of richest cities in India.
> Chemistry experiments won't solve this.
Tell this to people about to die. You are so cynical. 1.5-2 kg of oxygen per hour should be enough to support 2 people. 20 at least 10.
The mess, depravity, and despair I heard is such that people have already tried just anything.
Zeolite has been sold out across India for a few weeks.
Hydrogen peroxide sold out.
Any chemical which can be used to produce oxygen chemically is out of stock.
People are already blowing themselves up, and causing blackouts by following Youtube voodoo science trying to make completely unsound electrolyzer designs.
You are not getting any "proper" oxygen concentrators coming any time soon with all of above.
This design is at least less of a voodoo science than ones telling people to breath brown gas.
Please, give the medical system in India at least a tiny bit of respect and stop trying to armchair quarterback their solutions with your chemistry knowledge.
They know what they need better than you do. They're not going to MacGyver their solution by improvising an industrial chemical production process with welding equipment and random chemicals.
Being able to make oxygen in a chemistry experiment is not equivalent to being able to deliver oxygen to patients in a medically appropriate manner using standard medical equipment.
All those sudden oxygen leaks, equipment failures, or massive amounts of stored O2 disappearing is all about O2 infrastructure being in a bad state long before the Covid, and it coming to surface now.
Go to a praxair in the states and ask what the difference is: tested to 5x9's and loaded into a vacuum pulled bottle. ANY O2 at pressure is suitable to for human consumption at the surface because ANY impurities that are actually harmful would explode at 200 bar. Anything else (say from a PSA nitrox generator) would only be things like Argon.
And then you need to filter the output of the bubbler because microparticules will be suspended in the gas flow, and then you need to sterilize it, because you don't know what's growing in the bubbler, and then cool it down (is sterilize by heating it), and then you need to regulate the pressure of volume, etc....
hacking-rig an industrial oxygen generator is a very different thing from being able to generate breathable medical oxygen - when you're done with all the steps you'll end up at something that's very expensive and difficult to maintain in the end
That's natural, all breathing apparatuses already have to be treated like that. Having to washing the bubbler once in a while if a by far the better option to dying.
> When you're done with all the steps you'll end up at something that's very expensive and difficult to maintain in the end
> I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it.
This article discusses some of the challenges being faced, sounds like most of them are around distribution. India has a large steel industry which is very capable of generating and condensing oxygen.
LO2 reserve in any hospital should've been enough for weeks per refill.
And hospital with on-site O2 generation should've never had any issue. Any industrial scale O2 production machinery would've had many times the capacity reserve.
But they didn't. Double digit of hospital O2 generators were out of service, and LO2 tanks were never filled to full because hospitals were saving on LO2 service.
Some hospitals with central O2 systems from either tanks, or generators simply had them disabled for unfathomable reasons, had them broken down years ago without any attempt at repair, or simply never ever used them, so they don't know how to operate them.
You mention "poorly industrialised country" and then go on to list at least hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and supplies and access to a 200A 220V electrical service. A poor household in India has easy access to none of these resources.
Cheapest 200A welder costs like $30-$40 dollars in India.
200A service... , can't say how it's now, but even like 20 years ago, 100A was omnipresent in larger cities. Even with just few kilowatts you should still be easily producing above a kilogram per hour.
Using crudely produced industrial oxygen for medical purposes (human breathing) is dangerous. Even with the warnings included above, people will not fully understand the risks and consequences of using a DIY oxygen generator, including long-term lung damage.
Have you worked with medical oxygen in a practical setting? People are desperate and might give this a try. In real medical scenario, O2 is provided as LMO (liquid medical oxygen) with 99.5% purity. It is given to patients via equipment that is meant to regulate pressure and flow-rate.
> Connect it to oxygen supply through a breathing bag. Make some holes in the breathing bag. Eye the calculation so that incoming oxygen displaces at least 10 times the volume of exhaled CO2
You first need a clean and secure place to store it at pressure enough to be continuously consumed by a living breathing human.
Generating oxygen with this means will inevitably result in mixing impurities via the coating on the electrodes or any pre-existing corrosion on the electrodes. Salts mixed into lye, soda, or other salts added to increase conductivity, can result in toxic chlorine and chloride fumes. Heating at the electrode will result in further unexpected fumes.
You are suggesting plastic equipment around a 200A electrodes. If plastic is melting around the electrodes, imagine those fumes also mixing in.
These are just few of the problems that comes to my mind. I am sure an actual expert will know better. Please refrain from posting such garbage, especially medical information.
> You are suggesting plastic equipment around a 200A electrodes.
I'm not suggesting 200A at electrodes. The actual current will be much less with water resistance, you will obviously melt plastic if you put full short circuit current into it.
It's also welding machines themselves are not created for continuous operation, especially electronics based ones. A 100A ones will croak, and go into safety shutdown even from operating at 10% of load continuously.
> You first need a clean and secure place to store it at pressure enough to be continuously consumed by a living breathing human.
You don't have to store it, it's about continuous generation.
> Salts mixed into lye, soda, or other salts added to increase conductivity, can result in toxic chlorine and chloride fumes.
Obviously you will electrolyze chlorine if there is enough of it, but you need to really be electrolyzing sea water like salt concentration for it to be an issue.
> Please refrain from posting such garbage, especially medical information.
I will not refrain. I will talk more with you once I will see your engineering credentials, which I believe you don't have after reading all of above.
Do you guys still need oxygen there? How is the situation there really?
India is the largest producer of Oxygen and vaccine in the world! Despite this, we are facing a shortage of both.
Then how did we get in to such a situation? The reason is the complete apathy of the government in planning and preparation.
While we are the largest producers of Oxygen in the world, we only have 2000 trucks to transport them. Failure to plan and improve the logistics is one of the reason why all are hospitals are now facing Oxygen scarcity, even though we have a surplus of it! The second reason is failure to upgrade existing infrastructure in hospitals.
According to an opposition leader, we exported 60 million vaccines between January and March of this year, while we had only vaccinated around 30 to 40 million of our own people!
Our vaccine plans also hit a hurdle when a US vaccine by Novavax, that has been licensed for production in India, is facing hurdles of getting the raw material for the vaccine from US (that has obviously prioritized it for its own needs).
According to the same opposition leader, we also exported around 1.1 million doses of Remdesivir to other countries. And our media is showing people desperate to buy Remdesivir from anywhere at any price.
In between all this, the government permitted huge gatherings of people in election rallies and religious occasions.
Summary: We had all the resources. But apathy and poor planning screwed up India's fight against COVID.
Is there some service in India that actually delivers oxygen cylinders when you tweet? If you are in dire need to oxygen, the last thing you’d be doing is tweeting.
The irony is that elections that were held is the biggest cause for this spike and the government did not oppose or stop that.
Wow, you make a lot of assumptions and failed to read the article.
The reports are that people's families are having to source meds and oxygen for their loved ones. The offending tweet was consistent with that and, to paraphrase a bit, consisted of a guy basically saying "Hey, does anyone know where I can get a tank of oxygen for my grandfather??" It seems the the grandfather died by the next day anyway.
The situation on the ground is actually that bad unfortunately that people are resorting to pleading and begging for Oxygen anywhere they can.
The number of frantic oxygen requests I've been seeing in my building society Whatsapp group (a high end upper-class society) in the past few days is very scary. VIPs and people with a lot of connection are not able to source Oxygen or beds which paints the picture if you know India.
YES! If you’re actually in India, you will know how useful Twitter has been with this. People are amplifying tweets about other people’s needs and other folks are sharing verified leads. All of this without any incentive to do so. Where the government is daily failing, citizens are rising to the occasion.
The media control and censorship here in India is definitely getting our of hand!
Setting aside the absolute criminal mismanagement and planning of the Covid situation in the past few months, the fact that the people in power are still applying their brains and might into figuring out how to manipulate the narrative and how to squash dissent in this moment when the country is going through an unimaginable disaster.
Just today, a guy was slapped with some serious charges (which could lead to Jail time) because he tweeted that he needed Oxygen for his Grandfather. [1][2]
I know this is sounding alarmist but I've seen the change in the past 8 years and the country is heading in the direction of China at breakneck speed right now (not in the good way).
I don’t understand what Modi is doing. It seems like many huge companies based in the west will be looking to leave China (as much as possible) in the next 5ish years and India is a democracy perfectly situated to grab all of that economic productivity. They have the education, the infrastructure, and the population. All they have to do is be a bit less dictator-y than China and a bit more respectful of human rights.
That should be a pretty low bar. But for some reason when Modi should be positioning India as “we’re not like China” he instead seems intent on repeatedly pointing out the similarities on the international stage. It just seems really short-sighted to me.
Absolutely agree with this. In fact even if the minimum they do is walk back to how the country was before Modi, that would be a huge step forward. Not talking about politics here but just to a time when comedians and journalists didn't have to fear harassment for doing their jobs.
Also a fun fact - Modi has not done a single open, unscripted press conference in his entire 7 years of being in power! Can you actually believe that. He hasn't taken a single question on camera that was not pre-determined. Most likely because of the lesson he learned after the one interview he did with a reputed Journalist a while back before coming to power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGAYL8dtic
The effort that he puts into forming his public-image is actually impressive at some level.
No press conferences, massive rallies during a pandemic, and demonizing foreign powers for not solving problems they are responsive for solving? Sounds familiar ...
Many Indian politicians learned the exact opposite lesson from the 90s to 2000s when China's economy far outgrew India's despite the supposed geographical, labor, and education similarities between the two (i.e. see the debate from a western perspective in [1][2][3]).
The idea that democracy and free markets help with economic growth simply didn't pan out for India w.r.t. its neighbor and biggest rival. As far as Modi is concerned, why keep trying something that doesn't work? Especially when the alternative is self serving.
First the wire is known to be very alt-left but even then the patient didn't had any requirement for oxygen, his grandfather died of heart-attack. Not sure which part of article or twitter thread says a normal guy got screwed up ?
the correct tweet is the one where the local elected leader was targeted[1]. the leader made police run around to help the person. cops found foul play.[2]
What am I missing?
I’m not sure why we should be inclined to trust the police in an environment where the government is clearly making an effort to play down the seriousness of the crisis and their hand in it. It’s also a bit hard to believe that someone would both be trolling hard enough to lie about their grandfather needing oxygen during an oxygen shortage AND give enough information for the authorities to show up and realize he was trolling.
Alarming but otherwise China and to a lesser extent Pakistan take control of the narrative to their own advantage. At least the Modi government doesn't lock people in reeducation camps. India should remain a secular state though.
Well a little more context will do. The man tweeted he needed oxygen to a famous celebrity. A union minister herself called him twice to help. As he was not answering she asked district magistrate to help. They found that man's grandfather is not suffering from covid and not admitted to any hospital and under private care. So the man just fired a tweet thus police has questioned him and let him go.
The real reason is government tried to help. Cabinet minister reached out to help[1] . Sent cops to help . cops ran around calling, tracking and finally found the truth. Since there was no real need for oxygen in this case, cops suspect he tweeted to sensationalise.[2] if there was a need for oxygen then we could expect there would have been no arrest.
I've always wanted to ask the HN community about this problem, what exactly can be done from a technology standpoint?
I feel we're already at a point where tools are available to make a censorship resistant social network.
The main challenges would be:
- Kickstarting a network is a difficult problem
- A way to ensure sane content moderation (child porn / abuse, etc) while still keeping the decision-making decentralized enough
- Easy enough for the first time mobile internet users to onboard
Would love to hear your thoughts. In my opinion a blockchain based solution seems appropriate (I know there's a lot blockchain-hate on HN but requesting for constructive comments).
I know something needs to come up soon because the situation on the ground is actually quite bad.
If just enough celebs could be convinced to adopt & evangelize a new platform.
The last time I remember being excited about a new social platform was Quora. I was quite amazed by the quality of answers in the early days. I wonder how they managed to gather their first settlers.
Yeah I've heard about it and will be looking into this. But I haven't actually ever seen it in the wild anywhere online which makes me wonder why it hasn't gained traction much.
For a country like India, the solution needs to be dead simple. Exploring a mastadon server a bit, it doesn't feel like it would cut it.
What’s a “censorship resistant social network”? Would Trump be allowed on this platform? Would it be hosted on AWS? One person’s censorship is another person’s moderation.
Exactly, we already have the “censorship resistant social network” (gab), but for reasons completely unrelated to not restricting speech third parties seem hell bent on nuking it from orbit. Such is the fate of any similar social network.
This headline is at best misleading and at worst intentionally dishonest. How I interpreted it when I first saw it: “Facebook is considering hiding these posts” (looking into, as in planning to do something). Censorship, bad, etc. What it actually says (after reading the article and the referenced tweet): “Facebook is investigating why these posts were removed” (looking into, as in investigating an action that happened).
Shocking. What do the pro censorship people say all the time when defending Facebook or Twitter: speech is free but not free from consequences. I believe that's the line.
I believe they say "as long as we censor just this one particular politician because he's really bad just this one time using a variety of arbitrarily enforced technicalities, it's not censorship and it'll never come back to haunt us."
Free speech in the US is about being protected from government-inflicted consequences. I can say "fuck you" all I like, but that's never meant I can say it to my boss and demand a First Amendment right to remain employed.
It's never been an absolute, either. Incitement to riot, fraud, libel, actionable threats; all are speech, but we've long accepted restrictions on it.
When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle.
The majority of the US is anti-abortion. Would you be fine if they cancelled the other side? Huge swaths are anti-gay. Should coming out mean people are free to cancel you? While the number of churchgoers is around half, the number of Christians in the US is well over 75%. Should claiming to be another religion (or no religion) mean that cancellation is in order?
Once everyone agrees that persecution is acceptable, all that's left is arguing about who to persecute.
The government is by the people and for the people. It reflects the values of the people. You claim that free speech is government only, but why does the government create ideas like hate speech then? Why force private people and businesses to desegregate if your inalienable rights only apply to the government? If rights are inherent in humans, but may be stripped at a whim by the majority, either they aren't actually rights or the pro-cancellation majority are actually despots.
The pro-cancellation argument is all sophistry to gain and increase power.
> When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
> Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
I'm not sure when you were talking about; since at least the 1980s the positions have been basically identical—to today, both sides complaining of institutional biases cutting against them (often both accurately, though selectively), both sides claiming support for free speech but disagreeing that what the other side advocated for was genuine freedom. The big change is that the Right recently adopted the phrase “cancel culture” after nearly 4 decades of using “political correctness” in exactly the same arguments.
Sounds more likely that as you’ve gotten older you’ve just gained more sympathy for the right and thus have given more credit to their claims of support for free speech than you used to.
> It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle.
This is an oversimplification to the point of not agreeing with reality in any useful way.
Just a few months ago the party in power was “for free speech” while the party out of power was arguing for “limiting the reach” of certain content.
It might me more true to say that each party wants there to be more speech that it agrees with (i.e. speech that preserves or gives it more power) and less speech that it doesn’t like. There are more strategies than plain old censorship; as we saw recently drowning out the discourse with falsehoods works just as well. Few people care about some abstract ideal of “free speech”.
> The majority of the US is anti-abortion. Would you be fine if they cancelled the other side? Huge swaths are anti-gay. Should coming out mean people are free to cancel you? While the number of churchgoers is around half, the number of Christians in the US is well over 75%. Should claiming to be another religion (or no religion) mean that cancellation is in order?
>When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
>Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.
100 percent. When I was growing up, the Christian Right wanted to pass anti-flag burning amendments, because veterans were offended. Pornography, because children might see it. Bad words. Unpatriotic stuff, defined as socialism or communism, was a few decades before me. Also to protect morality.
Today we ban so-called hate speech and X phobic speech because 'it hurts'. And in the same way, there's a religious zealotry where if you attempt to use reason you'll be psychoanalyzed and motives attributed.
My advice is, don't engage with these people. If someone uses phraseology like words kill, words are violence, silence is violence, there is no such thing as neutrality, megaphone, we need to do better, systemic Xism, and so forth, run, don't walk away. It's a secular religious movement.
My main problem is the secular religious movement of banishing naughty thoughts has taken Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue by storm.
It's simpler than I made it out to be, which is why it's hated. The distinction between the law and the principle doesn't mean you can't make your own rules on your own property. In fact, they support that.
A) using a strawman
B) Comparing apples and oranges
When facebook decides on its own to remove posts, I'm ok with that, they're a private company and can do what they want on their platform.
When the government tells FB to remove posts, I'm not mad at FB; they can do what they want on their platform. I'm mad at the government for telling them to do that.
The government can suggest it and they can choose to do it. No?
Censorship is censorship. No one cares about narrowly defining Freedom of Speech as conflated with the 1st Amendment except Americans .. and especially Americans who support censorship on giant monopolistic platforms.
No because it's just a friendly suggestion, kind of like the Indian government.
Bottom line: Silicon Valley techies often suffer from a lack of education in civic matters and liberal democratic values in particular. They believe as long as Bad People have their, here's another term they often use, megaphones, taken away, then ethically it's a thumbs up.
The lack of civic education and historical education becomes evident when you ask them, OK, you support censorship and cleansing misinformation: now who decides?
In the US, 'Wrongthinkery' is policed by the silicon valley techies who think hiding posts from anyone who they disagree with is the solution.
> OK, you support censorship and cleansing misinformation: now who decides?
'They' can't come up with an answer to this classic one since they already realised that down the line they're becoming an arbiter of truth.
The liberal left are never in short supply of whataboutism, hypocrisy, gaslighting and the best of all of them, ignoring anything that doesn't fit their narrative.
In summary: If it affects them and those who they agree with, its an issue, if it is someone who disagrees with them, its their funeral and I'll get my buddies from FAANMG, Twitter and Facebook to ban them all.
The fact that those of us attacking censorship are getting down voted to grey on a Silicon Valley news site speaks volumes about the type of person who's working in these companies, their value systems and the power they yield. We should do everything in our power to criticize and attack the monopoly power of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter. It's not a Left and Right issue, it's very much a civil liberties one and a question of what type of open society we value.
The Indian government's position is perfectly in line with so-called free speech defenders: they are shutting down illegal content, not applying their own judgement.
I broadly agree, but I think it's not exactly the problem here.
In this case, one "side" would be a government (assuming this was done at govt request), which means it is literally censorship to silence the other side -- regardless of where the truth lies.
If FB did it proactively to appease a govt (which they did/do in the US), then it's a lot murkier of an issue. It's almost like "soft" censorship.
It is funny to discuss free speech on hn where people want to downvote you because they do not like facts that contradict their opinions about India of which they know nothing about :)
Facebook is a private company. They can decide not to provide you a platform for any reason or without any reason. If you don't like it create your own Facebook and post comments there.
The willingness of the big social networks and Google to submit to authoritarian rulers makes it obvious that any difficulties we have in the US with them are a legislative failure, not a Silicon Valley one. They're not evil, or twisted, they're sociopathic; they'll do whatever they're told, but we refuse to decide what to tell them. They'd love to be made into common carriers as long as they could still run ads.
Their customers are shareholders and consumers are just a product. They'll do whatever it takes to provide value for their customers. It's like turning capitalism on its head and that should be stopped.
Whether you think it is good or bad, Facebook is going to abide by "local laws and regulations". Why risk getting kicked out of the country and lose money? Unfortunate but most of us know that corporations value money over morals, despite what their PR departments may say.
The way these companies openly engage in politically biased publishing and selective enforcement in the USA made this kind of thing inevitable.
During this past election the New York Post was banned because of a story that painted candidate Biden's son in a poor light, and nearly everyone who works in these companies wanted candidate Biden to win so they used their positions to protect his image, knowing that there would be no real consequences for them.
Now we have a crisis in my country and we are unable to criticize the government publicly because our posts can just be suppressed on a whim. We know all about the coveted "muh next billion users" meme that these companies obsess over - some of you probably hear about it at work all the time. They aren't going to have the cooperation of the government unless they do as they're told.
Just like with the NY Post incident, some song and dance excuse will be concocted about this and everyone will blindly accept it, and expect the rest of us to go along with it like fools, when it's pretty obvious what is happening here. This has even been published in the news a few months ago and the country's policy head got caught telling employees that they had to do their moderating duties in a partisan way so that it did not "damage the company's business prospects in the country", and had to resign (link below). Now we are supposed to believe that this was her personal position and literally zero people in company leadership had the same idea. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54715995)
Next year is a Midterm election in the USA, so I fully expect more coincidental and highly unusual yet conveniently partisan stories like this coming up where some scandal gets buried and some out of context quote gets amplified. We have seen whistleblowers from Facebook talking about features like "deboost" being employed in a partisan manner. By then everyone would have forgotten about this and I'll be seeing "boosted" clips from all the late night TV "comedy" propagandists talking about some obscure senate or house seat in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance lest the evil red party take control. Pathetic.
I don't think this take is totally fair, it doesn't include a lot of context.
For sure it's a real discussion to have but I think only should be debated with the full context.
First FB didn't totally block it was still shared over 600k times and they said they were not promoting in the feed until their fact check process proceeded.
The specific reason Twitter cited for an actual block was their policy on hacked source material. Which in itself is kind of BS on its face I agree with you there, no one stoped Snowden. Compromising news is still news, even if the source material was stolen some of the best reporting ever is from 'stolen' source material.
But the source material couldn't be independently verified and the Post seemed to treat it as direct source fact even though at best it's 2nd hand hearsay through Guiliani, at worst through some spy agency.
Important context here is the impact of the Podesta emails originally reported to possibly have false or edited material, though in the future Senate report said unlikely. Being more careful is understandable and I think laudable.
These are important nuances in reporting from more legit access to verifiable direct sources versus a more opinion style non-factual piece from the NyPost.
There is also the political context of known and ongoing direct attacks on our Democracy and foreign nation state interference.
The origin story of the laptop is suspect at a minimum and I can understand caution. again not verifiable. especially given all the attacks and degradation of Democratic norms and wanting to not repeat the same mistakes as Clinton which undeniably had very big important impacts long term, whether you think good or bad.
Maybe they should have included that argument in their reasoning since it seems it probably had a big impact on their decision. Maybe they were given some tip offs from the FBI who knows. We might find out soon about Guilini's part in this, the actual 'russiagate' of direct cooperation with foreign government to undermine the election.
I don't accept the premise that the enforcement is done in good faith to begin with - there's no reason to. A bad faith actor can use a weak justification to selectively enforce the independently verifiable rule whenever they feel like it.
The guy who made the decision, spent 10 years working for John Kerry, Barbara Boxer and the Democratic party prior to his role at Facebook. Why should the USA policy director be magically different from the India one? They both engaged in politically biased selective enforcement, yet you want me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I will not. There is no reason to. Why do these companies allow 10 year political veterans to take these positions?
I’m disappointed in Facebook and saddened by what’s happening in India. Modi is slowly erasing secularism in favor of Hindu nationalism. People speaking out against him are accused of being Pakistani agents. And his governments response to COVID has been a disaster.
This I find is true, globalisation is eventually failing as imo it was always about cheap labour never anything elss and nationalism is on rise. Every country protects rights, America being leader of free world have those patriotic acts where they stopped raw material in name of America first(full blown nationalism), that too when leader is from by democrat party(left)
Nationalism is on rise even Germany's chancellor gave some taste of it(on parma industry comment), but still democracy is all good in india as I see, where to do you see democracy falling in india?
Globalism is not a healthy arrangement. It violates the principle of subsidiary. Global oligarchs are freaking out and hence the frantic uptick in fear mongering. They fear their loss of power. Deflection is key. Stirring up manufactured conflicts among the plebes and bogging people down in bad, self-destructive habits (like drugs and porn) and an endless series of diversions is the classic way you stifle uprisings and pacify the populace. Anyone with a basic understanding of history knows this. The surveillance state and rampant censorship are attempts to neutralize threats (the private sector can skirt constitutional obstacles because, hey, it's private, right?). It is troublesome if you can't use knowledge of history to read the signs in our day. It's one of the reasons we learn history: to understand our present conditions and learn from the past.
The merger of state capitalism and state socialism has been under way and crossing a new threshold, now represented by the convenient phrase "the Great Reset".
Well, it kinda died in developing countries because of the west too. There was a sweet spot in human history where communication was strong enough and technology limited enough where some many groups managed to find themselves on the brink of democracy, and the USA and other powerful bully nations replaced those regimes to keep the exploitative world order.
It's no surprise with a house of cards like that that it all eventually collapsed. Extremely depressing though.
The US should consider itself lucky that its well armed neo-nazi lunatic fringe and the Orange Man were better at racist shitposting than pulling off a coup d'état.
"Pretty good" sounds like a B, but I'd give this last election a C- at best.
Would you please stop posting political flamewar comments to HN? You did it repeatedly in this thread and it's not what this site is supposed to be for.
Others are doing it too, but not counting the account that started it (which we just banned), yours stands out as doing it worse.
The democrats tried to stop critical raw materials for vaccine production in India. These are raw materials that the US itself did not need for its vaccine production.
They only relented after it was pointed out India was supplying critical raw materials for Pfizer.
India has been supplying vaccines to the wider world and prioritizing those in a crisis. Indian exports made up 80% of UN vaccine program for poorer countries.
It was only natural that we would expect the world to offer a hand when we are in a crisis.
Perhaps for once you can focus on exporting what we need instead of exporting your leftist hypocracy and hollow ideology.
For all the aloofness the US and EU have showed themselves to be the pettiest global players, not to mention Xitler the creator of the coronavirus.
When it first came out it was actually a pretty good tool to communicate, coordinate, and share things with your friends. Over time they monetized the platform until it no longer resembled anything useful, but it has too much inertia and keeps chugging along.
I'm not aware of a major child porn problem on Facebook. It is a dominant social media platform. You make it sound like it is rampantly abused by a bunch of pedos to share images of naked kids, when in reality the problem is mostly teens sharing photos of themselves with friends or other teens sharing photos in message groups. In one statement you mention not letting their software near their computers, presumably because of privacy issues but in the next you indicate the the only solution would be to enact more spying and privacy intrusion.
Facebook and other social media platforms (even Google manipulating and sacrificing search integrity to prevent unearthing alleged misinformation much to the detriment of academic research when we need long tail results) are already censorship platforms and have been for a while. They even censor academic conferences on censorship.
Outcomes like these are to be expected when you also commit censorship (including shadow banning, algorithmic downvoting etc.) blatantly.
Do you know what's worst? A guy was booked yesterday for Tweeting he needed oxygen cylinders which according to a state government is spreading fake news. https://thewire.in/government/amethi-up-police-arfa-khanum-s...
While COVID hasn't been kind to the people of India, The current regime's attempts to curb democracy is quite disturbing.