She is saying that the "open web" Mozilla envisions is one where Mitchell Baker and her friends get to censor and manipulate content directly in the browser.
Obviously, people of the same ideology as her will agree with that, because they hate openness and debate. This is an excellent reason to stay away from Firefox. Using it is getting very close to being a political statement, which given the blog post, could mark its users as those in favour of in-browser political censorship.
Edit: very strange that some people cannot see this. She is extremely explicit:
> Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet [...] to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy [...] and he won't be the last [...] changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors
Let's rephrase that: she claims the "architecture of the internet" - that's the web - has "dangerous dynamics" because (she thinks) it helped a Republican. Not some specific website, or some specific incident, or even some specific politician! The whole design of the internet itself is dangerous, and hence she demands "solutions" to make a "better internet" that goes beyond mere "permanent removal of bad actors" but rather solves the problem pre-emptively before "untold damage is done". Nobody who runs a browser should have this kind of revulsion towards what the internet is.
The only point in this piece that sounds like that is “Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation”. It’s fair to disagree with her on that point but also consider that in conjunction with her call to make feed algorithms transparent. So she is saying to give preference to NYT over Breitbart by default but also make it obvious that is what you are doing.
I do remember, which is why I will never use Firefox again. Our culture is already far too censorious, I have no desire to support those who want to go further.
The issue with those recommendations is that they are worded to sound reasonable, and that they sound more reasonable when they target people you already dislike. For example, "promote factual voices" is in principle amazing, if it could be pulled off.
The problem is that it's hard to pull that off: One of the chief challenges of current day is that people have a hard time even agreeing what the facts are, and what some people hold to be factual aren't necessarily so.
The "factual voices" promoted by Facebook in the linked NYT article, for example, are just mainstream media which shares Mozilla's political slant and which have a built-up reservoir of respectability from earlier days when they were higher quality, but which aren't exactly paragons of factuality or careful reporting today, having spread outright misinformation and been quiet about important events. To put it another way, should we promote say, Fox News, because they're mainstream? That's probably not wise, if you ask just about anyone here.
The thing is, Fox may have been first, but every news outlet has drifted in a Foxified direction of catering to an audience and telling them what they want to hear instead of challenging their preconceptions, which ends up with many outlets made a killing hyperventilating about Trump, for example.
So the issue ends up being that Mozilla's just fine boosting that hyperventilation, which is part and parcel of the polarization and "we can't even agree what the facts are" problem. The issue of people lacking trust isn't solved by browbeating, but by earning their trust. It's presently really, really hard, but still in principle possible.
In the end, I don't want my browser maker to have that attitude. Brave and Vivaldi don't: They just make browsers and other services and give me more and more options. Brave even lets me judge sources and adjust my search engine should I want to. Supporting these teams that focus on giving me control and making better and better tools for me is an easy choice.
Some of the other bullet points have genuine upside that would be wonderful, but they also have costs and downsides that aren't immediately apparent.
All in all we need more of this, rather than the bland milquetoast garbage we are spoonfed by media. The insurrection attempt is a huge deal that is being treated with kid gloves. What in Baker's proposal specifically do you disagree with? I'll copy/paste them here:
- Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
- Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
- Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
- Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
Yeah, when I think of "honest" I think of Google...
Granted, that statement by Mozilla left a sour taste in my mouth. I'd like my browser vendor to be content-neutral. I'll decide if something is bad or not for myself.
A lot of the money they make from Firefox usage gets spent not on Firefox or the web but on social justice activism, which is invariably exclusionary of ordinary European and American men.
For example, they have an entire sub-fund devoted to nothing but ideological activism in Africa:
They don't help men - the app is exclusively given to women - because "The issue" is, as they put it, that "In Tanzania, older men are the primary decision-makers in households and local communities".
They could fund things useful to everyone globally, or even things useful for the web specifically (radical), but they choose not to deliberately. Instead they fund content for competing platforms. That's because Mozilla is a generic left wing NGO that sees the Google/Firefox deal as merely a legacy endowment. Naive geeks use it and send them money, which enables them to divert funding to what they really care about.
Edit: primarily -> a lot of, which changes nothing about the argument
> The money they make from Firefox usage gets spent not on Firefox or the web but primarily on social justice activism, which is invariably exclusionary of ordinary European and American men.
I know facts don’t care about feelings, but according to Mozilla Foundation’s on website it says $22 million since 2015. The most recent financial numbers I found are from 2022, which lists “software development” expenses at $242 million. That’s 1% a year.
I know you’re speaking from a place of feeling aggrieved that some underrepresented person without power somewhere’s life might be made just half-epsilon better, and under the mistaken belief that life is a zero-sum game, but for your own benefit, perhaps you should get informed before spouting off nonsense.
Who am I kidding? Facts don’t care about feelings, and feelings are all that matter.
Your "primarily on social justice activism" affirmation is obviously not true. Most of Mozilla spending is going to staff salaries, including of course paid Firefox developers.
> Mozilla makes 100% of its money from advertising. Safari and Edge are the browsers built by companies that don't make money from advertising. This argument is just completely wrong.
Yeah I never got that argument. It's not like it's any secret that Mozilla survives on handouts from Google.
Safari really is unique in that it's subsidized by iPhone and Mac sales instead of ads and is still using its own rendering engine.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...