Last time I wrote about the EU war on 'social media algorithms,' I had some people asking me why I thought corporations should be allowed to just do whatever on social media and why I didn't think they should be regulated by the government. Thus I want to make two things clear:
1) Nobody is really worried about "algorithms" OK? People like Habeck want to shut up the political opposition. This is a way of demanding that Eurocrats take action against the dirty filthy rabble online without appearing to be overtly illiberal or opposed to things like freedom of expression, while at the same time actually opposing these things in material ways.
2) I admit that social media is very powerful, and that the manipulation of social media by foreign parties may potentially have political consequences. That might be bad, though I generally think the threat here is overstated. What would certainly be bad, is the EU stepping in to manipulate social media instead.
No matter how bad you think no government regulation would be on the internet, I promise you it's much much better than government regulation of the internet.
Simulation Commander. As soon as an " expert" appears on any media I know I will be subjected to government approved brain washing. It's amazing in Canada with a doctor shortage how many expert doctors have the time to flood the airways with their "expert opinion". Shouldn't they be treating their patients?
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
[This is an expanded version of previous comment of mine on top-level]
Open access debates and regulations by our public representatives is far better than the situation we have now, where closed corporate and secrete government owners and controllers decide policies and censor & suppress information, debates, perspectives, testimonies, etc. as they amplify lies.
The algro.s that define feed access to non-followers should be configurable or disabled-able. I only want to see what my followers want to make available, and find others through topic searches, searches that are not mind-raping designed - not like Google and YouTube and likely others do, mind-controlling lying censoring nightmares they became.
All social-media should be define legally as 'carriers' like phone company, and no interference from the owners and controllers of those companies unless real illegal speech, or disrupting actions that interferes with normal use by others.
This seems so reasonable to be common-sense and Constitutionally, Liberty, Freedom-to-Hear Complient. Parents must parent Children before 14 related to these. Anyone disagreeing with this position must explain why they are not mind-raping though-controlling horrors that would come between us all and future, and something someone wants available for us to see and think about, and those interferers must argue why it not Just to publicly hang them and perhaps all adults in their family and significant mentors that warped them into such a Satanic horror.
Counterpoint: Social media is only as powerful as the recipient is susceptible/vulnerable to it.
Of course, any action taken to strengthen people to be able to exert control over their own media feed (apt name, feed, it is after all what you give farm-animals) would by definition and necessity weaken the Traffic-light parties, since they have ruled by lies, deceit and misdirection for 15 (?) years by now.
Exactly! It's not that social media algorithms manipulating popular opinion isn't an issue; it clearly is. It's that setting up a Ministry of Truth is not going to work out well.
I think you're wrong about that and that they do genuinely worry about algorithms. It's not a synonym or doublespeak for anything else. They mean exactly what they say.
Why would they fear algorithms? At the root of leftist ideology is the belief that wisdom, knowledge and morality are highly concentrated in a small number of people. The rest are malleable sheep who don't really derive beliefs themselves. They just absorb them from "elites" via the written word, and then do whatever they're told as a consequence. This is a consistent theme of leftist thought for hundreds of years. For example, Karl Marx was a big fan of the press because it tended to employ people like him, and he saw it as a key way to create "class consciousness" (rewrite people's beliefs). During COVID we saw how prevalent this attitude is in public health, where every word they spoke was selected with compliance in mind.
The "elites" who control people fall into two neat categories: benign or malign. Algorithms select the words people see, thus in their mind, algorithms = control of the population and therefore control of democracy, government and ultimately the world. Whether the controllers of the algorithms are aligned with your agenda or not is thus of paramount importance; how could it not be?
It follows naturally that you'd spent a lot of time freaking out about (a) any media you view as unaligned i.e. Fox News in America, and (b) any technological means to manipulate social media algorithms like bots, and (c) the alignment of the people who control the algorithms. In fact this issue would freak you out more than any other issue, because anyone who controls people's minds can defeat your entire agenda. Hence why left wing governments always engage in censorship.
So there's no need to look for deeper subtext when they talk about algorithms. They are terrified and horrified by Elon Musk because he's a non-aligned elite who they view as basically being Yuri from Red Alert 2.
While I appreciate what you're saying, we have to recognise that these are carefully selected talking points, and that the EU has framed illiberal meddling like this on other occasions too. The Digital Services Act, for example, was sold as some kind of consumer protection bill for Europeans.
What they really want to do, is stop the rise of what I'd call 'counter-narratives' on the internet. They can't just come out and say that, because they are also selling themselves as liberal democrats with every second breath. So instead they talk about two foreign-owned social media platforms (TikTok and X), suggesting that they represent a foreign threat from which Europeans need to be protected. Then they talk about algorithms, suggesting that the content (the counter-narratives) they want to censor is somehow not organic, not really what Europeans/Germans think, a product of foreign manipulation that must be corrected or rooted out. This allows them to square the circle and censor content while still casting themselves as good liberals interested in freedom of expression.
We're disagreeably agreeing, I think :) The thrust of my argument is that the people who run Europe genuinely don't think of themselves as having dictatorial or illiberal tendencies. There is no what they "really" want to do - they believe they are protecting people and "liberal democracy", and are saying exactly what they mean.
There's no contradiction in their minds because as far as they are concerned democracy never really existed at all. Ever, anywhere. To the Red/Green mind democracy actually _cannot_ really exist, because it's meaningless to talk about a democracy when most people are pieces of chalkboard that contain whatever one of the small cadre of intellectual elites wrote on them last. You can surely have votes and debates, the form of the thing. But to Greens talking about just "democracy", alone, without the liberal prefix, sounds like a 14 year old talking about their high school politics debates. It's cute, and a nice thing to encourage, but it's not serious. Not something that can actually yield legitimate decisions.
Into this confused state of mind walks someone like Donald Trump. A "populist", meaning someone who lets the masses write on him instead of the other way around. To the left this is just like putting the children of the local school in charge of the world. They struggle to articulate this belief usually, except for when the mask slips with people like Clinton and Biden of course, and then "garbage" and "deplorable" pours out.
Would you be comfortable living in a real democracy if you thought most people were garbage? No, hence this odd construct of the "liberal democracy", which is defined as a democracy that's safe from the garbage people because everyone who might seize chalk and write on them is either on-board with liberal values, or censored. If one goes rogue and starts reading words in the patterns of dust on the chalkboard then they view that as the gravest threat possible, because it's a meta-threat that undermines everything else.
Thank you. I think most people can see that algorithms are not necessarily benign. The Habek statement emphasizes algorithms while assuring people their own precious free-speech won't be affected—but of course it will.
I'm a software engineer. I was reviewing slides from a presentation on AI, and one of them was about removing bias from AI models. The slide spoke about how a model might show bias where you would _not_ expect it, such as across religion, gender, race, and one other category, I forget. In other words, the categories across which you would expect the _most_ difference. Fundamentally, these people believe that all people really are the same, "equal," but it's all crusted over with all this socially-constructed crap that has to be stripped away to get to the reality. This allows them to look at a data that tells them that the world is the exact opposite of what they think, but then they just say "That just tells us how biased the model is."
So too, I think, with algorithms. They really believe they know what the "right answer" is. If so much of society comes to disagree with the "right answer," then it cannot be because they are wrong; it must be because the algorithms that feed people content are somehow biased against the truth.
Yes, we're getting there, but I don't think they believe people are equal. See my argument above. I think this is a very common but serious misreading of leftism as an ideology.
What they believe is that people are born equal, because everyone is born a blank slate. By implication, people remain blank until something is written on them. And although they might be born equally blank, their slates aren't born of equal size or quality. With time, a small group of people become enormously superior to the others around them. Those people - intellectuals, elites, whathaveyou - have a moral duty to ensure good outcomes for the others, which they are supposed to achieve by writing on their slates. Making people want what's good for them, in other words.
The reason liberal AI researchers sound crazy is not because they think everyone is actually equal. They are extremely confident that people aren't equal, morally or intellectually speaking, and that they themselves sit quite high up in the rankings. What they actually think is that religion, gender/racial "stereotypes" and so on are junk that's been scribbled onto people's slates by an unworthy society. Social graffiti, almost, and that if it were wiped away or never written onto people in the first place, none of those differences would exist. Their goal is therefore not to make people reach their inherent equality - they don't believe in any such equality - but to wipe the slates clean and rewrite people's minds to contain better content.
This sort of viewpoint seems to be naturally appealing to AI researchers, because neural networks are extremely malleable and their structure is inspired by the brain. So you can see why AI people might generalize from things like the success of RLHF and think, well, why not use RLHF on the population too? It's obviously not a new idea, just the terminology is new. Stalin was a big fan of RLHF.
Generally I agree with what you are saying. I would make an exception for TikToc because I think the CPC uses this platform as a propaganda tool to sway the perception of the people who use it for getting their news. In fact I would outright ban TikToc as is being done in the US.
“Liberal democracies under pressure – a plea for a strong, capable Europe” is an amazing title for a speech by this authoritarian. Europe is not strong nor capable as it has been run by incompetent people with an agenda. My hope would be for the people of Germany to do the same as we did in the US and throw off the bullshit these people are trying to ram down your throats. As long as the Greens are in charge there is no hope for Germany.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Funny you should exclude TikToc as recently Elite mind-rapers did not like that on that platform an old article on The Guardian UK that was the published letter from Osama bin Laden, 'Letter to the American People' went virial. Guardian censored it during this interest. Here is an archived PDF version of it;
Spoiler: They do not 'Hate us for our Freedoms', and a lot of younger people were awakened to the corp-media Gov and other Zionist owned and controlled institutional lies, and then their censorship.
And that is dangerous. Mind-raping delusional and-or evil Psychos would come between us and something someone wants to make available to us all, and the Future, and they are everywhere!
.. what about all us here that would interfere with our Freedom-to-Hear, think and understand? Are you one?
> Habeck gave his talk (entitled “Liberal democracies under pressure – a plea for a strong, capable Europe”) on 9 November, the 35th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Germany should do something to stop this rising tide of right wing populism! It's fascistic! They need to protect themselves against that! Perhaps with some sort of Antifaschistische Schutzwand! They could erect it around the entirety of the internet to protect it from fascism!
So, suffering an intense fit of irony, he used the 35th anniversary of the collapse of the Antifascist Protection Rampart to... lament how Western values of free speech are fascism. Nobody would believe in a character this one dimensionally evil if this were a novel. They'd rant about how this was just another Ayn Rand type villain.
*sigh* Once again, reality is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraints. I'm starting to think Ayn didn't go far *enough*... *facepalm*
The crackdown on free speech is world-wide, which is why it's so important that Trump gets into office and blows up the entire gameplan. Australia is getting close to passing their hate speech/misinformation bill, and Ireland had a very close call recently as well. "They" know they can't win in a free speech environment, so they're going to try to "covid information" your entire life.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
After the mind-raping lying twisted psychological brain-washing betrayal from mother, feminists, Professionals, media, gov, .. and others that I was raised to trust, and that were once considered - within reason - trustworthy, a life of confusion, suffering, failures, broken-perspective on reality, etc, ..
..
.. I consider it Just (if not Right) to hang till dead anyone making censoring, interfering with all ours's and futures' Freedom-to-Hear, them and adults in their families that raised such vile dangerous children, and include that that actively support them into power-over-others.
Entire lives are filled with needless suffering, confusion, failures, and poison-filled spreaders and generational amplifiers of it.
I just read about that a few minutes ago! This is quite obviously the way to sneak in further legislation once they have everybody acclimated to the idea of getting online being a privilege.
The current Australian government limped in to power with just 33% of the vote in 2022 via preference deals with The Greens (who else). The prior 'conservative' admin had created shit sandwich after shit sandwich during covid so were always going to lose but that's the Uniparty here for you. Additionally, the current government have really achieved nothing in the last 2.5 years apart from attempting to emulate German energy self-destruction. And now they're debating in the Senate on their MAD (misinfo and disinfo) bill...
Ireland has actually passed a modified 'hate-speech' bill which retains many of the worst parts, including the ability for the police to go on fishing expeditions based on a flimsy pretext, confiscating anything they regard as kompromat, enhanced punishment for any crime that can be regarded as having an element of 'hate,' which they do not define, and reversal of the burden of proof. The Irish police are behaving as if the 'hate speech' element has actually been passed.
Simulation Commander. You nailed it in your first sentence. The crackdown on free speech is worldwide but particularly in the so called western progressive countries. Third world countries have perfected this to an art. Who would have ever thought that our so called enlightened first world democratic countries are attempting to do the same thing.
Today in most western countries " hate" has become the new crime. Not murder, not child molesting, not theft, not all the other real and tangible offenses that destabilize society. Hate and Racisim have become the new perceived crimes of the populations that reside in these countries.
We are living with the abysmal failure of progressive policies that have infected most nations. And now, rather than acknowledging their failure they seek to carry on by restrictions on our ability to communicate via social media. They don't appear to be giving up. This is morphing into a war on our freedom to communicate.
What's laughable about the entire issue is that they believe or want you to believe that to preserve democracy we must impose censorship.
As a Canadian citizen I was a rarity for backing Trump in the election.
I'm glad he got in. I too, hopes he blows up the entire game plan.
"Disinformation is being spread on TikTok and X to blur the difference between truth and lies and to make people compliant."
Holy projection, batman. Hopefully he doesn't include Substack in his "axis of autocrats". Protecting free speech is such fascist behavior. May the German MSM collapse just like their American counterparts. Eugyppius is far superior to der spiegel and should be everyone's go-to source for German news.
Maybe it's an artifact of translation, but I'm trying to figure out how disinformation (implied to be from the bad guys—us) makes people compliant. I would think it would make them noncompliant.
No, the translation is accurate. See my other post on this thread for an explanation. It's a perfectly sensible thing to say within the leftist world view, as they view all speech as an extremely powerful form of mind control over the bulk of the population.
The left are purely magical thinkers, so, of course, incantations have power. Their speech, including the Green Manifesto above, is incantatory in nature, an attempt to conjure their favored reality into existence through repetition, redefinition of terms, and imprecations flung at their enemies, the verbal equivalent of Zeus flinging thunderbolts.
Since you are a language professional, maybe you will find the original helpful: "Desinformation wird verbreitet, um die Menschen kirre zu machen." "Kirre" is, according to dictionaries, "submissive, tractable, obedient, compliant." Maybe Habeck means that we're being lulled into a stupor (dazzled by entertainment, made self-satisfied).
Hopefully we in the US dodged a bullet, or at least gained a little breathing space. I sincerely hope that if we have success on the free-speech front, it will help influence policies elsewhere.
There has been talk of the U.S. enacting higher tariffs on, and making NATO subsidies contingent upon European nations knocking off their censorship crusades.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
My apartment lease does not allow guns on property.
I am routinely censored in my YouTube comments - usually but not only related to israeli genocide-lies and 75+ years of Terror and evil and Capture of Governments, spewing evil world-wide as Satan's Anus on earth, of UN voting to remove nationhood '1-State Solution' where Palestine lands returned with all that is on it.
I was refused service at a coffee-shop because of my political, social, theological, .. writings on-line.
And more corporate anti-Constitutional policies and Actions.
It seems reasonable to me that if our taxes and public resources go to support them, that they must comply with the Intent of Constitutional Rights, when possible.
Such actions like mentioned Tariffs leverage could meaningfully spread the Best of our Nation world-wide, but we need to start here with the clear mind-raping thought-controlling censoring lying manipulating unTruth, inJustice, disOrdering corporations, Gov, and Institutions we have now.
I'm reading what Habeck is saying but he doesn't make any sense -- there's no there, there. None of these Misinformation Haters every say what exactly is the "misinformation." Just once I'd like a concrete example. I can only assume that the truth of what they want us to believe, is truly horrible. "Yes, the migrants ARE here to replace you, that is true, but you should WANT to be replaced, as it will be better in the long run for ME."
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Look at the UK's policy, laws, and those white Christain indigenous peoples' targeting genocidal Judges that are releasing violent immigrants from jails, to make room for political prisoners, to jail social media posters of 'wrong think', like when reporting Pakistani rape gangs of groomers of our [their] young white daughters, rapers that the police protect and allow, or the violence by illegal and legal immigrants that hate our culture and people, and other 'crimes'.
That is only the beginning Model of inJustice and anti-liberty planned for rest of world.
Eugyppius, at least people on the internet are not using paper. Are you sure there will even be elections In February when there is such a shortage of paper in Germany with which to produce ballots?
In BC Canada 🇨🇦 where my wife and my family live they the Communist NDP Party just stole the election here using the programable new this year digital tabulating machines!🥲 everyone I know voted for the Conservative party John Rustad. They were allowing people working in the election to take home the boxes of ballots if you can believe it and they’ve been finding boxes over the weeks now it took almost 2 weeks to finally get the election done they keep adding more and moremail in ballots they had people phoning to get people to vote on the phone so so very very corrupt here so sad for my once beautiful mostly free and strong. CANADA now turned into a communist China 2.0.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
The insanity of having black-box corporate owned and controlled voting machines where Zionist owners or Venture Capitalist corp that can threaten them, like BlackStone corp. social credit score where -for example - the less white men in company the higher their score, ..
.
.. that level of insanity is shocking, what next is acceptable to our mind-broken populations?
Mothers killing our babies on whim, children-mutilations, ..?!
People awakening. Many of these clowns are packing up. Looking forward to Trudeau, Macron as well. The problem is that another band of clowns is replacing them. Bad times for libertarian looking at minimal state, low taxes, rule of law.
Here in the US I have noticed a disturbing phenomenon: search engines now only return pages that support the government line and the corporate-controlled media. I literally cannot find alternative opinions or websites anymore, even after going down multiple pages. I have noticed this just during the past two months. In combination with the insane vaccine-schedule for children and the aggressive promotion of vaccines and pharma products to the U.S. public, we the people are being squeezed informationally into a vise that is being turned by the psychopaths who run our government, corporations, and media. The goal is apparently to dumb down every single person in the country.
Thanks guys. I use Brave but have never tried their search engine -- didn't even know it had one! I think that eventually (sooner rather than later) the oligarchs and their top-down control and suppression of information will fail.
As a man far smarter than me frequently notes, there is no such thing as misinformation or disinformation. There is just information that you CHOOSE to believe or not.
The premise left unstated is that there are valid and invalid (procedurally/legally sound) votes, which is a highly dangerous viewpoint for a democracy or republic to foster.
It sure was apt he took himself to a church where he might rail against heresy.
We the people must truly reimagine ourselves in the right image if we want to keep the tides sweeping out the trash. We in our multitudes are really a council of feudal barons testing out the most cunning to lead us effectively.
Warm and cozy images of democracy have enfeebled us. We must think of them not as Presidents and Chancellors but as Henchguys-in-Chief whose heads depend on serving us loyally.
One would think of all the nations on the earth, Germany would be the LAST place the state would go all out on another bender to suppress views and ideas of its citizens that the elites found offensive.
I agree they should remember the past, but only in East Germany and they seem to be fighting back. In West Germany it will be 80 years since the end of the war and hardly anyone alive now would remember the Nazi repressions and I'm sure it was not taught in school. I was born in the Capitol city of the US,74 years after the end of our Civil War, and it was hardly taught in school when I was young. Having said that I don't remember much being said about WW2 even.
Why would anyone think that? Places that are very left wing are likely to stay that way long term, it's a deep rooted psycho-cultural phenomenon and not something that can be fixed by mere expedient of losing a world war. It's not like China became a capitalist utopia after they realized communism wasn't working, after all. They loosened up just enough to not have a revolution, and then stopped.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Germany has been psychologically damaged and weakened as we all have in West by the re-written false History. The re-writing we can see now when corp-media of record and people being recorded repeat debunked proven false lies, Harris spewing the Oct7th rapes lie, with same Zionists lies at UN, false Gaza death numbers, censorship of genocide and public speeches of genocidal intent from israel leaders, etc. Same for Jan7th debunked lies.
Our future history will ignore all the information from Alt-media and social-media's on-site videos of events, and our grandchildren will learn those lies.
I bring this up because our past history is filled with intentional falsehood, some is easy to find and illegal to research or discuss in some places. The pre-post WWII Europe Population data makes clear that the 6 millions of Jews killed is a lie, that 300,000 is likely near the number,..
.
.. and those 5.7 millions of never alive undead Haunting us all - Germany the most - that we are all weakened from it, that proper response to Jewish abuse to us or others is weak and irrational, that entire world is unable to respond to open Genocide and war-crimes by israel because of it.
Germans are likely so mind-f-ed and weak that anything the Zionist controlled gov leaders push-for will become law and policy.
Last time I wrote about the EU war on 'social media algorithms,' I had some people asking me why I thought corporations should be allowed to just do whatever on social media and why I didn't think they should be regulated by the government. Thus I want to make two things clear:
1) Nobody is really worried about "algorithms" OK? People like Habeck want to shut up the political opposition. This is a way of demanding that Eurocrats take action against the dirty filthy rabble online without appearing to be overtly illiberal or opposed to things like freedom of expression, while at the same time actually opposing these things in material ways.
2) I admit that social media is very powerful, and that the manipulation of social media by foreign parties may potentially have political consequences. That might be bad, though I generally think the threat here is overstated. What would certainly be bad, is the EU stepping in to manipulate social media instead.
No matter how bad you think no government regulation would be on the internet, I promise you it's much much better than government regulation of the internet.
Trying to get this across to people is hard, when their only response is "But the lies!
The biggest lies are always from the 'experts'.
Covid fear mongering and the "safe and effective" miracle cure should have erased all doubt in case anyone was still wondering.
It is saddening to me that it hasn't
Yes, I feel the same
Ies. It really hasn't. And I agree. How sad that most people don't see it.
Simulation Commander. As soon as an " expert" appears on any media I know I will be subjected to government approved brain washing. It's amazing in Canada with a doctor shortage how many expert doctors have the time to flood the airways with their "expert opinion". Shouldn't they be treating their patients?
I’d ask if they know what’s a lie, why are they so worried? Why can’t everyone else figure it out for themselves?
Exactly.
"But *I'm* smart and all those people are dumb! I mean, just look at what they believe!"
BINGO !!! 👍👍👍
Well, that's the way tardigrades out there deal with it ... 🤣🤣🤣
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
[This is an expanded version of previous comment of mine on top-level]
Open access debates and regulations by our public representatives is far better than the situation we have now, where closed corporate and secrete government owners and controllers decide policies and censor & suppress information, debates, perspectives, testimonies, etc. as they amplify lies.
The algro.s that define feed access to non-followers should be configurable or disabled-able. I only want to see what my followers want to make available, and find others through topic searches, searches that are not mind-raping designed - not like Google and YouTube and likely others do, mind-controlling lying censoring nightmares they became.
All social-media should be define legally as 'carriers' like phone company, and no interference from the owners and controllers of those companies unless real illegal speech, or disrupting actions that interferes with normal use by others.
This seems so reasonable to be common-sense and Constitutionally, Liberty, Freedom-to-Hear Complient. Parents must parent Children before 14 related to these. Anyone disagreeing with this position must explain why they are not mind-raping though-controlling horrors that would come between us all and future, and something someone wants available for us to see and think about, and those interferers must argue why it not Just to publicly hang them and perhaps all adults in their family and significant mentors that warped them into such a Satanic horror.
God Bless., Steve
Counterpoint: Social media is only as powerful as the recipient is susceptible/vulnerable to it.
Of course, any action taken to strengthen people to be able to exert control over their own media feed (apt name, feed, it is after all what you give farm-animals) would by definition and necessity weaken the Traffic-light parties, since they have ruled by lies, deceit and misdirection for 15 (?) years by now.
Too many people fail to consider that the cure might be worse than the disease.
They assume that their side will be the one determining what other people get to see and hear.
Exactly! It's not that social media algorithms manipulating popular opinion isn't an issue; it clearly is. It's that setting up a Ministry of Truth is not going to work out well.
I think you're wrong about that and that they do genuinely worry about algorithms. It's not a synonym or doublespeak for anything else. They mean exactly what they say.
Why would they fear algorithms? At the root of leftist ideology is the belief that wisdom, knowledge and morality are highly concentrated in a small number of people. The rest are malleable sheep who don't really derive beliefs themselves. They just absorb them from "elites" via the written word, and then do whatever they're told as a consequence. This is a consistent theme of leftist thought for hundreds of years. For example, Karl Marx was a big fan of the press because it tended to employ people like him, and he saw it as a key way to create "class consciousness" (rewrite people's beliefs). During COVID we saw how prevalent this attitude is in public health, where every word they spoke was selected with compliance in mind.
The "elites" who control people fall into two neat categories: benign or malign. Algorithms select the words people see, thus in their mind, algorithms = control of the population and therefore control of democracy, government and ultimately the world. Whether the controllers of the algorithms are aligned with your agenda or not is thus of paramount importance; how could it not be?
It follows naturally that you'd spent a lot of time freaking out about (a) any media you view as unaligned i.e. Fox News in America, and (b) any technological means to manipulate social media algorithms like bots, and (c) the alignment of the people who control the algorithms. In fact this issue would freak you out more than any other issue, because anyone who controls people's minds can defeat your entire agenda. Hence why left wing governments always engage in censorship.
So there's no need to look for deeper subtext when they talk about algorithms. They are terrified and horrified by Elon Musk because he's a non-aligned elite who they view as basically being Yuri from Red Alert 2.
While I appreciate what you're saying, we have to recognise that these are carefully selected talking points, and that the EU has framed illiberal meddling like this on other occasions too. The Digital Services Act, for example, was sold as some kind of consumer protection bill for Europeans.
What they really want to do, is stop the rise of what I'd call 'counter-narratives' on the internet. They can't just come out and say that, because they are also selling themselves as liberal democrats with every second breath. So instead they talk about two foreign-owned social media platforms (TikTok and X), suggesting that they represent a foreign threat from which Europeans need to be protected. Then they talk about algorithms, suggesting that the content (the counter-narratives) they want to censor is somehow not organic, not really what Europeans/Germans think, a product of foreign manipulation that must be corrected or rooted out. This allows them to square the circle and censor content while still casting themselves as good liberals interested in freedom of expression.
We're disagreeably agreeing, I think :) The thrust of my argument is that the people who run Europe genuinely don't think of themselves as having dictatorial or illiberal tendencies. There is no what they "really" want to do - they believe they are protecting people and "liberal democracy", and are saying exactly what they mean.
There's no contradiction in their minds because as far as they are concerned democracy never really existed at all. Ever, anywhere. To the Red/Green mind democracy actually _cannot_ really exist, because it's meaningless to talk about a democracy when most people are pieces of chalkboard that contain whatever one of the small cadre of intellectual elites wrote on them last. You can surely have votes and debates, the form of the thing. But to Greens talking about just "democracy", alone, without the liberal prefix, sounds like a 14 year old talking about their high school politics debates. It's cute, and a nice thing to encourage, but it's not serious. Not something that can actually yield legitimate decisions.
Into this confused state of mind walks someone like Donald Trump. A "populist", meaning someone who lets the masses write on him instead of the other way around. To the left this is just like putting the children of the local school in charge of the world. They struggle to articulate this belief usually, except for when the mask slips with people like Clinton and Biden of course, and then "garbage" and "deplorable" pours out.
Would you be comfortable living in a real democracy if you thought most people were garbage? No, hence this odd construct of the "liberal democracy", which is defined as a democracy that's safe from the garbage people because everyone who might seize chalk and write on them is either on-board with liberal values, or censored. If one goes rogue and starts reading words in the patterns of dust on the chalkboard then they view that as the gravest threat possible, because it's a meta-threat that undermines everything else.
Very, very few people think of themselves as "the bad guy".
Great comment.
Thank you. I think most people can see that algorithms are not necessarily benign. The Habek statement emphasizes algorithms while assuring people their own precious free-speech won't be affected—but of course it will.
I'm a software engineer. I was reviewing slides from a presentation on AI, and one of them was about removing bias from AI models. The slide spoke about how a model might show bias where you would _not_ expect it, such as across religion, gender, race, and one other category, I forget. In other words, the categories across which you would expect the _most_ difference. Fundamentally, these people believe that all people really are the same, "equal," but it's all crusted over with all this socially-constructed crap that has to be stripped away to get to the reality. This allows them to look at a data that tells them that the world is the exact opposite of what they think, but then they just say "That just tells us how biased the model is."
So too, I think, with algorithms. They really believe they know what the "right answer" is. If so much of society comes to disagree with the "right answer," then it cannot be because they are wrong; it must be because the algorithms that feed people content are somehow biased against the truth.
Yes, we're getting there, but I don't think they believe people are equal. See my argument above. I think this is a very common but serious misreading of leftism as an ideology.
What they believe is that people are born equal, because everyone is born a blank slate. By implication, people remain blank until something is written on them. And although they might be born equally blank, their slates aren't born of equal size or quality. With time, a small group of people become enormously superior to the others around them. Those people - intellectuals, elites, whathaveyou - have a moral duty to ensure good outcomes for the others, which they are supposed to achieve by writing on their slates. Making people want what's good for them, in other words.
The reason liberal AI researchers sound crazy is not because they think everyone is actually equal. They are extremely confident that people aren't equal, morally or intellectually speaking, and that they themselves sit quite high up in the rankings. What they actually think is that religion, gender/racial "stereotypes" and so on are junk that's been scribbled onto people's slates by an unworthy society. Social graffiti, almost, and that if it were wiped away or never written onto people in the first place, none of those differences would exist. Their goal is therefore not to make people reach their inherent equality - they don't believe in any such equality - but to wipe the slates clean and rewrite people's minds to contain better content.
This sort of viewpoint seems to be naturally appealing to AI researchers, because neural networks are extremely malleable and their structure is inspired by the brain. So you can see why AI people might generalize from things like the success of RLHF and think, well, why not use RLHF on the population too? It's obviously not a new idea, just the terminology is new. Stalin was a big fan of RLHF.
"RLHF"?
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. A technique used to "house train" AIs.
Generally I agree with what you are saying. I would make an exception for TikToc because I think the CPC uses this platform as a propaganda tool to sway the perception of the people who use it for getting their news. In fact I would outright ban TikToc as is being done in the US.
“Liberal democracies under pressure – a plea for a strong, capable Europe” is an amazing title for a speech by this authoritarian. Europe is not strong nor capable as it has been run by incompetent people with an agenda. My hope would be for the people of Germany to do the same as we did in the US and throw off the bullshit these people are trying to ram down your throats. As long as the Greens are in charge there is no hope for Germany.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Funny you should exclude TikToc as recently Elite mind-rapers did not like that on that platform an old article on The Guardian UK that was the published letter from Osama bin Laden, 'Letter to the American People' went virial. Guardian censored it during this interest. Here is an archived PDF version of it;
https://ia801203.us.archive.org/8/items/bin-ladens-letter-to-america_November/Bin%20Laden%27s%20Letter%20to%20America_text.pdf
Spoiler: They do not 'Hate us for our Freedoms', and a lot of younger people were awakened to the corp-media Gov and other Zionist owned and controlled institutional lies, and then their censorship.
And that is dangerous. Mind-raping delusional and-or evil Psychos would come between us and something someone wants to make available to us all, and the Future, and they are everywhere!
.. what about all us here that would interfere with our Freedom-to-Hear, think and understand? Are you one?
God Bless., Steve
> Habeck gave his talk (entitled “Liberal democracies under pressure – a plea for a strong, capable Europe”) on 9 November, the 35th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Germany should do something to stop this rising tide of right wing populism! It's fascistic! They need to protect themselves against that! Perhaps with some sort of Antifaschistische Schutzwand! They could erect it around the entirety of the internet to protect it from fascism!
So, suffering an intense fit of irony, he used the 35th anniversary of the collapse of the Antifascist Protection Rampart to... lament how Western values of free speech are fascism. Nobody would believe in a character this one dimensionally evil if this were a novel. They'd rant about how this was just another Ayn Rand type villain.
*sigh* Once again, reality is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraints. I'm starting to think Ayn didn't go far *enough*... *facepalm*
The crackdown on free speech is world-wide, which is why it's so important that Trump gets into office and blows up the entire gameplan. Australia is getting close to passing their hate speech/misinformation bill, and Ireland had a very close call recently as well. "They" know they can't win in a free speech environment, so they're going to try to "covid information" your entire life.
Our hate crime bill (C-63) is worming its way though as well. It's totally insane.
Yes! I've written snippets about this from time to time, that bill is one of the worst.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
After the mind-raping lying twisted psychological brain-washing betrayal from mother, feminists, Professionals, media, gov, .. and others that I was raised to trust, and that were once considered - within reason - trustworthy, a life of confusion, suffering, failures, broken-perspective on reality, etc, ..
..
.. I consider it Just (if not Right) to hang till dead anyone making censoring, interfering with all ours's and futures' Freedom-to-Hear, them and adults in their families that raised such vile dangerous children, and include that that actively support them into power-over-others.
Entire lives are filled with needless suffering, confusion, failures, and poison-filled spreaders and generational amplifiers of it.
God Bless., Steve
If Trump does what he said he will regarding free speech, it's going to be epic. In the USA anyway. I don't know about the rest of the world.
Key word: fibrinaloid, as in fibrinaloid clots.
The only legitimate response is mass violations of the free speech laws. Clog the courts and jails to the max.
Guess why Sweden's /only/ free speech forum is based in New York?
Wikipedia-article is brief and quite informative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashback_Media_Group
Our authorities have been trying to shut this down since it was a punk fanzine in the 1990s.
Its bad here in Aus, they are now going after under 16 year olds, saying they will be banned from all Social Media, for "their" protection.
It is our Governments slimey way of enforcing ID for Online presence.
I just read about that a few minutes ago! This is quite obviously the way to sneak in further legislation once they have everybody acclimated to the idea of getting online being a privilege.
The current Australian government limped in to power with just 33% of the vote in 2022 via preference deals with The Greens (who else). The prior 'conservative' admin had created shit sandwich after shit sandwich during covid so were always going to lose but that's the Uniparty here for you. Additionally, the current government have really achieved nothing in the last 2.5 years apart from attempting to emulate German energy self-destruction. And now they're debating in the Senate on their MAD (misinfo and disinfo) bill...
Ireland has actually passed a modified 'hate-speech' bill which retains many of the worst parts, including the ability for the police to go on fishing expeditions based on a flimsy pretext, confiscating anything they regard as kompromat, enhanced punishment for any crime that can be regarded as having an element of 'hate,' which they do not define, and reversal of the burden of proof. The Irish police are behaving as if the 'hate speech' element has actually been passed.
https://www.youtube.com/@traceyomahonybarristerandf4933
Simulation Commander. You nailed it in your first sentence. The crackdown on free speech is worldwide but particularly in the so called western progressive countries. Third world countries have perfected this to an art. Who would have ever thought that our so called enlightened first world democratic countries are attempting to do the same thing.
Today in most western countries " hate" has become the new crime. Not murder, not child molesting, not theft, not all the other real and tangible offenses that destabilize society. Hate and Racisim have become the new perceived crimes of the populations that reside in these countries.
We are living with the abysmal failure of progressive policies that have infected most nations. And now, rather than acknowledging their failure they seek to carry on by restrictions on our ability to communicate via social media. They don't appear to be giving up. This is morphing into a war on our freedom to communicate.
What's laughable about the entire issue is that they believe or want you to believe that to preserve democracy we must impose censorship.
As a Canadian citizen I was a rarity for backing Trump in the election.
I'm glad he got in. I too, hopes he blows up the entire game plan.
"Disinformation is being spread on TikTok and X to blur the difference between truth and lies and to make people compliant."
Holy projection, batman. Hopefully he doesn't include Substack in his "axis of autocrats". Protecting free speech is such fascist behavior. May the German MSM collapse just like their American counterparts. Eugyppius is far superior to der spiegel and should be everyone's go-to source for German news.
Maybe it's an artifact of translation, but I'm trying to figure out how disinformation (implied to be from the bad guys—us) makes people compliant. I would think it would make them noncompliant.
No, the translation is accurate. See my other post on this thread for an explanation. It's a perfectly sensible thing to say within the leftist world view, as they view all speech as an extremely powerful form of mind control over the bulk of the population.
The left are purely magical thinkers, so, of course, incantations have power. Their speech, including the Green Manifesto above, is incantatory in nature, an attempt to conjure their favored reality into existence through repetition, redefinition of terms, and imprecations flung at their enemies, the verbal equivalent of Zeus flinging thunderbolts.
By artifact of translation, I didn't mean inaccurate. It's just that what he's trying to say doesn't make sense to me.
Since you are a language professional, maybe you will find the original helpful: "Desinformation wird verbreitet, um die Menschen kirre zu machen." "Kirre" is, according to dictionaries, "submissive, tractable, obedient, compliant." Maybe Habeck means that we're being lulled into a stupor (dazzled by entertainment, made self-satisfied).
They is more and more evidence that MSM all over the western world is collapsing
Sorry realised spell checker screwed up should be "There is..."
Hopefully we in the US dodged a bullet, or at least gained a little breathing space. I sincerely hope that if we have success on the free-speech front, it will help influence policies elsewhere.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-donald-j-trump-free-speech-policy-initiative
There has been talk of the U.S. enacting higher tariffs on, and making NATO subsidies contingent upon European nations knocking off their censorship crusades.
I've heard that too. I'm not gonna believe anything till I see it ;)
Although, even just the rumor might have the desired effect.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
My apartment lease does not allow guns on property.
I am routinely censored in my YouTube comments - usually but not only related to israeli genocide-lies and 75+ years of Terror and evil and Capture of Governments, spewing evil world-wide as Satan's Anus on earth, of UN voting to remove nationhood '1-State Solution' where Palestine lands returned with all that is on it.
I was refused service at a coffee-shop because of my political, social, theological, .. writings on-line.
And more corporate anti-Constitutional policies and Actions.
It seems reasonable to me that if our taxes and public resources go to support them, that they must comply with the Intent of Constitutional Rights, when possible.
Such actions like mentioned Tariffs leverage could meaningfully spread the Best of our Nation world-wide, but we need to start here with the clear mind-raping thought-controlling censoring lying manipulating unTruth, inJustice, disOrdering corporations, Gov, and Institutions we have now.
God Bless., Steve
I'm reading what Habeck is saying but he doesn't make any sense -- there's no there, there. None of these Misinformation Haters every say what exactly is the "misinformation." Just once I'd like a concrete example. I can only assume that the truth of what they want us to believe, is truly horrible. "Yes, the migrants ARE here to replace you, that is true, but you should WANT to be replaced, as it will be better in the long run for ME."
What's the misinformation? Well, *they* know it when *they* see it. We only know it when we get canceled.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Look at the UK's policy, laws, and those white Christain indigenous peoples' targeting genocidal Judges that are releasing violent immigrants from jails, to make room for political prisoners, to jail social media posters of 'wrong think', like when reporting Pakistani rape gangs of groomers of our [their] young white daughters, rapers that the police protect and allow, or the violence by illegal and legal immigrants that hate our culture and people, and other 'crimes'.
That is only the beginning Model of inJustice and anti-liberty planned for rest of world.
God Bless., Steve
Something everyone learned in Kindergarten:
When you mix Red with Green and Yellow, all you get is Brown.
Excellent!
The Grunners began as a coalition of Nazis and Pedophiles, and they have not improved morally since.
Eugyppius, at least people on the internet are not using paper. Are you sure there will even be elections In February when there is such a shortage of paper in Germany with which to produce ballots?
In BC Canada 🇨🇦 where my wife and my family live they the Communist NDP Party just stole the election here using the programable new this year digital tabulating machines!🥲 everyone I know voted for the Conservative party John Rustad. They were allowing people working in the election to take home the boxes of ballots if you can believe it and they’ve been finding boxes over the weeks now it took almost 2 weeks to finally get the election done they keep adding more and moremail in ballots they had people phoning to get people to vote on the phone so so very very corrupt here so sad for my once beautiful mostly free and strong. CANADA now turned into a communist China 2.0.
That is horrific!
They were obviously trained by the evil Left here in instituting their diabolical methods.
Mail in ballots are insane and need to be outlawed EVERYWHERE!!!
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
The insanity of having black-box corporate owned and controlled voting machines where Zionist owners or Venture Capitalist corp that can threaten them, like BlackStone corp. social credit score where -for example - the less white men in company the higher their score, ..
.
.. that level of insanity is shocking, what next is acceptable to our mind-broken populations?
Mothers killing our babies on whim, children-mutilations, ..?!
God Bless., Steve
People awakening. Many of these clowns are packing up. Looking forward to Trudeau, Macron as well. The problem is that another band of clowns is replacing them. Bad times for libertarian looking at minimal state, low taxes, rule of law.
Brilliantly written as usual.
Here in the US I have noticed a disturbing phenomenon: search engines now only return pages that support the government line and the corporate-controlled media. I literally cannot find alternative opinions or websites anymore, even after going down multiple pages. I have noticed this just during the past two months. In combination with the insane vaccine-schedule for children and the aggressive promotion of vaccines and pharma products to the U.S. public, we the people are being squeezed informationally into a vise that is being turned by the psychopaths who run our government, corporations, and media. The goal is apparently to dumb down every single person in the country.
Don't use google - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/alternatives-to-google/
Right. I use DuckDuckGo but they are just as bad. Do you know of any decent search engine out there?
Thanks guys. I use Brave but have never tried their search engine -- didn't even know it had one! I think that eventually (sooner rather than later) the oligarchs and their top-down control and suppression of information will fail.
Unfortunately, no. Brave & DuckDG both terrible. Google downright evil.
The other one people talk about is brave. I haven't tried it for more than a handful of test searches but it seems OK.
DDG seems a lot better than google, and it is the one I use, but I am well aware that is isn't perfect
As a man far smarter than me frequently notes, there is no such thing as misinformation or disinformation. There is just information that you CHOOSE to believe or not.
The premise left unstated is that there are valid and invalid (procedurally/legally sound) votes, which is a highly dangerous viewpoint for a democracy or republic to foster.
HabeckSTFU
It sure was apt he took himself to a church where he might rail against heresy.
We the people must truly reimagine ourselves in the right image if we want to keep the tides sweeping out the trash. We in our multitudes are really a council of feudal barons testing out the most cunning to lead us effectively.
Warm and cozy images of democracy have enfeebled us. We must think of them not as Presidents and Chancellors but as Henchguys-in-Chief whose heads depend on serving us loyally.
"Warm and cozy images of democracy have enfeebled us."
Superb insight.
Ain't you that little feller who wanted our host to give me a purposeful caning because you didn't like my manner of speaking?
Totalitarians always want to shut down free speech..it's what they do.
One would think of all the nations on the earth, Germany would be the LAST place the state would go all out on another bender to suppress views and ideas of its citizens that the elites found offensive.
I agree they should remember the past, but only in East Germany and they seem to be fighting back. In West Germany it will be 80 years since the end of the war and hardly anyone alive now would remember the Nazi repressions and I'm sure it was not taught in school. I was born in the Capitol city of the US,74 years after the end of our Civil War, and it was hardly taught in school when I was young. Having said that I don't remember much being said about WW2 even.
Why would anyone think that? Places that are very left wing are likely to stay that way long term, it's a deep rooted psycho-cultural phenomenon and not something that can be fixed by mere expedient of losing a world war. It's not like China became a capitalist utopia after they realized communism wasn't working, after all. They loosened up just enough to not have a revolution, and then stopped.
May this note find us all ever closer to God, and His Peace.
Germany has been psychologically damaged and weakened as we all have in West by the re-written false History. The re-writing we can see now when corp-media of record and people being recorded repeat debunked proven false lies, Harris spewing the Oct7th rapes lie, with same Zionists lies at UN, false Gaza death numbers, censorship of genocide and public speeches of genocidal intent from israel leaders, etc. Same for Jan7th debunked lies.
Our future history will ignore all the information from Alt-media and social-media's on-site videos of events, and our grandchildren will learn those lies.
I bring this up because our past history is filled with intentional falsehood, some is easy to find and illegal to research or discuss in some places. The pre-post WWII Europe Population data makes clear that the 6 millions of Jews killed is a lie, that 300,000 is likely near the number,..
.
.. and those 5.7 millions of never alive undead Haunting us all - Germany the most - that we are all weakened from it, that proper response to Jewish abuse to us or others is weak and irrational, that entire world is unable to respond to open Genocide and war-crimes by israel because of it.
Germans are likely so mind-f-ed and weak that anything the Zionist controlled gov leaders push-for will become law and policy.
God Bless., Steve