Other than the obvious discussions around free speech(very valid points), do we have any real studies on the actual effects of social media? What if social media platforms didn't exist. Would the world have been a better place?
I don't know the answer, but atleast from my observations it feels as if almost every country in the world has moved to the right but by bit. We have moved away from globalization and are into protectionism. Is social media to be blamed for this? I think it has certainly played it's part for sure.
One advantage of social media I see is that it has allowed people to create D2C businesses.
Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them.
As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?
Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.
Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.
In the specific context of Nepal, because it is clearly the next step in consolidation of power and move to authoritarianism.
The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.
It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.
Social media algorithms are tuned to maximize engagements and this is easily done by keeping the user happy. This creates echo chambers and ends up polarizing users. Not everyone gets polarized but a vast majority of users become victims of confirmation bias, which leads to an increasingly fragmented and divisive society. Am I wrong?
It's pretty strange how the floodgates opened in 2025 and seemingly every government decided to try this to some extent in unison. I wonder what their real reason is for this and how much governments discussed this together.
It's because the rest of the world has realised how deeply tied Western and Chinese BigTech are deeply tied to US and Chinese intelligence agencies, respectively (surveillance capitalism). The active lobbying made by the US government against data privacy laws (especially to store data locally and not share it with foreign entities) is just one example of a red flag that has lead to this.
(I fully support this move - there is absolutely no way any foreign government should have control and influence over your - communication platform and your media platforms.)
But surveillance capitalism wants unrestricted access, and they will gladly share with authorities in order to profit from it. They don't want governments to cut them off.
People in the west are so used to freedom of speech and so focused on problems with social media. They miss the fact, that many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat. They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
People in the west are also incredibly naive about issues around speech, and even more naive about the effects of propaganda, which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.
For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.
If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?
Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.
This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens
People who have never seen propaganda in action don't understand: it cannot work (the way these states want it to work) in the presence of real information channels, even if that's just private conversation. That's why socialist states arrest people for just talking privately to an agent about the government.
So yes, you have free speech if major news players coordinate whatever. If on social networks you get banned. Absolutely. That's problem 1 for authoritarian regimes. This is not something any authoritarian nation will relent on even slightly.
Second they have a problem with there being any "players" at all. Because you do get different perspectives, most of which don't match the governments. Compare the news in Israel with the "news" in Russia, or with Al Jazeera and you will see the difference. In Israel, there's maybe 5 major channels. But they hate each other. Pro and contra the war perspectives are represented. In Russia, there is no anti-war perspective. In Al Jazeera there is no one questioning how the government is spending money, there is no discussion on viewpoints, on anything in the middle east. There is no discussion of corruption either, in either Russia or Qatar. None.
This illustrates the problem of propaganda: everyone knows it's bullshit. Every Russian knows Russia is less democratic than a US TSA inspection. Everyone knows everything in Qatar is entirely, 100%, corrupt.
Propaganda will fail, certainly in the eyes of the government, if there is some, any way to get real information. And it doesn't matter if it's not easy. This is how it's always been in the US, because now people have some seriously rose colored glasses on how "true" US newspapers were in the early parts of the 20th century. Reality is that in the US bullshit always dominated the news cycle. This is not new.
Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government blocking them is akin to blocking free speech in the legal right itself.
Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?
I don’t really think of social media companies as being the public square. They are more like private clubs, just with really low standards for membership.
IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days.
The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their freedom of association, and avoid them. Online attempts at a public square tend to be pretty annoying, as a result.
These private clubs are the de-facto quasi-public square, is my point. In virtual space, the government is not hosting some sort of public social media so people are forced to use private corporations' services to voice their thoughts.
> Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square
This is a ridiculous assertion.
The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. It's still private property, though. If you show up in Aisle 6 trying to convert people to Mormonism, a Costco employee will ask you to leave and stop harassing their customers. Yes, the same principle applies to Twitter, Facebook, X, Truth Social and Instagram.
What gives you the right to leverage their private property as your soapbox? Because people on the sidewalk won't listen, and that hurts your feelings? They have a business, if you are using your speech in any way to obstruct the conduct of their thoroughfare then they can have you ejected. The cops will not listen to your tirade against multinational burger tyrants, they'll drop you off at the drunk tank. Your speech will never be unconditionally protected, not online or in real life.
It's not McDonald's either, a singular location does not serve billions. The difference between a physical and virtual location is one of scale. As for your other paragraph, the point is that these corporations have gotten so large and people depend on them so much that being banned on them is essentially akin to being exiled from the ability to have free speech in modern society, whatever restrictions you want to reasonably put on them. What is the alternative you want people to use if, like Nepal, the government bans social media platforms, that I have not already addressed?
With your linking of that xkcd, it's clear you're misunderstanding my point about legal vs natural rights, as I stated initially.
Many places in the USA, but not everywhere, have sidewalks around the parking lot that are going to be publicly owned so you can set up with signs and a megaphone there.
One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.
Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat
Yup, because it is a threat.
see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.
The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.
> Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
I would feel better about this type of activity being regulated. There is quite a bit of room for facebook to live up to higher standards and regulation to prevent that sort of behavior with out banning.
Might also be more a of a hassle to write and enforce the laws though than out right banning though.
The result of that for a country with a small market though might be facebook/similar voluntarily leaving the country/market though.
my general impression is that the greatest concern for china is people getting riled up about anything, and that leading to civil unrest. like what's happening in indonesia right now for example. therefore any kind of content that could get people upset is restricted. so effectively this means no doomscrolling. wechat has something that works like tiktok, and the content there is all positive, uplifting, educational or entertaining. probably just a addictive, mind you, but never once i have seen something that i would want to keep away from my kids.
If free speech in America goes away, the rest of the world will suffer for it as well.
People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.
The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.
Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.
Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.
Ref. the UK ('British people'), there's currently a thing where peacfully protesting a ban will get you arrested (I have a lot of sympathy for the police in this case, whatever they do will be wrong in the eyes of one side or the other).
One thing that annoys me is when a police officer, even here in the US clearly does not agree with a law. I was under the impression in one of my government classes in college that police officers could in fact choose not to arrest someone, but a lot of the time they opt-out of making that decision for whatever reason. I never looked if in the UK it's similar, but it always bothers me more when a police officer is "just following orders" especially when at least here in the US, they can just not charge someone at their discretion, because sometimes the law is just wild.
We also see it with judges. Our system isn't perfect, but it allows for people who strongly believe a law is unjust to step in.
What part of the President threatening financial sanctions and jail time for speech makes you think we have this?
To the degree the American experiment has shown anything about free speech, it’s that it may not work uncensored broadly. At the end of the day, we voted against it.
It should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do. Unfortunately, that's not the only amendment we blindly violated.
> should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do
And it’s causing lots of problems with questionable benefit. Millions of people with no medical training and the critical thinking skills of a first generation LLM debating vaccines online is not productive.
I thought this [1] New Yorker profile of the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court was a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of how tech giants interact with less-powerful countries. Surely we all agree that free speech is not absolute (e.g. we could probably agree that there should exist some boundary with respect to libel, threats/violent speech acts, national security, corporations as legal persons with free speech rights, the right or duty of platforms to regulate content, influence of money in politics...) and that therefore states have a legitimate interest in regulating free speech.
The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.
and the governments of the west are most supportive of authoritarian and military regimes. Why are they silent over what is happening in Pakistan? Pakistan election was stollen by Pakistan army in day light robbery. And what happened before the election is another story. Pakistan is going through worst form of its human right/freedom of speech/democratic abuses since its independence and west seems to be careless. Just because people of Pakistan support a person who is nationalist. So, for them a dictator is better than him.
Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)
And equally, we in the west are so used to genuine free expression of ideas we assume everyone who speaks is real and genuine. Meanwhile, outside actors are weaponising social media to divide us, errode trust and spread conspiracies. There are worse things that banning American media platforms - look at what they are doing to America.
Inside actors are also spreading misinfo, rage bait, propaganda and general degeneracy of culture. They're blaming outsiders while doing the same or even worse.
What freedom of speech? The "first world countries" in Europe are slowly turning up the surveillance state to not let people online if they don't provide their IDs, they want to surveil every private conversation you have at home, if it uses the internet in any way, they'd love banning encryption, VPNs, etc... but you have freedom of speech? Except when talking about thinks that are deemed "pro enemy" (Russia or whoever it is this time around).
Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.
Democracy cannot survive unless we find a way to ensure we know when are listening to the people that are part of our demos and NOT people that are outside of it, actively trying to destroy it.
We had freedom of speech in the west before the Internet. That speech was not anonymous.
I did. Your point puts national security of a boogeyman us vs them as paramount.
Your point gives the authoritian the ability to use "the red scare" as tactic to ensure no subversives appear. No one to challenge their power. We must monitor all to find "the infiltrated enemy".
Your bullshit is not new. It's been done all throughout history and it's always just an excuse to suppress threats to individual power. Political parties are proscribed because "they're working for foreign actors and we deem them to be treasonous".
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
I couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of papers the founders of the US published to argue against tyrannical government were written anonymously.
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent. Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron. The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
> This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent.
So we agree: authoritarian regimes are a gargantuan problem, not stripping away anonymity.
> Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
Online predator almost killed my child - this is not a "very minor problem". At least not for me.
> This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron.
It is not bout things _I_ don't like but things that _we (society)_ don't like. In my country nazi symbols are forbidden in public space and I think it is a good thing.
So yes - "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions".
> The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
Why not? There are countries which governments are elected by citizens and are _trusted_ by citizens. Why would I want to be anonymous if I _trust_ people I elected?
Almost killed your one child. Authoritarian governments have murdered many more.
At some point the disingenous concerned parents need to start dealing with their own parenting instead of pretending we need to live in 1984 just because your bad parenting requires it.
Your way has many more deaths of government dissenters. Stop using "death" as a scare tactic. Much like the "war on terror" supporters, it's a fraud.
I don’t know about any deaths (or imprisonment) of government dissenters in Poland (where I come from). Do you know any?
Maybe oppressive government and lack of freedom of speech is a problem in your country, I don’t know that and I’m sorry for you. My suggestion would be though, that you try to fix your government instead of anonymously requiring online anonymity because you’re afraid of your own government.
I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech.
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
That's disingenous bullshit. From the likes of people who use their power imbalance to pretend their propaganda is truth and dissent is dangerous.
"Freedom of speech is ok but what you're doing is different" is the first step
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
You only need to pay attention to history to see what political totalitarianism means when there's no anonymity.
It's way worse than online trolls.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
Said the dictator, who was accountable to no one. Those who hold the power shield themselves from accountability and want to use it as an excuse to prevent dissent.
Democracy for quite some time thrived in US (and for some shorter time in other western countries) even though there was no anonymity while free speech was guaranteed by the state.
In other words: anonymity is not a solution for lack of free speech. I should be free to say whatever I want without being forced to hide behind a nickname.
Secondly: I think you are happy to not being the target of online violence. I have experience with teens on the brink of suicide caused by it.
Ah. This is it, folks. You're a liar and you project your lies. Incapable of realising how people have lived shit in history.
Go google "disappeared people in military dictatorships" and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn something about authoritians and how they dealt with "subversives".
Not everyone here lives in the US.
Your account is 17 hours old and you want to find the "enemy within". Aren't you the enemy within?
Demosntate you're not a foreign actor, according to your own rules, post your full name and address. Or maybe that's a stupid thing to do and anonymity is valuable?
>They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
Please post your evidence of this regarding Nepal. Also, are you suggesting that Nepal has an authoritarian government? Picking up a book may be helpful, as they literally abolished their authoritarian government in 1990 and their monarchy in 2008.
It's almost like it's a country of 300 million people with a diverse set of views.
The group that outright wants social media banned in the US, talks down Zuckerberg, etc, by and large will be perfectly fine with other countries banning it if not celebrate it. You have built a strawman.
The "free speech" cohort is largely anti-banning. They want platforms like X, where anything goes, and are often quite militant about their views on this subject.
I for one think both "social media is bad" and "free speech is important" which puts me in a real bind. Turns out when you let bad faith actors accumulate billions, the outcomes of the systems they create aren't always great.
It's just people here deciding pretty blindly that the two are mutually exclusive, but they're not, any more than eg "Nestle is a bad company" and "I like Nescafe" would be mutually exclusive.
And there's always the question of who gets to be the arbiter of those things.
If the latter were consistent it'd be much more interesting. X banned most large leftist accounts after Musk took over, so like most "free speech" advocates they really mean they want to be able to say hateful rightwing speech.
Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.
I was just thinking the same thing. This looks like a healthy dose of intervention. I am biased however in that I believe smaller groups of people should run their own forums and chat servers to slightly minimize the Corporatocracy social manipulation especially before AI gets a strong foothold. Most have a few geeks in their own social circle that can run a tiny forum and chat server. Less birds of a feather [1]
Sad to see anti free speech sentiments all over the world. It was constrained to only some areas but now it’s normalized even in places like the UK. I guess with all that’s happening, Nepal doesn’t surprise me.
Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, say, Fox News an acceptable use of free speech. Plenty of countries where the regulator would find Fox News unacceptable rank higher than the USA on freedom & democracy indices, so there was always going to be pushback from other countries if the USA attempted to impose the Fox-Newsification of social media on others.
Freedom of speech existed before almost everything. Before the wheel, before the airplane, before newspapers, before radio and TV, and even before pen and paper. I wonder how much less free we'd feel if those things were banned as well?
These platforms themselves don't support free speech. On top of that everything is now heavily algorithmically driven. Everyone is pushed to consume the same type of content while thinking they have free will in their choice not realising they are being subtly manipulated right below their ability to recognise it.
At this point, YouTube probably has a better idea what you will consume next than you yourself do.
On the one hand, curtailing free speech is a problem and a lot of governments have started doing it to a massive degree.
On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
In that regard I do believe that banning them is a net benefit to society, but I fear that for the most part it is done out of the wrong intentions with more sinister goals.
That has always been a feature of having free speech. If only "good" free speech is allowed, it's not free speech. Much of it is going to be disagreeable to some people's views and/or objectively harmful in some ways. There is allowance for a red line, but it only covers a sliver of the universe. That of course begs the parallel to social media being harmful and over the red line - the equivalent of "yelling fire in a movie theater" - and this worthy of a ban within a free speech framework, but I think that is disingenuous, and it's more like banning harmful political tabloids and misinformation (which is at the root of the history of free speech itself).
Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).
I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.
> On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
There're plenty of things far worse than social network which society has found to acceptable for many decades if not centuries. Things like alcohol, carbonated drinks, sugar etc are all consumed by people in whatever amount they want knowingly full well how much damage it might cause them. We don't need a few people baby-sitting our consumption of diet, be it food or information.
i believe a true(tm) free speech platform would allow itself to be flooded with spam. few spaces like that exist sadly, and they're rarely intentional :(
Lol. Every fucking forum has people constantly bellyache about the moderation systems. Hivemind is a dead giveaway for thoughtless criticism. It's so tiresome. If it's flagged on HN it's almost always lowest common denominator mindless drivel or flamebait. No one serious would advocate for a system where comments can't be flagged as such.
You should enable showdead in your user preferences, I think you may be surprised to see what gets flagged.
I think the big issue is new accounts aren't allowed to downvote posts, but can flag them. In effect, the "flag" merely becomes the new downvote, leading to unpopular but relatively high-efffort coments becoming dead and invisible rather than downvoted.
Honestly just switching the two around (anyone can downvote, but only 500+ karma can flag) would go a long way to ensure only actual low-effort posts and spam get flagged, and unpopular posts get downvoted. As it is now, I rarely see an unpopular opinion that was downvoted and isn't already flagged.
"Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
I wonder what his opinion on pro-Palestinians getting banned on twitter is? Is it different then? What about the canning of Stephen Colbert?
I love these smug posts about how "free speech as a concept only applies to the government censoring people" that were made a couple years ago, where now the same figures are unbelievably opposed to sites like Twitter "excercising their right" to ban dissidents.
Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> "Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
Did you mean to demonstrate this with that strawman of a quote? Not exactly a stellar display of free speech's utility and benefits I'd say. I'm sure you will also passionately go around telling everyone how you just got unfairly censored for it if you even manage to get it flagged. It's especially rich considering this started with the dude above pulling out the hivemind card, which is also notoriously useful and productive of course.
this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.
> The government now requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances. “We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they don’t listen to us?” said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, a spokesman for the ministry.
I wonder what were the platforms expecting, ignoring local government.
You have to play by the rules society agrees on. Or do the companies think they are too big for consequence?
So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. Obviously a bad thing.
At the same time, a 2 year old law that still hasn't convinced the companies with valuations higher than my countries GDP to throw like $10k to set up an office here and maintain it with less than $5k a month to keep their services running. It doesn't feel right to fight to keep them around either.
PS: The previous paragraphs might have portrayed the current government in a (deservingly) negative light. I wonder if I'll have to start browsing hackernews with a VPN in the future.
Weren’t only the platforms that failed to register with the government banned? As I understand it, if they comply with the new regulations, they should be unblocked.
Facebook for a couple things, IG for keeping up with friends, sharing pics with friends. And a carefully curated YouTube subscription list. Only stuff that's worth watching: People I can relate to, have no ego, and are just having a good time sharing what they do. I gravitate toward hackaday worthy stuff and off-road exploration type videos. I limit intake of news sites, and instead try to focus on living my own life, accomplishing goals that I have set, and focusing on improving myself so I can help others.
Also, being a Gen-X-er who grew up without any of this stuff, I have to snicker just a little bit at people being up in arms about a ban on things that didn't exist 20-30 years ago. I know there is FAR more nuance to it. I simply found the thought humorous at a simplistic level.
I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.
Because humans have the capacity to compartmentalize and reason about things despite their gravitas, provided the opportunity and capability to do so.
For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.
There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.
Since you added context to my comment that I didn't ask for, I'm going to add some to yours that you didn't ask for.
Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.
You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.
Sorry, but I suppose there is an ugly thing I should add, geocrasher.
It remains very unfortunate that I came to pick a simile about hunger not knowing about your past - to signify in perching_aix's case that abstincence better be voluntary and in yours that loss of something achieved remains a bad thing.
The ugly thing: about "having no idea what I'm talking about",
we are both in this world together - and the rest. We all have seen hell and misery, in the different forms that chance and the evolution of facts inflicted us. I felt immediate participation to your story. Do not suppose, for good or bad, that you are an exception.
We all have seen and lived the most horrible things.
Of course the simile I found to try and show that "look, this branch does not seem appropriate for the context" was random. I thought of a few, in time constraints, and the one that looked the best of the bunch happened to be the one of "starvation". It could have anything - surely you understand.
> You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to
But I was talking of the matter in context, and the simile, as said, was logic, not comparative.
Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't.
Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).
> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't
"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).
So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.
> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts
It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.
> a coercion over a population
This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.
> the possibility of attempted population control
Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.
The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.
> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war
Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?
> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.
Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?
You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.
> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.
And where did you intend to go? In front of "State cuts the services" you went "Oh I get advantages staying without them". Yes but see, there are 30 million people there that may have had different choice, and some of them with rational choice (and fully evidently so: the World Video Archive is in the ban), and those 30Mln are within other billions that may be in a similar situation. (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
> [Missing out on social media] is quite literally the bare fact itself
Very certainly not: Nepal has blocked YouTube... Being forbidden access the worldwide video library cannot be reduced to "cannot be able to post comments" (that many serious YT users will not do, not even having an account, by the way).
> a characterization
Gross logical fault: there is a coercion in there, and reframing it as protection does not remove the presence of the coercion, which remains a debatable problem. And by going towards "protection" you are confirming my point («not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war»), which is again an extremely serious problem.
> I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses
And a number will reveal that the situation can be construed as serious. Were you to defend the idea that it were not serious, relativism will not help the substantial solidity of the argument.
> Did I ever question its seriousness?
Well, look, if the article is "they blocked the services", and you go you "feel better after doing without them", that heavily suggests you downplaying the seriousness!
Of course we could also have discussions about "could we revaluate the optimal level of those services in life balance", but maybe really not in front of "the State has decided for you"!
> there's lots of downsides to these platforms
Yes. That is also extensively discussed. But it is not in context: here, the matter is something decided for somebody else, and that there are a number of bigger problems (e.g. organized misinformation) that overseeing entities (States) will mismanage in their inability to counter them.
> Wake-up calls
You will probably be reassured that many of us are very much aware that having released transnational masses of substantial infants into echo chambers - to mention one of the foremost consequences - is a hell of a problem.
Where I said I did. I explained it to you several times over. I can only do so much if you're not willing to listen or are unable to relate.
> (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
Cool - and if the same thing happened in Russia and I posted this to my Russian mates on Discord [1], as it happened before, they'd laugh their ass off first, and then we'd shift to discussing workarounds. According to what you explained so far of your world model though, things are either inappropriate or appropriate, and they are observer invariant and temporally static. I guess this would make my Russian mates wrong about what they themselves think or something?
Not very persuasive. I'm also not really sure why you think these peers on these pages need explaining why this situation is bad, or why they'd benefit from reading another endless charade, enumerating the same tired points, and making them spiral even further (since according to you, this was definitively coercive, so there's nothing they can do anyhow). Why there isn't and should not be a space for this specific angle, as it is inappropriate according to you, and even though it is not practically possible for you to have consulted those peers to get their opinion, you're just speaking in their name.
> Gross logical fault
There is a word for that, it's called a fallacy. I did not engage in any, which you must have also noticed, hence why you didn't say that instead.
I feel our "discussion" has run its course.
[1] Yes I did see Discord was blocked in Nepal. Please apply reasoning to fill the blanks.
You think you show much hearing on this side? In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple. The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
> I did not engage in any
Apart from the one I pointed to and the other ones I have not mentioned? Not just precising the difference between fallacies and logical faults, but all the attributions of intention you expressed you construed, such as «explaining why this situation is bad». The latter was only pointed out to you because you clearly do not seem to get it, if you go "there are plus sides on not using social media" in front of of a government ban that closes the doors to a critical part of information to a population.
I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media. The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
> In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple.
I understand that that's your position. Would have been pretty hard to miss. I just feel otherwise. I'd think that's been hard to miss too.
> The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
That's regrettable. Unfortunately, you've spent all the empathy I had for you regarding this, so that's something you'll need to reflect on on your own terms if you want to figure it out.
> Apart from the one I pointed to
No, including that one, as that isn't one.
> because you clearly do not seem to get it
I'm not responsible for empathizing with myself on your behalf. I very clearly do get it, which you'd be able to appreciate, if you bothered to even consider its possibility.
> I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban"
I have not. Nepal is not what my world revolves around, and I've been working all day.
Not sure that's the most appropriate way to mention that by the way, you almost sound excited for it, as if those 14 people having deceased now lets you "prove" your point. Would be pretty dishonest and inciteful to frame it this way, right? Then why are you doing it to others?
> over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media
Can you be bothered to restrain yourself from encoding your conviction into every sentence supposedly meant to persuade? It's like announcing the decision before the trial.
It'd go an awful long way in at least making it appear like you actually wanted to persuade someone, rather than just talk about how hurt you feel and expecting to be finally heard for it by magical happenstance.
I get it, you think I should be treating this as if children were dying, as if there was a famine, whatever. I don't want to. I think that's beyond asinine and pointless. It can still be, and is, serious despite this, it's not a race. It can even escalate. It's also not just a single modality, things can be serious in different ways. Would be awfully cool if I didn't need to wade through your loaded sentences to be graciously allowed to have my own position, and not be portrayed as some heartless asshole for it.
> The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
I disagree. Not sure how your insistence that we were being insensitive, and how that means we shouldn't have shared these things, helps these folks though.
By the way, you do recognize just how utterly ironic is it to campaign for us not to talk about something in a thread about censorship, right? I restrained myself from mentioning it so far, as a way to show some solidarity. But it's clearly not being appreciated, so fuck it.
Edit: I have since read the news on the unrest in Nepal. It did way more to contextualize this and why my comment might have been insensitive and misguided than this "discussion" ever could have. Turns out, mentioning that the place is volatile and despotic would have been pretty key info. It's still extremely hindsight heavy though. Like do you have even the remotest concept just how similar this news was in this thread to many many others before it? Where the place wasn't so unabashedly authoritarian that police is licensed to fire live ammo at citizens, and didn't result in an unrest and death? So far removed in perspective, no shit I didn't have a clue why you are making a scene! If this is you "raising awareness", there's a LOT you should improve on, holy shit.
My comment was not about suffering, war, starvation, or anything of the like. You've clearly added your own context and then judged me for it. Great job.
The context I added was that of the facts I construed from the shreds of events and opinions I met. They are not there to be compared to "starvation" as a parameter with scalars of "what is worse": they are in the same cone of "something bad happening", in front of which simplistic dismissals are puzzling.
-- Select your best channels and RSS (or similar) on them.
-- Promote politically that the informational wealth the YT platform contains¹ should be treated like the rest of public knowledge and archived by the State for preservation.
¹(Picking a few example channels: "Manufacturing Intellect", "British Pathé", "Intelligence Squared"...)
You have simply heavily missed that you are keeping yourself on voluntary diet while the submission context is that, within a complex frame of reasons and regulation attempts, somebody has placed a population on enforced lack of service.
When something like this happen the companies affected should terminate the accounts of all government officials under the guise "if the population can't use our site, neither can you who work in the government"
Discussion (275 points, 2 days ago, 262 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137363
Other than the obvious discussions around free speech(very valid points), do we have any real studies on the actual effects of social media? What if social media platforms didn't exist. Would the world have been a better place? I don't know the answer, but atleast from my observations it feels as if almost every country in the world has moved to the right but by bit. We have moved away from globalization and are into protectionism. Is social media to be blamed for this? I think it has certainly played it's part for sure.
One advantage of social media I see is that it has allowed people to create D2C businesses.
Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them.
As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?
Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.
Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.
And full of bots. So you think that you have discussion with a human but it is a bot :)
Social networks are waste of time and source of anger combined with cheap dopamin. Lovely. It is what is really good for your health /s
I don’t think it’s a coincedence that both social media and conservatism thrive on viral fear and outrage. The two are most certainly connected.
The world would probably be a very different place today if instead hope and joy were the bread and butter of Twitter, Reddit, etc.
In the specific context of Nepal, because it is clearly the next step in consolidation of power and move to authoritarianism.
The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.
It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.
Social media algorithms are tuned to maximize engagements and this is easily done by keeping the user happy. This creates echo chambers and ends up polarizing users. Not everyone gets polarized but a vast majority of users become victims of confirmation bias, which leads to an increasingly fragmented and divisive society. Am I wrong?
It's pretty strange how the floodgates opened in 2025 and seemingly every government decided to try this to some extent in unison. I wonder what their real reason is for this and how much governments discussed this together.
It's because the rest of the world has realised how deeply tied Western and Chinese BigTech are deeply tied to US and Chinese intelligence agencies, respectively (surveillance capitalism). The active lobbying made by the US government against data privacy laws (especially to store data locally and not share it with foreign entities) is just one example of a red flag that has lead to this.
(I fully support this move - there is absolutely no way any foreign government should have control and influence over your - communication platform and your media platforms.)
you don’t really need a lot of collusion. Control of the media and communication channels is a natural impulse of authoritarian goverments.
And who do you think is controlling most of these platforms?
> Control of the media and communication channels is a natural impulse of authoritarian goverments.
and of surveillance capitalism. Funny how they collude with one another.
But surveillance capitalism wants unrestricted access, and they will gladly share with authorities in order to profit from it. They don't want governments to cut them off.
[flagged]
have you tried checking?
People in the west are so used to freedom of speech and so focused on problems with social media. They miss the fact, that many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat. They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
People in the west are also incredibly naive about issues around speech, and even more naive about the effects of propaganda, which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.
For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.
If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?
Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.
This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens
> which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.
Read up on the founding of the US and who funded printing all the propaganda flyers, newspapers, and pamphlets. That stuff wasn't cheap back then!
People who have never seen propaganda in action don't understand: it cannot work (the way these states want it to work) in the presence of real information channels, even if that's just private conversation. That's why socialist states arrest people for just talking privately to an agent about the government.
So yes, you have free speech if major news players coordinate whatever. If on social networks you get banned. Absolutely. That's problem 1 for authoritarian regimes. This is not something any authoritarian nation will relent on even slightly.
Second they have a problem with there being any "players" at all. Because you do get different perspectives, most of which don't match the governments. Compare the news in Israel with the "news" in Russia, or with Al Jazeera and you will see the difference. In Israel, there's maybe 5 major channels. But they hate each other. Pro and contra the war perspectives are represented. In Russia, there is no anti-war perspective. In Al Jazeera there is no one questioning how the government is spending money, there is no discussion on viewpoints, on anything in the middle east. There is no discussion of corruption either, in either Russia or Qatar. None.
This illustrates the problem of propaganda: everyone knows it's bullshit. Every Russian knows Russia is less democratic than a US TSA inspection. Everyone knows everything in Qatar is entirely, 100%, corrupt.
Propaganda will fail, certainly in the eyes of the government, if there is some, any way to get real information. And it doesn't matter if it's not easy. This is how it's always been in the US, because now people have some seriously rose colored glasses on how "true" US newspapers were in the early parts of the 20th century. Reality is that in the US bullshit always dominated the news cycle. This is not new.
Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government blocking them is akin to blocking free speech in the legal right itself.
Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?
I don’t really think of social media companies as being the public square. They are more like private clubs, just with really low standards for membership.
IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days.
The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their freedom of association, and avoid them. Online attempts at a public square tend to be pretty annoying, as a result.
These private clubs are the de-facto quasi-public square, is my point. In virtual space, the government is not hosting some sort of public social media so people are forced to use private corporations' services to voice their thoughts.
> Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square
This is a ridiculous assertion.
The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. It's still private property, though. If you show up in Aisle 6 trying to convert people to Mormonism, a Costco employee will ask you to leave and stop harassing their customers. Yes, the same principle applies to Twitter, Facebook, X, Truth Social and Instagram.
> The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square.
But it's not at such a scale though. It does not have one location with billions of members.
Okay, McDonalds then. "Billions served"
What gives you the right to leverage their private property as your soapbox? Because people on the sidewalk won't listen, and that hurts your feelings? They have a business, if you are using your speech in any way to obstruct the conduct of their thoroughfare then they can have you ejected. The cops will not listen to your tirade against multinational burger tyrants, they'll drop you off at the drunk tank. Your speech will never be unconditionally protected, not online or in real life.
As always, refer to the relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
It's not McDonald's either, a singular location does not serve billions. The difference between a physical and virtual location is one of scale. As for your other paragraph, the point is that these corporations have gotten so large and people depend on them so much that being banned on them is essentially akin to being exiled from the ability to have free speech in modern society, whatever restrictions you want to reasonably put on them. What is the alternative you want people to use if, like Nepal, the government bans social media platforms, that I have not already addressed?
With your linking of that xkcd, it's clear you're misunderstanding my point about legal vs natural rights, as I stated initially.
True but you can speak out in front of the Costco. There's no equivalent for fb.
I think they also own the land out in front of the shop.
Many places in the USA, but not everywhere, have sidewalks around the parking lot that are going to be publicly owned so you can set up with signs and a megaphone there.
> They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is great, but not if its used by your neighbours to stir up trouble. (the civil war was long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War)
One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.
Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat
Yup, because it is a threat.
see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.
The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.
> Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
I would feel better about this type of activity being regulated. There is quite a bit of room for facebook to live up to higher standards and regulation to prevent that sort of behavior with out banning.
Might also be more a of a hassle to write and enforce the laws though than out right banning though.
The result of that for a country with a small market though might be facebook/similar voluntarily leaving the country/market though.
I heard TikTok has a Chinese version which promotes educational content, has time restrictions etc.
The "export" version... not so much.
I have also heard (but never verified) this statement. Curious to know if it's true.
my general impression is that the greatest concern for china is people getting riled up about anything, and that leading to civil unrest. like what's happening in indonesia right now for example. therefore any kind of content that could get people upset is restricted. so effectively this means no doomscrolling. wechat has something that works like tiktok, and the content there is all positive, uplifting, educational or entertaining. probably just a addictive, mind you, but never once i have seen something that i would want to keep away from my kids.
If free speech in America goes away, the rest of the world will suffer for it as well.
People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.
The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.
Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.
Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.
Ref. the UK ('British people'), there's currently a thing where peacfully protesting a ban will get you arrested (I have a lot of sympathy for the police in this case, whatever they do will be wrong in the eyes of one side or the other).
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rvly00440o
One thing that annoys me is when a police officer, even here in the US clearly does not agree with a law. I was under the impression in one of my government classes in college that police officers could in fact choose not to arrest someone, but a lot of the time they opt-out of making that decision for whatever reason. I never looked if in the UK it's similar, but it always bothers me more when a police officer is "just following orders" especially when at least here in the US, they can just not charge someone at their discretion, because sometimes the law is just wild.
We also see it with judges. Our system isn't perfect, but it allows for people who strongly believe a law is unjust to step in.
> If free speech in America goes away
What part of the President threatening financial sanctions and jail time for speech makes you think we have this?
To the degree the American experiment has shown anything about free speech, it’s that it may not work uncensored broadly. At the end of the day, we voted against it.
It should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do. Unfortunately, that's not the only amendment we blindly violated.
> should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do
And it’s causing lots of problems with questionable benefit. Millions of people with no medical training and the critical thinking skills of a first generation LLM debating vaccines online is not productive.
I had a conversation with a talented UK startup developer about a month ago at a defense industry event.
He mentioned wanting to move to the US. I assumed smugly “must be for our business environment or contractual benefits” and said as much.
He quickly responded with his concerns about being arrested for social media posts, and mentioned how many people were being arrested in the UK.
No discussion of anything about where he was on the political spectrum or anything; he was leading with this issue.
When it becomes an issue like this, we’re going to see talent flight to more favorable climates
> When it becomes an issue like this, we’re going to see talent flight to more favorable climates
I sincerely hope we see other countries adopt our original intent on free speech as law of their lands.
I thought this [1] New Yorker profile of the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court was a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of how tech giants interact with less-powerful countries. Surely we all agree that free speech is not absolute (e.g. we could probably agree that there should exist some boundary with respect to libel, threats/violent speech acts, national security, corporations as legal persons with free speech rights, the right or duty of platforms to regulate content, influence of money in politics...) and that therefore states have a legitimate interest in regulating free speech.
The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/the-brazilian-...
and the governments of the west are most supportive of authoritarian and military regimes. Why are they silent over what is happening in Pakistan? Pakistan election was stollen by Pakistan army in day light robbery. And what happened before the election is another story. Pakistan is going through worst form of its human right/freedom of speech/democratic abuses since its independence and west seems to be careless. Just because people of Pakistan support a person who is nationalist. So, for them a dictator is better than him.
Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)
And equally, we in the west are so used to genuine free expression of ideas we assume everyone who speaks is real and genuine. Meanwhile, outside actors are weaponising social media to divide us, errode trust and spread conspiracies. There are worse things that banning American media platforms - look at what they are doing to America.
> outside actors are weaponising social media
Inside actors are also spreading misinfo, rage bait, propaganda and general degeneracy of culture. They're blaming outsiders while doing the same or even worse.
Sure, but a lot of them have essentially been programmed.
Antivax is a strategy, not a serious point of view.
another read is that they're not banning Facebook nor anything like that
but the Trump administration and the current USG.
it's a move against the American Culture AND government
This is an enforcement of legislation passed in 2023, so unlikely to be connected to Trump.
e: Well, unlikely to be connected to the current admin; it does target misinfo which was a big media focus surrounding the elections in 2016/2020
Did the UK banning RT.com improve my quality of life?
Not sure this is correct? It loads for me on Virgin Media broadband connection (although slow), also responds to pings at 70ms.
How would you know if it didn't? You'd be comparing to an alternative future that didn't end up happening.
Very much so.
What freedom of speech? The "first world countries" in Europe are slowly turning up the surveillance state to not let people online if they don't provide their IDs, they want to surveil every private conversation you have at home, if it uses the internet in any way, they'd love banning encryption, VPNs, etc... but you have freedom of speech? Except when talking about thinks that are deemed "pro enemy" (Russia or whoever it is this time around).
Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.
Democracy cannot survive unless we find a way to ensure we know when are listening to the people that are part of our demos and NOT people that are outside of it, actively trying to destroy it.
We had freedom of speech in the west before the Internet. That speech was not anonymous.
Hahaha. Fuck off with the "it's the enemy bullshit". You'll call people "russians" if they don't agree with your jingoism.
You'll try and get people against wars fired.
Post your name right now. Real name and address. If that's what you want, right?
You didn't address my point.
Which is unsurprising.
I did. Your point puts national security of a boogeyman us vs them as paramount.
Your point gives the authoritian the ability to use "the red scare" as tactic to ensure no subversives appear. No one to challenge their power. We must monitor all to find "the infiltrated enemy".
Your bullshit is not new. It's been done all throughout history and it's always just an excuse to suppress threats to individual power. Political parties are proscribed because "they're working for foreign actors and we deem them to be treasonous".
Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
I couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of papers the founders of the US published to argue against tyrannical government were written anonymously.
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent. Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron. The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
This is coming from someone that voted in an authoritarian regime isn't it. Irony is very ironic.
> This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent.
So we agree: authoritarian regimes are a gargantuan problem, not stripping away anonymity.
> Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
Online predator almost killed my child - this is not a "very minor problem". At least not for me.
> This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron.
It is not bout things _I_ don't like but things that _we (society)_ don't like. In my country nazi symbols are forbidden in public space and I think it is a good thing. So yes - "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions".
> The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
Why not? There are countries which governments are elected by citizens and are _trusted_ by citizens. Why would I want to be anonymous if I _trust_ people I elected?
Post your full name and address if you're so happy with lack of anonymity.
I’m sure you know the difference between publication of your personal data and making it accessible for trusted government officials.
Almost killed your one child. Authoritarian governments have murdered many more.
At some point the disingenous concerned parents need to start dealing with their own parenting instead of pretending we need to live in 1984 just because your bad parenting requires it.
Your way has many more deaths of government dissenters. Stop using "death" as a scare tactic. Much like the "war on terror" supporters, it's a fraud.
I don’t know about any deaths (or imprisonment) of government dissenters in Poland (where I come from). Do you know any?
Maybe oppressive government and lack of freedom of speech is a problem in your country, I don’t know that and I’m sorry for you. My suggestion would be though, that you try to fix your government instead of anonymously requiring online anonymity because you’re afraid of your own government.
I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech.
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
That's disingenous bullshit. From the likes of people who use their power imbalance to pretend their propaganda is truth and dissent is dangerous.
"Freedom of speech is ok but what you're doing is different" is the first step
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
You only need to pay attention to history to see what political totalitarianism means when there's no anonymity.
It's way worse than online trolls.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
Said the dictator, who was accountable to no one. Those who hold the power shield themselves from accountability and want to use it as an excuse to prevent dissent.
Democracy for quite some time thrived in US (and for some shorter time in other western countries) even though there was no anonymity while free speech was guaranteed by the state. In other words: anonymity is not a solution for lack of free speech. I should be free to say whatever I want without being forced to hide behind a nickname.
Secondly: I think you are happy to not being the target of online violence. I have experience with teens on the brink of suicide caused by it.
I have experience of people disappeared because of totalitarianism. Your teens on the brink of self harm are peanuts compared to state murder.
Try some other shitty propaganda.
Let me guess, it was Alex Jones.
Did he fall out of a window?
Ah. This is it, folks. You're a liar and you project your lies. Incapable of realising how people have lived shit in history.
Go google "disappeared people in military dictatorships" and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn something about authoritians and how they dealt with "subversives".
Not everyone here lives in the US.
Your account is 17 hours old and you want to find the "enemy within". Aren't you the enemy within?
Demosntate you're not a foreign actor, according to your own rules, post your full name and address. Or maybe that's a stupid thing to do and anonymity is valuable?
[dead]
on the grandour... yes, USA is the pinacle of "freedom" whole world should aspire to! /s
>They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
Please post your evidence of this regarding Nepal. Also, are you suggesting that Nepal has an authoritarian government? Picking up a book may be helpful, as they literally abolished their authoritarian government in 1990 and their monarchy in 2008.
Americans: social media is bad! It should be banned. Americans, after an Asian country does it: free speech!!!
It's almost like it's a country of 300 million people with a diverse set of views.
The group that outright wants social media banned in the US, talks down Zuckerberg, etc, by and large will be perfectly fine with other countries banning it if not celebrate it. You have built a strawman.
The "free speech" cohort is largely anti-banning. They want platforms like X, where anything goes, and are often quite militant about their views on this subject.
I for one think both "social media is bad" and "free speech is important" which puts me in a real bind. Turns out when you let bad faith actors accumulate billions, the outcomes of the systems they create aren't always great.
It's just people here deciding pretty blindly that the two are mutually exclusive, but they're not, any more than eg "Nestle is a bad company" and "I like Nescafe" would be mutually exclusive.
And there's always the question of who gets to be the arbiter of those things.
If the latter were consistent it'd be much more interesting. X banned most large leftist accounts after Musk took over, so like most "free speech" advocates they really mean they want to be able to say hateful rightwing speech.
Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.
> Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments.
It triggered the arab spring, but after that its pretty much used to pinpoint activists and destroy them before they get a chance to organise.
I was just thinking the same thing. This looks like a healthy dose of intervention. I am biased however in that I believe smaller groups of people should run their own forums and chat servers to slightly minimize the Corporatocracy social manipulation especially before AI gets a strong foothold. Most have a few geeks in their own social circle that can run a tiny forum and chat server. Less birds of a feather [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][documentary][44 mins]
https://archive.is/tFaAq
Sad to see anti free speech sentiments all over the world. It was constrained to only some areas but now it’s normalized even in places like the UK. I guess with all that’s happening, Nepal doesn’t surprise me.
Free speech existed before social media, so banning social media can't be any less free speech than how things were then. Also the USA has for decades been an outlier in taking an extreme interpretation of free speech that considers, say, Fox News an acceptable use of free speech. Plenty of countries where the regulator would find Fox News unacceptable rank higher than the USA on freedom & democracy indices, so there was always going to be pushback from other countries if the USA attempted to impose the Fox-Newsification of social media on others.
Freedom of speech existed before almost everything. Before the wheel, before the airplane, before newspapers, before radio and TV, and even before pen and paper. I wonder how much less free we'd feel if those things were banned as well?
These platforms themselves don't support free speech. On top of that everything is now heavily algorithmically driven. Everyone is pushed to consume the same type of content while thinking they have free will in their choice not realising they are being subtly manipulated right below their ability to recognise it.
At this point, YouTube probably has a better idea what you will consume next than you yourself do.
I'm conflicted.
On the one hand, curtailing free speech is a problem and a lot of governments have started doing it to a massive degree.
On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
In that regard I do believe that banning them is a net benefit to society, but I fear that for the most part it is done out of the wrong intentions with more sinister goals.
That has always been a feature of having free speech. If only "good" free speech is allowed, it's not free speech. Much of it is going to be disagreeable to some people's views and/or objectively harmful in some ways. There is allowance for a red line, but it only covers a sliver of the universe. That of course begs the parallel to social media being harmful and over the red line - the equivalent of "yelling fire in a movie theater" - and this worthy of a ban within a free speech framework, but I think that is disingenuous, and it's more like banning harmful political tabloids and misinformation (which is at the root of the history of free speech itself).
Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).
I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.
> On the other hand, social networks are a cancer that are used to spread misinformation, steal information, and invade privacy like nothing else before.
There're plenty of things far worse than social network which society has found to acceptable for many decades if not centuries. Things like alcohol, carbonated drinks, sugar etc are all consumed by people in whatever amount they want knowingly full well how much damage it might cause them. We don't need a few people baby-sitting our consumption of diet, be it food or information.
Ironic to read about free speech here where a bunch of stuff gets "[flagged]" when it does not agree with the hive mind.
i believe a true(tm) free speech platform would allow itself to be flooded with spam. few spaces like that exist sadly, and they're rarely intentional :(
the worst part is that im only half joking.
Lol. Every fucking forum has people constantly bellyache about the moderation systems. Hivemind is a dead giveaway for thoughtless criticism. It's so tiresome. If it's flagged on HN it's almost always lowest common denominator mindless drivel or flamebait. No one serious would advocate for a system where comments can't be flagged as such.
You should enable showdead in your user preferences, I think you may be surprised to see what gets flagged.
I think the big issue is new accounts aren't allowed to downvote posts, but can flag them. In effect, the "flag" merely becomes the new downvote, leading to unpopular but relatively high-efffort coments becoming dead and invisible rather than downvoted.
Honestly just switching the two around (anyone can downvote, but only 500+ karma can flag) would go a long way to ensure only actual low-effort posts and spam get flagged, and unpopular posts get downvoted. As it is now, I rarely see an unpopular opinion that was downvoted and isn't already flagged.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
"Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
I wonder what his opinion on pro-Palestinians getting banned on twitter is? Is it different then? What about the canning of Stephen Colbert?
I love these smug posts about how "free speech as a concept only applies to the government censoring people" that were made a couple years ago, where now the same figures are unbelievably opposed to sites like Twitter "excercising their right" to ban dissidents.
Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> Turns out this free speech thing might be a pretty useful ability to have, huh?
> "Its free speech when I talk, but if you, someone who says things I disagree with talks, then you're merely an asshole being shown the door"
Did you mean to demonstrate this with that strawman of a quote? Not exactly a stellar display of free speech's utility and benefits I'd say. I'm sure you will also passionately go around telling everyone how you just got unfairly censored for it if you even manage to get it flagged. It's especially rich considering this started with the dude above pulling out the hivemind card, which is also notoriously useful and productive of course.
this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.
That’s the strategy Brazil used to stop free speech. They then arrest whoever the representative is when they don’t comply with government censorship.
Imagine a foreign company operating in the US refusing to adhere to US law.....
Social media is cancer. Let’s go back to expressing free speech in the old fashioned way- at town squares and leaflets.
You mean free speech zones...
Yeah, like a "public space" or something.
[flagged]
So like when somebody insists on calling or meeting up, rather than texting or email? I know a lot of those.
I heard it was a DNS-based block, and picking any other DNS server would bypass the block.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137363
This paragraph should be emphasized.
> The government now requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances. “We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they don’t listen to us?” said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, a spokesman for the ministry.
I wonder what were the platforms expecting, ignoring local government.
You have to play by the rules society agrees on. Or do the companies think they are too big for consequence?
True, which is why I am somewhat conflicted.
So after sacking the wildly (and deservingly) popular Chairman of the National Electricity Authority, after allowing ministers to set arbitrary and uncapped salaries for themselves and their workers, after obstructing and undermining the wildly (and deservingly) popular mayor of the Capital, and after doing like 15 of these really major, objectively anti-nation things, and getting called out for it in Social Media by the commoners, the 73 year old Prime Minister (in many ways a Trump-like figure; immune to shame or criticism) moves to ban social media in the country. Obviously a bad thing.
At the same time, a 2 year old law that still hasn't convinced the companies with valuations higher than my countries GDP to throw like $10k to set up an office here and maintain it with less than $5k a month to keep their services running. It doesn't feel right to fight to keep them around either.
PS: The previous paragraphs might have portrayed the current government in a (deservingly) negative light. I wonder if I'll have to start browsing hackernews with a VPN in the future.
Good for them.
Weren’t only the platforms that failed to register with the government banned? As I understand it, if they comply with the new regulations, they should be unblocked.
I'm doing basically the same, but voluntarily. It's a calmer life. YouTube is still going strong for me though, I have to admit.
Facebook for a couple things, IG for keeping up with friends, sharing pics with friends. And a carefully curated YouTube subscription list. Only stuff that's worth watching: People I can relate to, have no ego, and are just having a good time sharing what they do. I gravitate toward hackaday worthy stuff and off-road exploration type videos. I limit intake of news sites, and instead try to focus on living my own life, accomplishing goals that I have set, and focusing on improving myself so I can help others.
Also, being a Gen-X-er who grew up without any of this stuff, I have to snicker just a little bit at people being up in arms about a ban on things that didn't exist 20-30 years ago. I know there is FAR more nuance to it. I simply found the thought humorous at a simplistic level.
If it is clear to you that it is simplistic, why do you publish it anyway?
I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.
I did not point to naïvete. I asked why, if you see the thing has gravity, you would be treating it as just a "oh well no great loss".
Because humans have the capacity to compartmentalize and reason about things despite their gravitas, provided the opportunity and capability to do so.
For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.
There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.
Why shouldn't they?
"Hunger in Abysland" // "Ah, right, I just started a diet" // "Immediately I thought it funny to remember that once we also had little to eat"
Appropriateness.
Since you added context to my comment that I didn't ask for, I'm going to add some to yours that you didn't ask for.
Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.
You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.
Sorry, but I suppose there is an ugly thing I should add, geocrasher.
It remains very unfortunate that I came to pick a simile about hunger not knowing about your past - to signify in perching_aix's case that abstincence better be voluntary and in yours that loss of something achieved remains a bad thing.
The ugly thing: about "having no idea what I'm talking about",
we are both in this world together - and the rest. We all have seen hell and misery, in the different forms that chance and the evolution of facts inflicted us. I felt immediate participation to your story. Do not suppose, for good or bad, that you are an exception.
We all have seen and lived the most horrible things.
I am terribly sorry to hear that, geocrasher.
Of course the simile I found to try and show that "look, this branch does not seem appropriate for the context" was random. I thought of a few, in time constraints, and the one that looked the best of the bunch happened to be the one of "starvation". It could have anything - surely you understand.
> You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to
But I was talking of the matter in context, and the simile, as said, was logic, not comparative.
Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't.
Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).
> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't
"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).
So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
> not perfect, not meant to be perfect
Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.
> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts
It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.
> a coercion over a population
This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.
> the possibility of attempted population control
Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.
The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.
> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war
Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?
> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.
Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?
You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.
> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.
> Nor was what we were going for
And where did you intend to go? In front of "State cuts the services" you went "Oh I get advantages staying without them". Yes but see, there are 30 million people there that may have had different choice, and some of them with rational choice (and fully evidently so: the World Video Archive is in the ban), and those 30Mln are within other billions that may be in a similar situation. (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
> [Missing out on social media] is quite literally the bare fact itself
Very certainly not: Nepal has blocked YouTube... Being forbidden access the worldwide video library cannot be reduced to "cannot be able to post comments" (that many serious YT users will not do, not even having an account, by the way).
> a characterization
Gross logical fault: there is a coercion in there, and reframing it as protection does not remove the presence of the coercion, which remains a debatable problem. And by going towards "protection" you are confirming my point («not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war»), which is again an extremely serious problem.
> I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses
And a number will reveal that the situation can be construed as serious. Were you to defend the idea that it were not serious, relativism will not help the substantial solidity of the argument.
> Did I ever question its seriousness?
Well, look, if the article is "they blocked the services", and you go you "feel better after doing without them", that heavily suggests you downplaying the seriousness!
Of course we could also have discussions about "could we revaluate the optimal level of those services in life balance", but maybe really not in front of "the State has decided for you"!
> there's lots of downsides to these platforms
Yes. That is also extensively discussed. But it is not in context: here, the matter is something decided for somebody else, and that there are a number of bigger problems (e.g. organized misinformation) that overseeing entities (States) will mismanage in their inability to counter them.
> Wake-up calls
You will probably be reassured that many of us are very much aware that having released transnational masses of substantial infants into echo chambers - to mention one of the foremost consequences - is a hell of a problem.
> And where did you intend to go?
Where I said I did. I explained it to you several times over. I can only do so much if you're not willing to listen or are unable to relate.
> (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
Cool - and if the same thing happened in Russia and I posted this to my Russian mates on Discord [1], as it happened before, they'd laugh their ass off first, and then we'd shift to discussing workarounds. According to what you explained so far of your world model though, things are either inappropriate or appropriate, and they are observer invariant and temporally static. I guess this would make my Russian mates wrong about what they themselves think or something?
Not very persuasive. I'm also not really sure why you think these peers on these pages need explaining why this situation is bad, or why they'd benefit from reading another endless charade, enumerating the same tired points, and making them spiral even further (since according to you, this was definitively coercive, so there's nothing they can do anyhow). Why there isn't and should not be a space for this specific angle, as it is inappropriate according to you, and even though it is not practically possible for you to have consulted those peers to get their opinion, you're just speaking in their name.
> Gross logical fault
There is a word for that, it's called a fallacy. I did not engage in any, which you must have also noticed, hence why you didn't say that instead.
I feel our "discussion" has run its course.
[1] Yes I did see Discord was blocked in Nepal. Please apply reasoning to fill the blanks.
Have you read the rest?
> not willing to listen
You think you show much hearing on this side? In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple. The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
> I did not engage in any
Apart from the one I pointed to and the other ones I have not mentioned? Not just precising the difference between fallacies and logical faults, but all the attributions of intention you expressed you construed, such as «explaining why this situation is bad». The latter was only pointed out to you because you clearly do not seem to get it, if you go "there are plus sides on not using social media" in front of of a government ban that closes the doors to a critical part of information to a population.
I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media. The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
> Have you read the rest?
Regrettably yes, I did. It was a waste of time.
> You think you show much hearing on this side?
Yes.
> In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple.
I understand that that's your position. Would have been pretty hard to miss. I just feel otherwise. I'd think that's been hard to miss too.
> The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
That's regrettable. Unfortunately, you've spent all the empathy I had for you regarding this, so that's something you'll need to reflect on on your own terms if you want to figure it out.
> Apart from the one I pointed to
No, including that one, as that isn't one.
> because you clearly do not seem to get it
I'm not responsible for empathizing with myself on your behalf. I very clearly do get it, which you'd be able to appreciate, if you bothered to even consider its possibility.
> I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban"
I have not. Nepal is not what my world revolves around, and I've been working all day.
Not sure that's the most appropriate way to mention that by the way, you almost sound excited for it, as if those 14 people having deceased now lets you "prove" your point. Would be pretty dishonest and inciteful to frame it this way, right? Then why are you doing it to others?
> over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media
Can you be bothered to restrain yourself from encoding your conviction into every sentence supposedly meant to persuade? It's like announcing the decision before the trial.
It'd go an awful long way in at least making it appear like you actually wanted to persuade someone, rather than just talk about how hurt you feel and expecting to be finally heard for it by magical happenstance.
I get it, you think I should be treating this as if children were dying, as if there was a famine, whatever. I don't want to. I think that's beyond asinine and pointless. It can still be, and is, serious despite this, it's not a race. It can even escalate. It's also not just a single modality, things can be serious in different ways. Would be awfully cool if I didn't need to wade through your loaded sentences to be graciously allowed to have my own position, and not be portrayed as some heartless asshole for it.
> The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
I disagree. Not sure how your insistence that we were being insensitive, and how that means we shouldn't have shared these things, helps these folks though.
By the way, you do recognize just how utterly ironic is it to campaign for us not to talk about something in a thread about censorship, right? I restrained myself from mentioning it so far, as a way to show some solidarity. But it's clearly not being appreciated, so fuck it.
Edit: I have since read the news on the unrest in Nepal. It did way more to contextualize this and why my comment might have been insensitive and misguided than this "discussion" ever could have. Turns out, mentioning that the place is volatile and despotic would have been pretty key info. It's still extremely hindsight heavy though. Like do you have even the remotest concept just how similar this news was in this thread to many many others before it? Where the place wasn't so unabashedly authoritarian that police is licensed to fire live ammo at citizens, and didn't result in an unrest and death? So far removed in perspective, no shit I didn't have a clue why you are making a scene! If this is you "raising awareness", there's a LOT you should improve on, holy shit.
My comment was not about suffering, war, starvation, or anything of the like. You've clearly added your own context and then judged me for it. Great job.
The context I added was that of the facts I construed from the shreds of events and opinions I met. They are not there to be compared to "starvation" as a parameter with scalars of "what is worse": they are in the same cone of "something bad happening", in front of which simplistic dismissals are puzzling.
Social media is 2025's opium and we're all on it.
You are posting on a platform that allows exchange and if properly used is there to raise awareness.
Yeah. YouTube being both effectively the modern public airwaves and dictated by an engagement algorithm is a big problem.
-- Select your best channels and RSS (or similar) on them.
-- Promote politically that the informational wealth the YT platform contains¹ should be treated like the rest of public knowledge and archived by the State for preservation.
¹(Picking a few example channels: "Manufacturing Intellect", "British Pathé", "Intelligence Squared"...)
Same here,youtube is getting to be more like the rest as time goes on.
You have simply heavily missed that you are keeping yourself on voluntary diet while the submission context is that, within a complex frame of reasons and regulation attempts, somebody has placed a population on enforced lack of service.
I didn't miss it, but thanks.
[dead]
[dead]
When something like this happen the companies affected should terminate the accounts of all government officials under the guise "if the population can't use our site, neither can you who work in the government"