On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.
The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?
We must work to build an inter[dark]net which ideally fully divorces the user from the government and laws of the country the user is physically in (unless the user leaks his dox).
It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social cohesion on TV, or radio, or newspaper, or street sidewalk, or workplace, or family gathering - the internet is moving in the same direction. The anarchy was never meant to last.
1. The Streisand effect. No-one on HN gave a monkeys about this dodgy news agency till today. Now half of us have read the archive about how they promote propaganda & fake news. Your reputation takes a hit
2. There is no absolute definition of “freedom”. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for humanity in general and I think should be defended. But as more and more of humanity come to live more and more online, then the legal and cultural norms will shift and shuffle - courts for two hundred years have assumed they can order anyone in their jurisdiction around and often not in their jurisdiction- and that’s kind of the point of courts. So what is freedom? It’s what we the demos and the courts agree …
3. An example is in the order (I mean on the Streisand effect - when the %#}#% hell would I ever read a court order from India ?!) - it says “herein to take down/delete” - this bespeaks a failure to understand the world on the level of “who are the Beatles”. Take down - fine this is part of how we agree norms and limits of courts. Delete. Are you kidding me. Does that imply from everywhere else? Wow.
Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propaganda. Also it's admins are toxic and abuse their little power they have over every editor there.
Try editing some articles there, and you will see the dark side of Wikipedia.
I understand that Wikipedia has done this to not lose the possibility to appeal the court's decision. However, if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely. I believe that will blow up spectacularly in ANI's face if everyone comes to know the reason for the block.
Right now only a few people in India know about the ongoing dispute between ANI and Wikipedia. A country-level block is going to bring everyone's attention to the issue which I don't think is something ANI and the incumbent party (the BJP) would want to happen.
India routinely blocks many websites, including many porn sites, but blocking something as big, popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
As an Indian, you cannot understand the despair this makes me feel.
ANI is a bit like privatised Pravda operating in service to the government, yet, still pretending to be independent journalism. Wherever there is a critic of the government, ANI exists to slander such critics as a service.
As a discerning reader, you learn to avoid mainstream media that quotes ANI (don't even consider watching a TV channel). You seek out alternate information sources. As the entity aligns closer with the ruling party and the mega-corporations like Adani that are aligned with it, you basically witness an octopus take over all information communication in India.
Then you get harsher and harsher laws regulating social media. You get no new laws protecting your speech. You witness a general fatalism set in on the few Indian comment sections that still think this stuff is wrong. But one day you see it on HN and realise everyone is basically powerless here.
Foolish maybe, but I genuinely hoped the open and open-sourced side of the internet would transcend borders. There must exist an information ecosystem that is above government. But Linux bans Russian devs, wikipedia is blocked worldwide because they wouldn't reveal an editor's biodata to India, social media platforms regulating information appoint information officers to enforce dictatorial government orders.
Where is the technology that can challenge this? At what point can the principle of "code is law" support free human expression instead of serving the whims of the latest oppressive regime?
I would implore any devs making open-source censorship-proof tools to consider the Indian context as ground zero.
I’d like to clear up some misconceptions about jurisdiction going on in this thread, purely from the perspective of international law.
As a matter of sovereignty, a state can exercise judicial jurisdiction over its territory, over its nationals, over national security concerns and over the most grave crimes.
A state’s jurisdiction can apply even to foreign people/companies who have no presence in said state at all. What the state’s courts can’t do is enforce their decisions abroad.
I know nothing about Indian law, but I know it has the right to set its own judicial jurisdiction. Accordingly, it can surely grant courts the power to order worldwide content bans. The real questions at stake in this case are:
1) does Wikipedia have any presence in India, so that Indian courts can compel it to follow their orders?
2) which countries where Wikipedia operates are able to receive requests from Indian courts and take enforcement action based on them?
It might not be fair, or right, but that’s the way it is. Thankfully, the obstacles to enforcing absurd orders abroad are usually high enough that they discourage said orders, or render them ineffective.
I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
A comment from Jimbo Wales on WMF Legal's reasoning for the temporary takedown can be found on the on-wiki discussion on the topic, the reason given is to preserve the Foundations ability to appeal:
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in...
When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
I am following this case closely to see how will WMF handle the issue when it goes to court, as the issue I am experiencing is similar to this one.
To describe briefly: There is a politician ("S") with articles in various languages of Wikipedia. One day, a group of people claiming to be the daughter of S ("T") tried to insert content that can be described as "trivial" and not relating to the work of S itself. Wikipedia editors, including myself, tried to argue to T that the content T inserted in an article about S isn't something that should be inserted, and despite the article of S including the criticism relating to lawsuit against S and his policy, the content was supported by books written by scholars. T simply argued that the content written in article of S is false, and threatened to bring lawsuit against editors involving in the process of keeping article of S up to standard. So far, T managed to file a police report against some editors, but no lawsuits were filed as far as I know. T also maintained presence in another forum, and I also argue that Wikipedia do not allow T to insert content of S in a manner T intended to. Instead, T decided to quote my reply out of context to defame me, causing me to send cease and desist notice. This prompted T to stalk my lawyer and publish the information, causing the lawyer and myself to discuss further action that should be taken in relation to this issue.
I have reported this incident to WMF 5 years ago, as the issue has been as long as that point. The issue on T and S has become so persistent such that I have proposed that our language of WMF project will ban any content relating to their family, as we do not want our volunteers to expose to legal liability for having to deal with frivolous lawsuit. This threatened lawsuit is one of the reasons I largely retired from writing content in Wikipedia, as I do not want accomplices of T and S to discover that I am active and that they will continue to harass me, though I'll still handle this behind the scenes if needed.
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
We desperately need more work done on a separate internet that by design cannot and never can be censored.
I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.
Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.
If you take wikipedia rogue and only accept crypto donations, the budget will take a nosedive. And the project will lose all relevance once the non-tor mirrors are blocked in the big countries.
This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.
The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.
As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.
I think comments about how Wikipedia is backing down when they have the right to ignore the situation doesn’t do Wikipedia justice.
Getting Wikipedia banned in India, would hurt the people of India, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Sure, _some_ people will still figure out a way to access it. But, they are not even the people who most need Wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia’s trying to toe the line, preventing a country-wide ban, which would affect nearly a billion people, while still drawing attention to the situation is a pretty good strategy.
I feel like your comment is overlooking 2 pretty crucial points that I think these questions will force you to face:
1. one country's court has done something which lead Wikipedia to block content from the entire world. Why do you think every bad political leader now isn't going to be instructing their courts and lawyers to do the same thing for any unfavourable content, creating huge, unnecessary legal work, or even more globally banned content?
2. you mention it's good because they're avoiding blocking information from 1 billion people. 8 billion is more than 1 billion, and all 8 billion are impacted by this decision and potential precedence, so why is it better this way?
No disrespect intended, but you've commended a worldwide content ban by wikipedia and dismissed all other comments without articulating any solid reasons why.
I would love to understand your position a bit more, because it seems a little different.
[+] [-] redrix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|1 year ago|reply
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
[+] [-] typewithrhythm|1 year ago|reply
In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service.
The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable.
Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
[+] [-] tim333|1 year ago|reply
Nah, this stuff has been going on forever. See the death of Socrates for example for 'corrupting the youth of Athens' by his speech. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates)
Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.
The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
[+] [-] endgame|1 year ago|reply
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|1 year ago|reply
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
[+] [-] ants_everywhere|1 year ago|reply
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
[+] [-] verisimi|1 year ago|reply
They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?
[+] [-] rustcleaner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] consf|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ekianjo|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Rury|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|1 year ago|reply
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
[+] [-] anal_reactor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|1 year ago|reply
1. The Streisand effect. No-one on HN gave a monkeys about this dodgy news agency till today. Now half of us have read the archive about how they promote propaganda & fake news. Your reputation takes a hit
2. There is no absolute definition of “freedom”. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for humanity in general and I think should be defended. But as more and more of humanity come to live more and more online, then the legal and cultural norms will shift and shuffle - courts for two hundred years have assumed they can order anyone in their jurisdiction around and often not in their jurisdiction- and that’s kind of the point of courts. So what is freedom? It’s what we the demos and the courts agree …
3. An example is in the order (I mean on the Streisand effect - when the %#}#% hell would I ever read a court order from India ?!) - it says “herein to take down/delete” - this bespeaks a failure to understand the world on the level of “who are the Beatles”. Take down - fine this is part of how we agree norms and limits of courts. Delete. Are you kidding me. Does that imply from everywhere else? Wow.
[+] [-] _el1s7|1 year ago|reply
I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propaganda. Also it's admins are toxic and abuse their little power they have over every editor there.
Try editing some articles there, and you will see the dark side of Wikipedia.
[+] [-] hshshshshsh|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] laxmin|1 year ago|reply
It is temporary as heck. People will forget about anything, no matter the extent of Streisand effect and go onto the next tictok video or whatever.
Who gives a flying fk anyways about an article on wikipedia.
[+] [-] random_ind_dude|1 year ago|reply
Right now only a few people in India know about the ongoing dispute between ANI and Wikipedia. A country-level block is going to bring everyone's attention to the issue which I don't think is something ANI and the incumbent party (the BJP) would want to happen.
India routinely blocks many websites, including many porn sites, but blocking something as big, popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
[+] [-] fwipsy|1 year ago|reply
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
[+] [-] instagraham|1 year ago|reply
As a discerning reader, you learn to avoid mainstream media that quotes ANI (don't even consider watching a TV channel). You seek out alternate information sources. As the entity aligns closer with the ruling party and the mega-corporations like Adani that are aligned with it, you basically witness an octopus take over all information communication in India.
Then you get harsher and harsher laws regulating social media. You get no new laws protecting your speech. You witness a general fatalism set in on the few Indian comment sections that still think this stuff is wrong. But one day you see it on HN and realise everyone is basically powerless here.
Foolish maybe, but I genuinely hoped the open and open-sourced side of the internet would transcend borders. There must exist an information ecosystem that is above government. But Linux bans Russian devs, wikipedia is blocked worldwide because they wouldn't reveal an editor's biodata to India, social media platforms regulating information appoint information officers to enforce dictatorial government orders.
Where is the technology that can challenge this? At what point can the principle of "code is law" support free human expression instead of serving the whims of the latest oppressive regime?
I would implore any devs making open-source censorship-proof tools to consider the Indian context as ground zero.
[+] [-] thimabi|1 year ago|reply
As a matter of sovereignty, a state can exercise judicial jurisdiction over its territory, over its nationals, over national security concerns and over the most grave crimes.
A state’s jurisdiction can apply even to foreign people/companies who have no presence in said state at all. What the state’s courts can’t do is enforce their decisions abroad.
I know nothing about Indian law, but I know it has the right to set its own judicial jurisdiction. Accordingly, it can surely grant courts the power to order worldwide content bans. The real questions at stake in this case are:
1) does Wikipedia have any presence in India, so that Indian courts can compel it to follow their orders?
2) which countries where Wikipedia operates are able to receive requests from Indian courts and take enforcement action based on them?
It might not be fair, or right, but that’s the way it is. Thankfully, the obstacles to enforcing absurd orders abroad are usually high enough that they discourage said orders, or render them ineffective.
[+] [-] EasyMark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Alpha3031|1 year ago|reply
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1253528244#C...
[+] [-] Liftyee|1 year ago|reply
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
[+] [-] tomrod|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PeterCorless|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kayxspre|1 year ago|reply
To describe briefly: There is a politician ("S") with articles in various languages of Wikipedia. One day, a group of people claiming to be the daughter of S ("T") tried to insert content that can be described as "trivial" and not relating to the work of S itself. Wikipedia editors, including myself, tried to argue to T that the content T inserted in an article about S isn't something that should be inserted, and despite the article of S including the criticism relating to lawsuit against S and his policy, the content was supported by books written by scholars. T simply argued that the content written in article of S is false, and threatened to bring lawsuit against editors involving in the process of keeping article of S up to standard. So far, T managed to file a police report against some editors, but no lawsuits were filed as far as I know. T also maintained presence in another forum, and I also argue that Wikipedia do not allow T to insert content of S in a manner T intended to. Instead, T decided to quote my reply out of context to defame me, causing me to send cease and desist notice. This prompted T to stalk my lawyer and publish the information, causing the lawyer and myself to discuss further action that should be taken in relation to this issue.
I have reported this incident to WMF 5 years ago, as the issue has been as long as that point. The issue on T and S has become so persistent such that I have proposed that our language of WMF project will ban any content relating to their family, as we do not want our volunteers to expose to legal liability for having to deal with frivolous lawsuit. This threatened lawsuit is one of the reasons I largely retired from writing content in Wikipedia, as I do not want accomplices of T and S to discover that I am active and that they will continue to harass me, though I'll still handle this behind the scenes if needed.
[+] [-] throwaway313373|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iafisher|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alwayslikethis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] josephg|1 year ago|reply
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
[+] [-] driverdan|1 year ago|reply
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
[+] [-] dh77l|1 year ago|reply
All centralized systems have this weakness.
[+] [-] sneak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jprete|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mrlongroots|1 year ago|reply
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
[+] [-] josephcsible|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ImJamal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hayleox|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ta988|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ruthmarx|1 year ago|reply
I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.
Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.
[+] [-] eternauta3k|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SirHumphrey|1 year ago|reply
The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.
As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.
[+] [-] ozozozd|1 year ago|reply
Getting Wikipedia banned in India, would hurt the people of India, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Sure, _some_ people will still figure out a way to access it. But, they are not even the people who most need Wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia’s trying to toe the line, preventing a country-wide ban, which would affect nearly a billion people, while still drawing attention to the situation is a pretty good strategy.
[+] [-] 1dom|1 year ago|reply
1. one country's court has done something which lead Wikipedia to block content from the entire world. Why do you think every bad political leader now isn't going to be instructing their courts and lawyers to do the same thing for any unfavourable content, creating huge, unnecessary legal work, or even more globally banned content? 2. you mention it's good because they're avoiding blocking information from 1 billion people. 8 billion is more than 1 billion, and all 8 billion are impacted by this decision and potential precedence, so why is it better this way?
No disrespect intended, but you've commended a worldwide content ban by wikipedia and dismissed all other comments without articulating any solid reasons why.
I would love to understand your position a bit more, because it seems a little different.