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Social Media Giants Step Up Joint Fight Against Extremist Content (reuters.com)
Social media giants Facebook, Google's YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft said on Monday they were forming a global working group to combine their efforts to remove terrorist content from their platforms. From a report: Responding to pressure from governments in Europe and the United States after a spate of militant attacks, the companies said they would share technical solutions for removing terrorist content, commission research to inform their counter-speech efforts and work more with counter-terrorism experts. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism "will formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN," the companies said in a statement.
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As long as they have a good definition of terrorist. And they'll need to explain the difference between terrorist and freedom fighter/revolutionary/protester.
I thought I came to Slashdot, not reddit. My mistake.
They're outraged at the thought of censorship, denouncing the authoritarian agenda, and otherwise pretending to stand up for freedom.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8...
You are welcome on my lawn.
That is not an AC post! Well not really. Jeez, never seen so many people in my life afraid to say who they are....
Caution: Contents under pressure
They work so many hours and don't take vacation time.
Yes, they do. As a black guy with a demanding wife, I've been fired from four jobs so far since she wanted to take a long weekend off. I chose her over my employer. The best job I've lost so far was at Microsoft Azure that was within walking distance of our apartment. They wouldn't allow me time off, so I said I was taking it anyway since I earned it, then they fired me. Washington state law doesn't require them to pay-out accrued vacation time, so I lost a lot of money by doing that. Still worth it.
Without the social media to guide them, how will the defenders of the 1% find the evil terrorists? It's not like they are doing any intelligence work or police work. They need the obvious. They need people to shout online that they are angry. They need people to stand up in online public places and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"
That's how they nab 'em.
...omphaloskepsis often...
And they'll need to explain the difference between terrorist and freedom fighter/revolutionary/protester.
How do so few people have access to a dictionary?
terrorism
: the unlawful use or threat of violence especially against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion
freedom fighter
: a person who takes part in a resistance movement against an oppressive political or social establishment
protest
: a complaint, objection, or display of unwillingness usually to an idea or a course of action
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You know, nazi trollbots. The "politically acceptable in 2017" astroturfing of every issue with racial invective and fear of the other, ridiculous assertions made for shock value and public discord and no other goal. At some point we have a choice between unfettered speech and a dual-insurgency that has no interest in legitimate society, because allowing a certain level of degeneration in public discourse is tantamount to granting extremists free reign and in fact ownership of those faculties and medias. It's difficult to define but easy to spot, like (most) pornography. It certainly doesn't benefit from an arbitrary authoritarianism, but there absolutely has to be some mediating force or limitation on such speech not only because it results in violent rhetoric and in fact violence, but because it IS AIMED at achieving those ends, directly. It is defined by that motive alone. That motive is, in fact, a crime in our society.
Censorship does nothing to help convince people, it only strengthens their argument.
Leave it in place. Mark it as extremist and provide counter arguments side by side.
they will find this shit somewhere and read it with out you...
don't do the totalitarian bull shit.
The plutocrats are challenging you, will you defend yourself?
Unless we destroy the ignorance of the underclass, they will be the death of the planet
So only white people can be racist?
You racist bastard! Black people can be anything white people can be, they are not unable to be anything just because they're black! Get over your white privilege!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because we learned that corporations are much like political parties: Killing the guy at the top doesn't accomplish jack shit. There's always someone willing to take the spot and usually he's worse. Look at the development at MS. You thought Bill is the antichrist. Mostly because you didn't know Ballmer back then.
And if we had known what that Indian bozo turns it into, we would have chanted "developers, developers, developers" with monkey boy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You want to kill me? Our corporate drinking game includes the word "cyber" (among other meaningless buzzwords). I mean, how else do you survive the average management bullshit speech?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Amazing how the Jewish Anti-Defamation league can post two pages with the same content (one pretending to be from Israel and the other from the Palestinians) and the Israeli page gets pulled while the Palestinian page stays. YouTube came in and demonetized all the MGTOW channels, deleted many of the gun channels, and anything else not part of the socialist orthodoxy.
Make no mistake, this is CENSORSHIP.
I mean, how else do you survive the average management bullshit speech?
I usually pick a spot and at stair at it... but it looks like I am listening.
stare*... coffee is a helluva drug.
My idea to a Knight News Challenge on Libraries : https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Create a browser addon so when people post to the web they can send a copy for storage and hosting by a network of local libraries."
Sad that the Knight News Foundation has changed their software and so all the old contributions are no longer available. Hard to respect a group like that which takes so much hard work by so many people and just dumps it. It's an example of the very thing that contribution was about -- the need for distributed backups. Glad that info is still findable in archive.org -- until perhaps the Knight News Foundation puts up a broad robots.txt and makes it all inaccessible.
---- More details on the idea
Describe your project.
There are two many single points of failure on the internet for collections of important knowledge. For example, years of posts to Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, MetaFilter, or SoylentNews would all be lost if those websites were to be shut down. We have an answer to that challenge.
While the Internet Archive is backing up some of the internet, it is another single point of failure. We propose developing data standards, software applications, coordination protocols. and hardware specifications so every local library in the world can participate in backing up part of the internet. While that brings up many copyright concerns, we have an approach to deal with that.
We propose making web browser addon applications major web browsers. This browser addon would make it easy for people posting content to any website on the internet to send a copy for safe keeping to their local library (or other access gateway). From there, the content would be distributed across the distributed library network. Any previously published content they have written could also be added to this system using that browser app. The content would be sent a standardized form for indexing and linking with other content using semantic information. Users would specify a Creative Commons license or similar free license for their content when they contributed the content. Each data item would be assigned a unique hash for its content to help ensure its integrity and retrievability (similar to how the Git source control system stores information).
Each local library might only store terabytes of information (likely using Apache Hadoop and perhaps Apache Accumulo or similar software). But, together as a network, thousands of local libraries could store the world's knowledge in a reliable distributed way. Even one library would have the absolutely most important data for that locality, and any few libraries would have most of the popular data across the network.
How does this project advance the library field?
Libraries have historically kept paper copies of the world's information. There were multiple copies of every published book archived across the library network even if each library typically only had one copy of only some of the total. This project will help libraries do the same for the world's digital information -- with each library having part of a distributed whole. In a somewhat holographic way, each library would maintain a copy of the most important information for its local patrons, while also serving as a backup for some of the rest of the data from outside its locality.
Who is the audience and what are their information needs?
The global web community, The Internet Archive. The need is to have reliable backups of freely published digital information.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
https://chomsky.info/200401__/
"CHOMSKY: It's close to a historical universal that the term "terror" is used for their terror against us and our clients, not our terror against them. Heads of states can qualify as "terrorists," when they are official enemies."
https://chomsky.info/20011018-...
"Well that brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That's terrorism. That's a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that. The problem is that it can't be accepted because if you accept that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize the other day, you will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting time on this and really get down to it.
But there's a problem. If you use the official definition of terrorism in the comprehensive treaty you are going to get completely the wrong results. So that can't be done. In fact, it is even worse than that. If you take a look at the definition of Low Intensity Warfare which is official US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of what I just read. In fact, Low Intensity Conflict is just another name for terrorism. That's why all countries, as far as I know, call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter terrorism. We happen to call it Counter Insurgency or Low Intensity Conflict. So that's a serious problem. You can't use the actual definitions. You've got to carefully find a definition that doesn't have all the wrong consequences."
https://chomsky.info/200205__0... ...
"The problem of definition is held to be vexing and complex. There are, however, proposals that seem straightforward, for example, in US Army manuals, which define terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." NOTE{_US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction_ (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37), 1984.} That definition carries additional authority because of the timing: it was offered as the Reagan administration was intensifying its war on terrorism. The world has changed little enough so that these recent precedents should be instructive, even apart from the continuity of leadership from the first war on terrorism to its recent reincarnation.
Evidently, we have to qualify the definition of "terrorism" given in official sources: the term applies only to terrorism against _us_, not the terrorism we carry out against _them_. The practice is conventional, even among the most extreme mass murderers: the Nazis were protecting the population from terrorist partisans directed from abroad, while the Japanese were laboring selflessly to create an "earthly paradise" as they fought off the "Chinese bandits" terrorizing the peaceful people of Manchuria and their legitimate government. Exceptions would be hard to find.
The same convention applies to the war to exterminate the Nicaraguan cancer. On Law Day 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the US would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice, which went on to condemn his administration for its "u
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We are not in fear of "extremism". We are in fear of violence. So this initiative is already a lie, as stated. Is there any *practical* difference between this policy and creating a means of systematic censorship of political opinion on the internet? If not, we must oppose it.
The writeup went from 'extremist' to 'terrorist' effortlessly. As if these are in some way equivalent.
But no matter, this, in the U.S. is indistinguishable to me from prior restraint. Only the reality that these companies are not constrained by the First Amendment, and offer a service that need not actually abide by the First Amendment, saves them. It also should illuminate their operations. Facebook, for instance, cannot be considered a news organization. Oh, wait, they actually do publish news. Will they distinguish between protected news content and unprotected 'other' content? Can they? Is there a difference between a sponsored CNN post and the rantings of a college professor on their own page?
Indeed, is the CNN post news, commentary, opinion? Should it be protected by the First Amendment? Does Facebook, for example, have a responsibility, bound to permit it in its entirety, or can Facebook pick and choose CNN posts, edit them, suppress them, as it wishes? It does so with user content. Is that a violation of the First Amendment?
What makes my posts unworthy of constitutional protection on Facebook, but CNN's posts, which to so many are clearly biased opinion not fact, protected? Merely because they come from an organization that used to be considered a reliable news outlet?
This is a terrible thing for free speech, despite the attraction of suppressing terrorism and violence by shutting off the terrorists... But CNN and other 'news outlets' have, recently, published reports of seemingly reasonable people in the US calling for or supporting the assassination of elected officials. Do we actually intend to suppress those statements? Why?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Just saw that Rahiel Kasim, Scientific Programmer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, made a plugin like this -- yay!
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
===
I made a browser extension [1] that automatically archives bookmarks to archive.is or (currently Chromium only) locally as MHTML files.
[1]: https://github.com/rahiel/arch...
===
Seen here:
"Show HN: Tesoro -- Personal internet archive (tesoro.io)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
He was responding to other people with similar ideas for browser plugins.
Now we just need the local library infrastructure and data standards to connect to.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
from the article- "counter-speech efforts"
Do we really need to say more? The whole point of 'freedom of speech' is that who ever controls speech controls information. Speech never harms anyone, anyone can say or write whatever they want all day long and no one is harmed unless a) someone is somehow forced to listen or read, b) someone acts on the ideas in the speech. Speech is not the crime or even the real concern the actions are and should be.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
And in other news, people screamed and fainted at recent performances of 1984 on Broadway.
You should start playing bullshit bingo. It's great. Here's how you do it:
1. Get a bullshit bingo generator. Print a few of the bingo cards.
2. Distribute them in your office. Everyone gets about 5-10 sheets, depending on how long the speech it.
3. Bring the sheets to the speech, hide them in your ledger.
4. During the speech, you cross off the words that the speaker uses. You may only use the topmost sheet.
5. Once you have bingo, shuffle the sheet to the bottom and continue with the next sheet.
6. After the talk, go back to your office and compare the amount of sheets everyone has. Who managed to fill the fewest sheets has to pay the beers.
We started with just one sheet and indicating who is done by closing the ledger (and whoever was last had to pay) but that game was over after just ten minutes and hour long speeches can get awfully long when you got nothing sensible to do. Now you have a whole security team hanging on the lips of whatever manager or markedroid is babbling, we look highly motivated, we look like we're taking notes and we actually have quite a bit of fun. Not to mention we get beer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
lol, that's pretty good.