Regarding what the article is referring to, things like the Washington Post allowing China to buy ads or China funding lobbyists who speak to congressman who likely have no idea, I can't see anybody justifying that, unless they hate the US, which okay, that's your prerogative.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the average person is at least two orders of magnitude less endowed with information than the people you might speak with on HN, whether or not any of our opinions are correct, so even a tiny bit of propaganda reaching enough people can change minds against the interest of the country.

I think this should've been illegal 50 years ago, and I think the people abetting this should be tried for treason, almost by the very definition.

Their purpose is to pretend to be serious news outlets to amplify various social media phenomena by selectively reporting about them and repeating this over and over again, with the purpose of legitimizing the phenomenae.

The message that comes out is aligned to the goals of the Russian Federation. The messages that are repeated are chosen for political purposes. The point is to not speak to Russians but to the "disgruntled people" of the West. The main idea seems to be to amplify divisions, whatever those may be.

For instance, just look at what is coming now out related to the "Yellow Vests" in France.

These sites are not a channel for presenting facts or a "counterbalance to Western media". They are simpleton propaganda outlets, news theater that is one part of the media influence mechanism that the Russian leadership wields.

The narrative in the prominent articles is always quite predictable: NATO equals bad, USA equals culture imperialism, Europe equals falling apart, Ukrainians equals fascists, Russia the underdog does nothing wrong, and so on.

Once RT starts running articles detailing the corruption in Russia and why there is an opposition movement in the first place (hint: not due to foreign involvement) it might start gaining plausibility as an outlet for high quality fact-based journalism.

In comparison to major US outlets? I get what you're saying, and agree that they place a halo on Russia, but, I would argue instead that you can get a much more holistic view of what is actually happening in the West from RT than what's being sold you to us on a TV screen in the US. From what I've seen, it doesn't look like RT is sparking anything that isn't already brewing and should not be covered.

There are very serious issues and changes brewing in France and all over Europe that OUR media is obscuring and even dismissing.

For one example (of many), regarding the Yellow Vest situation, Paris is on the verge of open revolution, but, up until about a week ago, most of the US outlets, especially the liberal ones (sorry, but it's true), portrayed peace and harmony in France and would mention Macron as some kind of noble visionary in contrast to Trump - not once did I see a mention of how his polling numbers were precipitously dropping to the lowest in modern history, among a myriad of other indicators. That, to me, is propaganda.

The word "division" is thrown a lot now, but conflict is inevitable, and I think the greater sin in our media has been obscuring issues behind a TV screen until things reach a climax.

France24 reported that the number of protesters is slightly down and that the Netherlands have also had peaceful protests.

Times in UK reported that "hundreds of online accounts linked to Russia" were used to fire up the demonstrations. Disinformation and pictures of injured protesters from other events were used to tell a story of brutal French authorities.

Guess what RT and friends bring up in their reporting, and how they present it?

Source: I live in Paris.

As a commenter, there are several "good faith" ways to respond to this:

- I disagree, this is not harmful to these users, because ____

- I agree that this is harmful to these users, but that is outweighed by ____

- I don't know whether or not this is harmful to these users, and I'm looking to learn more about their concerns.

You seem to have taken another route, "I don't understand this concern at all, nor do I intend to educate myself on it, and instead I'm going to rant about how these people are bad for society". This doesn't strike me as productive.

(Also: you're arguing against an imaginary position. Nobody is claiming that Tumblr doesn't have the right to decide what content is allowed on their platform. The argument isn't that tumblr can't do this. This is just shedding a light on the harm this decision will cause)

You've effectively changed what he said. He said something much simpler: there are children that use Tumblr; because there are children that use Tumblr, removing porn from Tumblr should not be controversial.

A "nuanced" reply would assess the risk of exposing children to the fascinations of various alternative communities that do not dabble in child porn. I don't see "Porn is obviously bad", but I do see exposing children to porn is obviously bad.

As it stands, Tumblr is not just banning someone's stash of hardcore sex videos. It also is banning, say, a casual vacation photo taken on a beach where topless sunbathing is acceptable (due to the explicit ban on female nipples except for a few narrow contexts). On a more "adult" level, it is also banning stuff in between the two categories, like say boudoir photography (which is usually adult in nature, sometimes erotic / titillating, but is usually not explicitly pornographic.)

Even the "any content that depicts sex acts" seems vague. Would something like, say, Rodin's "The Kiss" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Rodin_sculpture) -- be flagged? I don't know, it depends on what the auto-algorithms sees as a "sex act" I guess. Certainly if you were an artist that dabbled in any sort of erotic drawing / painting, the vague definition would probably be a worry IMHO.

(Tumblr is already 13+ already. Commercial crass porn is one thing, but I personally don't think there is any problem showing a 13+ year old this Rodin sculpture or a casual beach shot where topless sunbathing is acceptable.)

As a parent, the idea of exposing my kids to the internet is frightening. There are so many paths by which they can get exposed to stuff they shouldn't be exposed to. I, personally, think that attempts to make more of the internet child friendly are good. The internet as it exists today is like walking down the Main Street of some town, except that people surprise you by randomly jumping out from behind mailboxes and shrubs and engaging in hardcore sex on the sidewalk. It's insane.

First, they're deploying a machine-learning algorithm that simply does. not. work. It's flagging SFW content and ignoring NSFW content. I've been collecting a sample of erroneously-tagged posts here: https://paperairplanemob.tumblr.com/tagged/GREAT-WORK-VERIZO...

Second, it is a marked change from an earlier effort to make a "Safe Mode" for minors that filters out illicit content for those that don't want to (or shouldn't) view it. This is taking it a step farther, leaving those that have previously used Tumblr for such content scrambling to find a new platform.

Third, the announcement was incredibly disrespectful to the existing community on Tumblr. Everything from the post's title to the language used ("female-presenting nipples") was laced with corporate double-speak that would barely have flown on a normal social network. On Tumblr? Yeah, no.

Finally, because this is a change from earlier behavior on Tumblr, it's going to change the social makeup of the network. I don't go to Tumblr for illicit material; that's not why I'm there. I'm there to see and read some good fandom material, read webcomics, and have a good time. The previously lax content policy meant that the people I follow were free to experiment and be creative without worrying about having a post taken down for violating some vaguely defined "no porn" rule. Now, even if someone isn't posting illicit material, they still have an algorithm to content with. If they make it through the algorithm, they still have to worry about someone with an axe to grind reporting their content anyway. Eventually, people will stop posting rather than deal with the new changes. And that's going to change the community on Tumblr.

So no, in the broad scheme of things, there are plenty of other things we should be worried about. But something we love is being taken away from us, and we're going through the stages of grief as a result.

Web 2.0 spent the last 15 years taking over the internet. They made publishing easy enough for your mom. The web evolved from a niche many-to-many medium into a really global, many-to-many medium.

But... In exchange for these great, free publishing tools... most online content got concentrated and funnelled through a handful of companies. Being startups, they had reasonably diverse personas. Family friendly Facebook, anarcho-lunatic Reddit, neckbeard news.yc and pansexual tumblr...

As valuations grew, online advertising exploded and startups aged... they all end up with the same corporate persona.

I care about freedom too. But, I think a lot of liberals/libertarians (like me, this isn't shade) get too caught up in philosopmhical "blackboard freedom" and don't look at actual freedom.

An web where most content is reviewed by a taboo filter (this is what nsfw means, taboo) is not as free as one that isn't.

I'll throw out a reminder that many of the web's first communities existed to discuss taboo topics: drugs, sex, etc.

These were, for example, in my opinion, responsible for the cultural liberalisation that enabled "the great coming out" of gay and other marginalized culture.

Used to be if you wanted a presence on the web, you did it yourself. You got hosting, you learned what you needed to learn if there was something unfamiliar to you, some trial and error later, a website. You dot com.

The platforms came and soon it became you dot theirplatform dot com. Because they made it easier, faster and cheaper to get your stuff out there and get it seen by many people also posting on 'the platform'...the great tragedy is that it also made it easy for 'the platform' to get rid of 'your' stuff (read: stuff you leased to the platform) if at any point they decide, for whatever reason, they don't want it there.

I remember that being much harder to do that when it was you dot com. We were happy to do the work of putting up a you dot com. Some of us still are, because it's what we came up with, what we cut our teeth on so to speak.

Not sure if I'm really going anywhere with this...just sort of thinking idly at a bygone era I guess.

In the past, I would visit dozens of different websites in a day, each catering to their own little niche. Now, it's all moderated-subreddits which have to ultimately bow to the rules of the reddit admins.

It's impossible to have a decent conversation online now. Before, when everything was forums, the conversation in a thread was a single thing. People posting one after the other. Now, it's threaded comment chains where you get so many little conversations going on that it's garbage.

How many forum threads have you subscribed to and been eager to read the new replies the next time you visit? How many reddit posts have you ever returned to after the first visit, assuming you read the comments at all?

I hate the current-day internet. HN, SA and XDA excluded.

You forgot the gamification of it all with weighted popularity ranking. There's little point in contributing to any conversation unless it aligns with the existing accepted beliefs of the community.

And since have to maintain a minimum social credit/karma/gold/whatever score to function on many sites, why jeopardize it? Best to avoid controversial topics and opinions.

The web was very big, very early in absolute terms, but pretty small in the "number of people from your town" sense.

If this is your way of asking if people still visit Fark, the answer is "yes" :P

I agree the horrible policy is bipartisan.

Please clarify the nature of your disagreement with my comment. Not sure I fully understand.

That's a funny contradiction of a sort - then the index fund becomes the agent it's supposed to be observing.

For one, Blackrock is not Berkshire Hathaway - and in reality, obviously Blackrock can't wake up tomorrow and decide to be. They're not built for that.

Another scary thing is that the market is being increasingly turned into a derivative, and the underlying asset becomes more volatile (certainly for many different reasons) as it becomes proportionally smaller .