Slashdot Mirror
China Bans the Use Of Social Media As a News Source
Mark Wilson, reporting for BetaNews:Continuing its control of the internet, China has announced that news outlets may not use social media as a source of news -- at least not without official approval. The Cyberspace Administration of China says that the move is part of a campaign to prevent the spread of rumors and fake stories, but most people will see it as the government continuing to flex its online muscles. To add weight to its reasoning, the regulator referred to a number of fake news stories that had originated and spread online. It's an interesting new code of conduct, particularly considering the Chinese government floods social media with fake stories of its own.
I don't think we hate on China. We worry about our Chinese brothers/sisters and hope someday things will get better for them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is censorship. Comments are being suppressed, which is a form of censorship. I won't pretend that all censorship is inherently bad, but it is taking place here. And it really is a problem.
If you post as an AC, it takes a single downmod to be at -1. It doesn't mean that your post is unacceptable to Slashdot, as a whole. Rather, one user disliked your post and was able to put it at -1. That means a lot of users will never see the post and the moderation, if unjust, may never be undone. Furthermore, editors have unlimited mod points and can moderate a single post many times. There's no way to tell how often a post has been moderated or who is doing it.
Moderation also affects your ability to post. If you're logged in and your karma gers low enough, you post at -1 but can only post twice a day. It also affects your ability to moderate. In other words, it greatly affects your ability to participate in the system.
If a single user can very quickly moderate a post to -1, it makes it pretty unlikely that many people will see the post. Also, while its justifiable to censor off-topic posts, flames, and comments with patently false information, a lot of comments also get modded down because they're disagreeable with the prevailing point of view.
The system isn't very good at highlighting good posts. It is, however, very effective at promoting groupthink and suppressing opposing points of view.
I have been moderating at Slashdot for years, and in that time, I have browsed countless 0 and -1 posts. Most of that is complete and utter crap. If you want to post on how evil black people are, if you want to spam every page with comments on "those republicans are evil", "she did it again", "obama wants to kill black people", then YES, you should go to -1, because that is absolute garbage that contributes absolutely nothing. Almost all of the good and insightful posts at 0 eventually wind up at score 5, even though it takes longer, which it should - if you're not willing to lend your words a reputation, then yeah, they have to get by purely on content, which will require you to appeal to whatever the kind of person who reads at 0 is in hopes that they mod you up. If you really want to lend substance to your posts, then you post with a name, because then you actually have some form of punishment for trolling. As to that, trolling itself on Slashdot is absolutely ridiculous these days; some asshole loser, with waaaaaaaaa too much time on her hands floods every story with complete garbage, and it's getting longer and longer. So yeah, it will get modded down, because nobody wants to see it; we can only hope at some point she realizes what a stupid and pointless endeavor it is.
Furthermore, the system of karma works exactly as it's supposed to. If you take up a side in a debate or whatever, you'll almost always get modded up by both sides if you can actually make decent and coherent points. When you write "stup4d obama he against allz de Trumpz", you are just as likely to get modded down as if you wrote s/obama/cruz. If you have been modded down so incredibly often that you have -1 and can only post twice a day, well, maybe you should rethink what you're writing. If 99.99% of people hate it, then just maybe there's something wrong with it - I find it hard to believe someone is so incredibly special that we all immediately, all 99.99% of us, vote down their posts because we're so dumb we don't see the enlightenment in the above. For example, if you flood the story with a bunch of stupid political posts that have absolutely no relation or bearing with the story.
Third, moderation never deletes a post, only hides it. If you are genuinely confident in what you've written, then obviously that's not a problem; you know that anyone who wants to here your side of the story can easily find it by searching at 0. If your genuine goal is to contribute something, then you're obviously focusing on writing good content and not on how high you ca
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."