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'Chilling Effect' of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a Motherboard article: Research suggests that widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public. A paper published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that "the government's online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion." The NSA's "ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly" and "can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found.
Dissent online is very, very much alive. Go to the comments section of any website and you will see loud, proud, sometimes articulate, occasionally constructive, and frequently genuinely angry dissent and dissatisfaction with the status quo and especially the bullshit peddled by those running it.
Most of it is periodically scrubbed, censored, banned and shadowbanned by increasingly ideological moderators on media and "social media" websites up and down the internet.
The internet should eb a forum for free discussion, but instead we have a class, a new social class of moderators, community managers, and media manipulators whose function is to turn the internet into a giant propaganda machine.
Note that this function is independent, but not exclusive of the function of other groups to turn the internet into a panopticon. But the critical distinction here is that you can spy and snoop all you want, but if you want to shut people up who really want to speak their mind, you must have muscle and manpower in the right locations to shut them down by fiat.
Call them "socialists", "terrorists", "trolls", "misogynists", "islamists", "bigots" or "radicals". The name doesn't matter; the result is just to shut down free assembly of any kind on this increasingly disillusioning network. "Moderation", or what has come to pass for it, is the real silencing force on today's web.
Under the guise of protecting the U.S., I'm sure plenty of well-intention ed people are serving their roles in NSA, FBI, Congress, etc. that in the short run are trying to protect, but in the long run are undermining our values. This is very dangerous and troubling for our future.
Actually, its not really the government surveillance I'm most concerned with. I know enough to express my opinions in such a way as to not give the government any evidence to do me harm (or at least to 'want to do me harm'). I'm far more concerned over my employer knowing my opinions. If I was independently wealthy (not robustly so just so I could live free of having to be employed) or was self-employed in a business where I could support myself I would have 0 problem removing my anonymity online. Heck I used to robustly debate all kinds of things on-line (long before the 'internet' became what it is today), it was fun, a 'sport' if you would, it was intellectually gratifying. But with employers & especially SJWs running amok that can threaten my livelihood I have taken to express my views only to those people I already consider close family or friends & thus pretty much already know my opinions...they are smart people but its not nearly as gratifying.
Precisely, the nutters are the only ones crazy enough to use their free speech rights anymore.
It's one of the reasons 4chan is as popular as it is.
I can go there, say whatever I want; "burn the gays!", "kill the niggers!", "Hitler did nothing wrong!", or even something as mundane as "Yeah, I actually support Trump" - anything and I won't be persecuted, ostracized, or otherwise attacked in real life for it.
And you know what that enables?
Actual political discourse. Because you no longer have to temper anything against the prospect of retributive action from people who oppose your political ideas. If someone thinks your idea is full of shit they can't just censor you, they can't just throw you in jail or even kill you. No matter how asinine (in fact, the more contrarian the post, the more visible it is due to the larger number of replies it will garner) someone will have to argue against your position in order to refute it.
And it's absolutely fantastic. It and the few *chan copycats are the only places on the internet where actual political discussion can take place. Where, rather than posting in a hugbox of like-minded people who echo your thoughts, you put yourself in a hurt-box where everyone tells you you're a dumbfuck moron who doesn't know what he's talking about, and you're forced to actually defend whatever argument you've made.
The only two issues the format has are: [1] signal-to-noise ratio; as there is a very large amount of spam that takes place due to the free-speech nature, and [2] moderation stepping in and censoring certain viewpoints/topics. (This doesn't tend to happen much on 4chan's popular boards just for the sheer number of posters that makes censorship almost impossible, but on the smaller sites as well as the smaller boards on 4chan itself, it's definitely an issue).
If you want to get the pulse of what the political undercurrents and beliefs in present day western society actually are, without the politically correct censorship that takes place, you go to 4chan and get the whole ugly truth of it.
Hypothetical:
Donald Trump somehow wins the presidency. His supporters then manage a clean sweep in the next round of Congressional elections, stacking Congress with Trump supporters. This Trump-friendly Congress passes a law criminalizing any donation of money, by any entity, to any political candidate not personally approved by Trump.
Does this law, in your opinion, violate the First Amendment?
If so, your claim that "money is not speech" is at best a half-truth.
If not, I'd like to hear your reasoning on why not.
A popular trolling tactic is to disagree with someone in as plausible a way as possible. After dealing with that for a while, people get to a point where they can't take anyone who disagrees with them seriously. So they conclude that anyone who disagrees is doing so insincerely. The result is that they merely become part of the problem. It's bad enough that trolls waste people's time with bullshit insincere arguments, but at least when people respond to that bullshit, the response will have some educational value. However, when sincere arguments are moderated down, it's a total loss.
That's why a lot of subreddits don't have negative moderation, but instead rely on shit posts merely not receiving any up-votes.
As far as Slashdot being a "deep thinking" web site goes, I think the bigger problem is that Slashdot's moderation system heavily favors the first posts to appear in response to a new story by exposing them to more potential moderators than posts which appear later. The result of this is that the highest-rated posts are rarely new ideas, but rather, just old and obvious ideas quickly typed up in response to a new story. New and original thinking requires time to be written, and since it appears later, is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to being seen by potential moderators. Essentially every moderation system on the internet is like this since none of them present posts to moderators in random order, but Slashdot is particularly bad about it since, after 100 comments are posted, one must click "load all comments" in order to load the lower-rated comments into the page at all, which means that those lower-rated comments are rarely seen and thus unlikely to receive any positive moderation no matter how enlightened they may be.
The result of this is that we end up mostly just reading comments from those who know how to game the system well: For every new story that appears, quickly post any response that many people are likely to agree with, so that as the first moderators read the story, they have only your own post and perhaps 20 others to choose between when deciding what to positively moderate, and so you'll almost certainly receive some points. If you're late to the game, post in response to an existing highly-rated comment since the replies to that comment are more likely to be read. If there are already more than 100 comments posted to the story, then don't waste your time, but instead just post in response to the next story. Eventually you'll earn karma because Slashdot has learned that people enjoy your comments, even if it's more just because they see them than it is because you write particularly good comments. I mean, a fucking lot of people write worthwhile comments, but only some people get instant +5 karma, and that's how they do it, whether that's by choice or by simple accident of having nothing better to do than browse Slashdot all day and always thinking they know everything and thus never bothering to read the story before commenting.
The way to solve this would be to track what posts moderators are seeing by presenting them one at a time, and choosing which post to present to the next moderator by sort of which post has been viewed by the fewest moderators. Then those who aren't moderating would actually be shown the best posts.