In this particular case it is very relevant, because Navalny himself was warning [1] that it is a dangerous precedent which is going to help the enemies of freedom everywhere. And he was absolutely right.
In my opinion there's a point: if the dominant ethnicity is being enslaved, imagine what could happen to powerless minorities.
In other words, if countries that call themselves free are becoming less free day after day, it becomes obvious to imagine that not-as-free countries will follow the same route, maybe even faster.
they simply started from a different position in the global-freedom scale.
EDIT: apparently from the downvotes someone believes that Russia is a special place were all the bad things happen, while in the west when the US government spies their allies it's progress.
If an American company, Apple for example, obey to the free government of the US of A when they ask for more control over the content on their platform, what make you think that they will fight against other more repressive governments? (they have in fact put this specific app down on their store, as per Putin's request)
information warfare and content control are the weapons of the future, it is quite naive to think that there will be good governments that won't use it and bad governments that will abuse it. Everyone will use it to their own advantage. what's happening today is just the tip of the iceberg, wait for the day when the internet won't be globalized anymore as it is today and we'll have hundreds of local internets hardly connected to each other, allowing only some highly monitored link to "friendly" nets.
You're absolutely right. As an American, it is shameful the direction we've been going all in the name of 'safety'. If the "most free country on Earth" starts clamping down this hard, and spends copious amounts of time engineering forms of technical censorship/suppression, there is little or no reason to expect anywhere else to not do any different.
To be frank, America has lost a strategic asset in the form of being an attractive place to come for the best and brightest to try to realize something unfettered; and we're not doing a damn thing to export anything that creates any semblance of assurance that the American experiment's results are any better than anywhere else's.
The bar has been lowered so far it isn't even funny.
Navalny correctly predicted that the Trump ban gave authoritarian governments fair precedent. Hey, the US can ban the previous President. They paved the road.
I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers
To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.
It's sneaky. It's against site rules to make the accusation because it's usually impossible to confirm but it is absolutely a tactic used by foreign powers.
Thanks for that link. I had read parts of the Mueller report before, and learned some of the TTP's that the Russians used during the 2016 campaign/election, but this lays it out more clearly.
The belief among technologists that censorship is a good thing is relative recent, and there is still quite a large number of people who still think that all censorship is bad when it comes from the powerful deciding what the powerless can see and do.
The group that is against censorship is likely still angry with companies like Facebook, twitter, apple, and it makes more sense that it is those people who continue to make jabs about past censorship. One do not need to pay people to be angry.
Here is a question: Does the hkai use above has a history of advocating free speech outside of articles that cover Russia? Is it consistent with someone who has not accepted that powerful companies should hold such power on society?
>> I'd venture a guess that this low-grade whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly from Russian and similar bots trying to divert attention.
> I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers
I will make an attempt at an explanation, or at least an unusual way to think about it. It's not that I find it difficult to "believe" it....it is very easy to "believe" it....just do it. However, forming a strong belief that it is actually true, based on sound logic and strict epistemology, this is far less easy, for me.
Firstly, consider the logic (if we interpret the statement literally): Because "A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers", then therefore it logically follows that "whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly[!] from Russian[!] and similar bots trying to divert attention".
Clearly, this logic is not free of flaws.
Now of course, your actual opinion on the matter is surely more complex, but then this raises the important (and typically "This is Water"-type unrealized) point that we use an amazingly crude language, on amazingly crude internet platforms, to debate (conceptualize, and form opinions upon) a problem space (reality) that is infinitely dimensionally complex, not to mention deceptive, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. And even worse: all of this is conducted upon a not very well understood and known to be incredibly flawed platform: the human mind.
If you think about it, is the very premise (axiomatic ~~belief~~ perception) that humanity can form highly comprehensive accurate individual and shared models of this mess in the first place not obviously delusional and hubristic?
Below we have:
> To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.
This is clearly a false dichotomy - are there really only two options here? There are many different ways to think about this, and I would be surprised if the person who wrote that comment wouldn't be able to whip up a whole bunch of other theories without breaking a sweat. And yet, they wrote that comment....and that comment was consumed (as ~correct) by other agents within the system, in turn distorting their internal model of reality (which is typically considered to be reality itself, another root cause problem), agents who will then go on to distort the models of other agents in one giant game of Telephone[1].
Day after day, year after year, generation after generation we (and here I include the much more competent than average minds here on HN) repeat this obviously (when looked at from the proper perspective, a perspective that seems to be available only in certain states of mind[2]) highly flawed behavior, and "shake our fists at God" (or the members of our outgroups) for causing these problems.
What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon: not only does it seem not possible to get people to stop behaving like this, it seems to be impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that there might be some truth to this characterization of it. Like, they might post a pithy comment ~"proving it wrong", but if one is to reply to that pointing out that it suffers from the very same phenomenon being described, the response tends to be either rhetoric (on less intellectual platforms) or solipsism &/or silence/disinterest (on more intellectual platforms).
It is a very difficult nut to crack, especially when no one else is able to be interested in cracking it.
As a Russian, it pisses me off. It's like saying "black people shouldn't moan, because white people suffer too".