Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not
defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
> But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum...
I, frankly, don't. A lot of these conversations stop because of statements like this. You're assuming a set of priors that make your argument make a ton of sense and assuming other people agree with them as well. Take away that as your prior assumption and other viewpoints make a lot more sense.
There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it. I think that happens a lot when people talk about "bad ideas".
I don't think it's the ideas existing that is the problem. I think a focus on the ideas is a distraction from the question of what are the conditions that make these ideas attractive to people?
As an example, I dislike Trump immensely. However it's not at all surprising to me that people voted for him for a lot of reasons but I think the best example was in what is probably the best political slogan/ad I've seen in my life, "He's for you, she's for they/them."
I don't think the problem was Trump, I think the problem was the choice being Trump's ideas and the ideas he was up against being.
>There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it.
Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.
That may be the term but I recall it as a little more closely related to how I phrased it though probably not as clinical.
I don't necessarily think you're guilty of it but I do think the premise you're proposing hints at it.
I wouldn't argue that democracy doesn't requires are shared understanding of the facts. The argument I'm making is that the motivation for people to believe certain things often is the root of the "problem", rather than the existence of things for them to believe.
Notably, I think, The shared understand of "the facts", is a convenient over-simplification. The real world situations where someone has "the facts" wrong, isn't usually a question of fact or fiction really, it's a focus on the emphasis of the narrative being spun. A reading of the same story comes of very different, even with shared facts, depending upon which parts of the story you think are important.
The usual disagreement on a lot of current events isn't what actually happened. Fringe elements will argue the plain facts but the majority of people are disagreeing about why something happened, not what happened.
Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.
Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.
It's true though, these people exist. There's bias in everyone, but it takes a special kind of arrogant to call a large portion of the population "cattle" because they are in disagreement.
That's an interpretation I've already seen in other replies. But that's not the idea.
Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.
NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.
Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).
That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.
EDIT: Just take a look at the NED website about Asia[1]. They don't even hide it: 295 projects in 13 Asian countries with a budget of over 50M$ to promote 'democracy' (i.e. US interest, anti-China propaganda). These countries need to act aggressively against these NGOs, because these NGOs do not act in the interests of the country and it's people.
Careful what you’re applying spatial terms to. “Information space” might sound clever to you, but you’re basically redefining hearts & minds in territorial terms, which is really no different than saying that people are the sovereign territory of their countries. Down that road lies a fork in the road, one path takes you back to serfdom, the other way straight to fascism. Neither is a particularly pleasant place to visit, and once you’re there, leaving is rather difficult.
It's rather strange to see such shameless apologetic of Putinism on HN. Yeah right, let's give the government more power and control over the information, what could go wrong???!
You're the one paranoid about "putinism" so that explains where that came from. The GP said nothing of what you are interpreting. The US itself has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people, so what are you saying?
The GP was preaching the virties of information control, and we Russians know far too well how it ends.
And no, your claim that US has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people is laughable: you can host and serve any information critical of government without issues. The closest you had to putinism was when companies en masse started deplatforming Trump and his supporters in early 2021.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
Not necessarily, you can buy low priced Deepseek inference also from many services that guarantee ZDR and GDPR compliance. My personal rule is: Never buy inference from those who also train models, because they have an inherent incentive to abuse your data to train their models.
Also because the independent services won't have incentive to resell your data. (to have another income and therefore make their inference cost lower, enabling them to gain over competition)
Ukrainian special ops. And good riddance, that pipeline was a stain on the Baltic, and people like Paavo Lipponen should be ashamed for ever pushing for it.
Reminder that the US is responsible for the precision strike murder of at least 120 school children[1]. Are they still 'investigating'? No one went to prison, right?
Recently, Marco Rubio gave a speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Seeing this, I immediately thought "what an oximoron".
Completely normal. There is a German fake online shop for heating-oil[1]. It's online for many month now (at least 8 month per domain lookup), they already scammed hundreds (if not thousands) of people, they were reported to authorities countless times. Nothing happens, authorities just don't do anything. This fake shop is allowed to continue to scam people (orders are often >1000€!). But if you dare to insult Chancellor Merz on twitter, you get fined at most 2 days later.
[1]: https://fastenergy24.com (the real shop is: https://www.fastenergy.de/). People are searching for "fastenergy" on google and they mistakenly land and buy on "fastenergy24.com" instead of "fastenergy.de"). I tried to report the scam site on google, but the whole process is so frustrating that I gave up.
Me too, maki in --yolo mode within an incus NixOS container, giving maki rootless (nested) podman and nix flakes powers (so it can install and run whatever tools it needs), with 100% ds4-flash it's extremely powerful and super cheap.
Some routing services not just route to different LLMs, they also handle all the legal issues (GDPR compliance, ISO certification, guaranteed Zero-Data-Retention, domestic data processing/European based clouds, etc.). In regulated industries, these things matter a lot, especially when processing of sensitive data is involved.
By "guaranteed" they mean "we promise really hard" right? Data retention has so much profit potential that any provider would have to be completely stupid not to retain data, even after promising they didn't.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
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