> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
magmaus3 · 3h ago
the blog post was written before the page was changed
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
ghurtado · 1h ago
Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
hulitu · 47m ago
Yes. They vote with their (lobby) money almost every day, unless you, who votes with a pencil, every four years.
vorgol · 3h ago
A bit like "There used to be a lot of corruption is politics. There still is, but there also used to be."
layer8 · 4h ago
Note that the CUII blocking process is now based on court orders instead of arbitrary corporate decisions: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
JBiserkov · 4h ago
> Sadly, there's a small catch: the old blocks stay.
ghurtado · 1h ago
This thread has an alarming number of comments toeing the corporate line.
Could they have noticed this HN post and sent their shills to "clear things up"?
Nah, they would never do that. They're only looking out for all of us, like some kind of supply side guardian angels.
layer8 · 1h ago
Both the submitted article and the above link are from the same blog and author, just five months apart. I was pointing out the newer blog post containing updated information. It also indicates a success of the author’s activism, which is to be welcomed.
ghurtado · 39m ago
Thank you for clarifying.
Jolter · 38m ago
Doctor have any evidence that the claim is false?
ycombinatrix · 4h ago
Not true. The article you linked states that the current nefarious block list still exists, it just isn't growing any more.
Lerc · 2h ago
How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?
mrtksn · 5h ago
Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
sunshine-o · 3h ago
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks.
The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
TomLisankie · 51m ago
I'll have to check out gemini again sometime. I tried it out a couple of years ago and really liked how it had that wild west feel of the old-web.
zosima · 3h ago
Copyright is not censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
dragonwriter · 58m ago
> Copyright is not censorship.
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
mrtksn · 2h ago
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
fastball · 2h ago
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
Ukv · 1h ago
> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
fastball · 36m ago
> If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to...
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
mrtksn · 2h ago
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
psychoslave · 1h ago
Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.
fastball · 29m ago
You believing all property is theft is very avant-garde of you, but at the same time it is not a stance the vast majority of the world agrees with (including Germany), so it hardly seems relevant to a constructive conversation centered around the behavior of German ISPs.
ghurtado · 1h ago
> i don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
fastball · 39m ago
Which of these definitions do you think supports your case?
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
drfridg · 4h ago
I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
Dumblydorr · 3h ago
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
acdha · 3h ago
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
TomLisankie · 47m ago
> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
snickerdoodle12 · 3h ago
> I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general
Ha.
mtsr · 4h ago
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
mrtksn · 3h ago
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
mannykannot · 2h ago
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
mrtksn · 2h ago
Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.
mannykannot · 23m ago
As the claim you made about copyright being used to take down a video was completely false, how did it contribute to anything?
dw64 · 3h ago
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet.
IMO that’s the issue.
buran77 · 4h ago
What about all the propaganda sites you like?
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
mtsr · 3h ago
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
perihelions · 3h ago
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
glenstein · 2h ago
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
buran77 · 3h ago
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
cowboylowrez · 3h ago
>door to arbitrary banning
lol the US has had that door removed
squigz · 4h ago
> If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack in a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
> just
So... you do both?
johnisgood · 3h ago
Y'all never made homeless people walk into the tobacco store to get cigs for you when you were kids? Or anyone who would do it for a quick buck.
squigz · 3h ago
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
buran77 · 2h ago
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
johnisgood · 1h ago
Thank you for answering, pretty much my thoughts.
We do both, yet it does not work, so I ask the parent, now what do you suggest?
Xelbair · 4h ago
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
coffee_am · 1h ago
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 4h ago
What is censorship for the "common" good? The point being that censorship is a top-down thing; it is not a "common" thing by definition.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
Definition of Common good is doing what the political establishment sees as good for preserving their power.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 3h ago
This is some weird revisionism. The definition of a common good is what's good for a community.
JeremyNT · 2h ago
> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
glenstein · 2h ago
I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
Thorrez · 4h ago
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 4h ago
They are saying that it is censorship, it just largely wasn't (and isn't) considered such.
squigz · 4h ago
> freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only.
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
dingdingdang · 2h ago
Yes, pre-empt the opposition Rumsfeld style and you ain't gotta worry about anyone taking that position any time soon #chat-with-ai
derelicta · 4h ago
There is no technological solution. Only a political one. And I tell you already: voting is useless.
acdha · 3h ago
> And I tell you already: voting is useless.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
Atreiden · 3h ago
> If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
acdha · 7m ago
You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
glenstein · 1h ago
I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
> voting is useless
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
GLdRH · 3h ago
How can you say that. Look at Trump.
cowboylowrez · 3h ago
I think this "derelicta" is actually advocating for Trumps position here so I bet "derelicta" has already had a look at Trump lol
GardenLetter27 · 4h ago
Germany is so backward in stuff like this, skilled engineers should just move to the free world and leave them with their insolvent pensions.
yladiz · 2h ago
Define free world.
GLdRH · 3h ago
That's already happening
yogorenapan · 3h ago
Where is the free world? Certainly not the US with Trump around.
zoobab · 5h ago
More censorship is a good inventive to build really uncensorable protocols that ISPs can't mess with.
mzajc · 5h ago
These protocols or revisions already exist - DNSSEC at the site level and DoT/DoH at the user level prevent this kind of malicious tampering with responses by the ISP.
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
jeroenhd · 33m ago
SNI blocking will hopefully be harder now that Let's Encrypt is rolling out IP certificates, so ECH becomes viable for websites that don't share an IP address with known-good websites (like Cloudflare tunnels). IP blocks will be the only solution on the normal web.
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
ACCount37 · 4h ago
And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
eskuero · 1h ago
> you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
Buttons840 · 4h ago
Imagine if the radios we all carry with us everywhere could be programmed to communicate with each other.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
ACCount37 · 3h ago
Cellular modems are typically locked down completely to shit. But I know of a few LTE chips that can be obtained with no pre-burned vendor boot keys, and also have the vendor modem sources and toolchains leaked.
ratorx · 3h ago
These don’t prevent censorship necessarily, they will give you a way to detect it at best.
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
jeroenhd · 22m ago
DNSSEC itself won't help you alone, but the combination of DNSSEC + ODoH/DoT will. Without DNSSEC, your (O)DoH/DoT server can mess with the DNS results as much as your ISP could.
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
uyzstvqs · 1h ago
The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
tliltocatl · 4h ago
Ultimately it all ends on the physical layer. Those who control the physical layer can always suppress communication if they choose so. The only protocol ISP can't mess with is having an army big enough (and somehow the commanders of that army has to be motivated not to mess with the protocol for their own purposes).
oblio · 5h ago
It's great to have alternatives but in practice those don't really get adoption (until a catastrophe has already happened) and during regular times their usage tends to put a target on your back.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
No, more censorship is a reason to vote better governments not to find workaround while accepting tyranny.
2716057 · 5h ago
The workarounds on this page mostly suggest to use large public resolvers. Feature request (not sure if the author is on HN): it would be interesting to know which domains are blocked by 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, and especially the new DNS4EU service.
p2detar · 4h ago
Thanks so much for this. I never heard about DNS4EU before.
Sadly dns4eu does not support dnscrypt protocol which is deal-breaker in 2025 if you ask me.
rfl890 · 12m ago
Why isn't DoT sufficient?
nicce · 3h ago
Few years ago I would have been happy about such a service in EU level. Now I just fear how they are planning to misuse it.
ballenf · 4h ago
When domains are seized, does the new "owner" pay the registration renewals? If so, what's to stop someone from doing this:
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
tiagod · 3h ago
These domains aren't being seized, they are being blocked. In this case, as per TFA, they're just overriding the domain nameserver at the ISP default DNS server.
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
GuB-42 · 3h ago
Seizing a domain probably costs way more in procedures than any renewal fees.
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
asdfaoeu · 4h ago
I don't think governments seizing domains are paying anything.
ascorbic · 4h ago
Step 1 there is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl"
hk1337 · 1h ago
Initially, this will be used exactly as intended and therefore seen as good. After about ~10 years it will include other "objectionable" material and a good case will be made for it so most people will not necessarily realize it.
elashri · 5h ago
These stories and the stories about going after people who are torrenting in much more aggressive manner make my puzzle by Proton decision to relocate to Germany from Switzerland over some proposed law. I understand that it would make it harder to operate with protecting privacy but I would wonder why relocating to Germany, what would the Swiss government do that would be worse than the current situation in Germany?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
flerchin · 2h ago
So this entire censorship scheme is bypassed by using 8.8.8.8 or the like?
Henchman21 · 2h ago
What about simply running ‘unbound’ yourself?
IFC_LLC · 3h ago
What options are there? Do we have a reliable distributed DNS? I'm genuinely asking, because I've just realized that for the past 7 years I've been happily using my provider's DNS server and never thought of it.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
Ms-J · 1h ago
In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives. Too many bad laws to keep giving them your consent to be governed.
aleph_minus_one · 59m ago
> In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives.
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
layer8 · 56m ago
It’s explicitly not the government, it’s an independent private association of ISPs and copyright holders.
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
layer8 · 28m ago
The article was about how they are deciding to block websites on their own authority, without court orders.
Ms-J · 14m ago
The article is speculating on why a test domain owned by Telefonica is blocked. The government issues many blocking orders and the CUII complies.
mystraline · 3h ago
So basically, we need a new way of contact DoH multiple DNS's for a probabilistic response for a site. Ideally, you could also verify geographically different ASNs, including opposing countries to get around legal idiocy.
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
donperignon · 5h ago
Ah telefonica… that’s Spanish, same company that every weekend blocks cloudfare in order to “avoid” football piracy. They don’t believe in laws, well they believe that laws are for the plebs not for them, the elites
GranPC · 5h ago
Not just Telefónica. Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs. It's getting really old at this point.
diggan · 5h ago
> Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
GranPC · 4h ago
Yup. Been going on for a few months already. Here are some links:
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone.
A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
ErneX · 4h ago
It’s most, yes. Due to a court order. But Telefonica are the ones who owns the domestic broadcasting soccer rights this season and past.
akk0 · 5h ago
I understand it's just rhetorics, but I am amused by the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".
bapak · 5h ago
> the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".
Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
donperignon · 5h ago
They are. Spanish organizations , the c-suite is always there by nepotism
fodmap · 4h ago
You can say "the elites" in Telefonica case, because is heavily under the Spanish socialist party control.
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
anthk · 2h ago
Lol at Tebas and LaLiga, so "socialists"...
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
oriettaxx · 4h ago
As we all experienced, there is always somebody that wants to "protect" us: and so often is the state
ulrischa · 5h ago
[flagged]
riedel · 4h ago
The legal basis is explained here [0] . Funny thing is that in contrast to what the OP says the German net agency says that the CUII needs a court decision:
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
Unlike censorship on US-owned social media platforms where the female nipple is banned for some reason.
Hilift · 3h ago
Time to break out the 20 Germany bad demographic maps that dovetail-overlay with East Germany and Afd. Or the fire set by Russian agents that destroyed 1,400 Vietnamese owned businesses in Poland. Were those suppressed in Germany?
randomtoast · 4h ago
I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
mrtksn · 4h ago
>political (like rt.com)
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
on_the_train · 3h ago
I'd go further and say that Germany is not part of the (general) internet. From the top of my head I can list 5-10 domains that are blocked. No site explaining, just "this site can't be reached". Reasons are piracy, pornography, politics. And the biggest problem is that it's being widely defended with many voices to increase that censorship.
plextoria · 5h ago
Except in the case of rt.com it's completely justified
No comments yet
croes · 3h ago
At least we can say fuck on TV and aren’t afraid of showing a naked female breast.
GLdRH · 3h ago
But when you call a politician "Schwachkopf" your house gets raided. I guess you have to take the bad with the good.
carstenhag · 3h ago
Or "so 1 Pimmel" ("such 1 penis")
croes · 2h ago
The raid was because of allegedly antisemitic post, but they totally botched the warrant.
The mentioned antisemitism in the title but not in the reasons.
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
They ran a TV channel without broadcasting license. Which country allows this?
ur-whale · 4h ago
> bigger than one would think
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
simonask · 4h ago
Yes, it absolutely does.
zahlman · 3h ago
For understandable reasons, censorship in particular of Holocaust and Nazi-related imagery is especially heavy-handed in Germany. Among other things, this has led to bans of several video games (note how much space is dedicated to Germany on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...) that were relatively popular and uncontroversial in North America, particularly ones with an eye to historic simulation. The context of depicting the Nazis as unquestionably the bad guys who you as a player character must vanquish, does not matter to the censors.
ffsm8 · 4h ago
I live in Germany. I just opened it and it loaded just fine.
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
sorushn · 4h ago
Just tested, and it's blocked on Deutsche Telekom & O2 mobile.
ffsm8 · 4h ago
At least mobile telekom and my local landline ISP resolve it fine.
orlp · 4h ago
Are you using a third-party DNS like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8?
Eezee · 3h ago
Just tried and it's blocked on Telekom with the default DNS.
FWIW I was also sceptical, but just tried it from my phone network and it seems indeed blocked. Wouldn't be the first case of different ISPs using different block-lists. c.f. bs.to
42lux · 4h ago
No problem from Telekom mobile and residential the biggest provider by a humongous margin.
on_the_train · 3h ago
That is not true
mtsr · 5h ago
[flagged]
klabb3 · 4h ago
Not parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
heelix · 4h ago
I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.
bootsmann · 4h ago
> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
zahlman · 4h ago
If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?
jpalawaga · 3h ago
Sanctions are about impinging others freedom because they’re behaving badly.
“Why can’t I play with the kid who is in timeout? Is it because you hate my freedom?”
tpoacher · 2h ago
Except your analogy here should be more "there's a kid on timeout so nobody gets to play, just in case"
zahlman · 3h ago
I would think that enforcing economic sanctions would be a far more effective use of time and effort.
throwaway290 · 3h ago
Shutting down a business = economic sanctions. Blocking domain of a web publication is part of shutting it down.
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
Xelbair · 3h ago
i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
ur-whale · 4h ago
> The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
And ... ?
multjoy · 4h ago
Do you think allowing an enemy state free reign to broadcast propaganda to your population makes good tactical sense?
dvdkon · 4h ago
Freedom of speech rarely makes "tactical sense", which is why we as citizens need to continually fight for it.
fireflash38 · 2h ago
The irony of freedom of speech, much like democracy in general, is that it can destroy itself.
zahlman · 3h ago
This is inconsistent with the upthread argument:
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
jdiff · 2h ago
It is not. People are allowed to do what they will, as long as those people are not the outlet itself. The propaganda outlet loses control over it and cannot push the media through, only hope that others pull it from them.
multjoy · 2h ago
The difference is they're not an enemy sovereign state. This isn't contradictory or illogical.
somehow missed the fact that the EU has declared war already
multjoy · 2h ago
You don't need to declare war to have enemies. After all, Russia has launched chemical and radiological attacks on EU states.
logicchains · 3h ago
If you believe in any kind of system of morality, it's absolutely possible for one's own government to be in the moral wrong and the enemy government to be in the moral right. Censorship means the citizens may never learn that their country is the bad guy in that case.
raverbashing · 3h ago
Some people really do not need their holidays north of Seoul prevented
Matl · 4h ago
Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.
raverbashing · 3h ago
Every person and institution have a limited number of flips to give
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
Matl · 3h ago
Apart from the fact that you seem to be equating a whole people with one group, you also seem to conveniently not realize that the government committing the genocide is a non-secular messianic one, with a deep seated belief of the superiority of their own religious group over any other, but particularly feel themselves superior to the people they occupy for decades, who of course despite them being occupied are always supposed to find compassion and understanding for their occupier first, otherwise the occupation cannot end, right?
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
So why haven't we banned Israeli news sites and companies for their war/genocide in Gaza?
simonask · 4h ago
Because Israel is not engaged in a war against Europe.
zosima · 3h ago
Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.
kace91 · 3h ago
There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
simion314 · 4h ago
>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
taminka · 4h ago
> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
rvnx · 4h ago
It is similar to the problem of pornography online.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
petre · 3h ago
Propaganda affects everyone, not just kids. It even affects people with university studies but who have given up thinking for themselves. The problem is that they authorities are banning websites, while social media is riddled with propaganda. They claim to do something which clearly doesn't work.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
zx8080 · 3h ago
> ads, propaganda and hate speech
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
hnlmorg · 4h ago
I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
rvnx · 4h ago
What you actually need is to have a feature on iPhone / Android (and on the home Wi-Fi) to block porn and that parents can enter a pin-code to unlock that, if you consider this is non-acceptable in your family.
hnlmorg · 2h ago
Some broadcasters do already have this feature. For example if you watch adult content (doesn’t have to be nudity, could be violent shows or other content that isnt considered appropriate for children) on SkyTV (UK satellite) then then you get promoted for a pin if its before 9pm.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
littlecranky67 · 5h ago
Clear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.
mnw21cam · 4h ago
The best counter-argument I can provide to your wonderful ideal is that people are stupid, and they are vulnerable to being manipulated into believing dangerous peace-disrupting falsehoods by propaganda.
littlecranky67 · 3h ago
Spinning your thoughts further, you assume that stupidity is not some kind of freedom that you get to enjoy in a democracy. The opposite is true, people are free to be stupid, and if the majority is stupid, the smart people have to give in to the fact that stupid people make the rules (by voting).
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
Barrin92 · 2h ago
>The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
moron4hire · 4h ago
If the people are too stupid to discern propaganda from truth, then they are too stupid to vote.
jdiff · 2h ago
Nobody is immune to propaganda. Thinking you are paradoxically makes you more susceptible.
morkalork · 5h ago
What if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.
rvnx · 4h ago
Democracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
imcritic · 4h ago
That description fits any authority, not just democratic. The state is an apparatus of coercion. Always was, always will be.
rvnx · 4h ago
Sadly yes. Even original Greek democracy was completely broken (women couldn't vote for example, like in many countries even recently).
There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 4h ago
What would you propose instead of democracy?
DoctorOW · 4h ago
> Clear case of "motive justifies the means".
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
vintermann · 3h ago
It used to be common sense among non-authoritarians, that propaganda just becomes more potent from suppression.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
DoctorOW · 3h ago
Your example of moon landing theories isn't an apt comparison because you're picking a fringe group. RT already had millions of international followers on Facebook, YouTube, etc., often more than high quality journalism outlets. I've been online long enough to see RT showing up uninvited in my feeds before.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
vintermann · 2h ago
Point is, you should be glad the attempt at censoring RT fails pretty bad.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
DoctorOW · 2h ago
> Verifiable damning truths about "our" side
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
zahlman · 3h ago
> Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.... If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
DoctorOW · 3h ago
Sure, they reported that Jewish individuals had to flee Ukraine due to a Nazi takeover and a supposed ongoing genocide. There's no evidence of the fleeing or the genocide happening. This was one of the false narratives cited in the EU court's ruling.
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
vintermann · 4h ago
It's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
jijijijij · 1h ago
> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
jamesnorden · 4h ago
Surely it will stop at blocking them (the Bad Guys), it will never extend to blocking us (the Good Guys). What a naive way of thinking.
jddj · 5h ago
I didn't get the impression they were making any value judgement
mtsr · 5h ago
You’re right. I guess I am. I’m pretty happy RT is blocked.
jstanley · 5h ago
Why?
mtsr · 4h ago
Because it’s turning out that too many people are susceptible to (this specific, but also other) propaganda.
Amezarak · 4h ago
If you think the masses are too susceptible to unapproved propaganda to the extent we have to censor it, it’s not clear to me that you can consistently believe democracy should be your form of government, as opposed to some sort of rule by experts/the rich/the educated/aristocrats/something else. It’s effectively saying the masses get a choice unless it’s the wrong choice.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
mtsr · 3h ago
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
rdm_blackhole · 3h ago
> Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
mtsr · 2h ago
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
rdm_blackhole · 2h ago
This is not an ad-hominem attack.
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
Amezarak · 3h ago
None of these problems are new. The problems have been well-understood since the founding of all Western democracies and we accepted that trade off, as we decided the alternative systems were all worse. You can find this very debate in newspapers and CC notes (in America)at the time, about “false rumors” stirred up by “designing men.”
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
petre · 3h ago
> It’s their job to persuade their fellows.
Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Screw Russia and China. The Internet blocking committee should probably also block Tiktok while they're at it, as it makes people's brains rot.
Amezarak · 3h ago
> Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
You are comfortable with the blocking until the politicians start blocking something you care about.
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
petre · 3h ago
Don't worry, nobody would stop it anyway, at least nobody on Twitter and Tiktok. The Kremlin is paying the nazis to scream, shout and create diversions. Then they could justify other de-nazifying invasions. The only ones rallying now are the nazis, screaming and shouting, oh no, cancelled elections.
rdm_blackhole · 3h ago
How convenient.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
jddj · 5h ago
[Editing this while I still can as although I think it's a reasonable discussion I tend to regret getting too much into politics here.]
qwertox · 4h ago
It's like handing knives out on a playground. rt.com is handing out propaganda which is meant to influence those who are already distrustful of mainstream institutions.
GuB-42 · 3h ago
Which German laws did RT break?
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
05 · 5h ago
Pretty sure the biggest propaganda channel is social media and it's wide open.
mtsr · 4h ago
I would be in favor of limiting these channels, because I agree with you it seems necessary. But it’s also something to be quite careful with, I feel.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
imcritic · 4h ago
You see, he isn't against propaganda, he is against propaganda he doesn't agree with.
mtsr · 4h ago
I’m against propaganda that seeks to actively undermine freedom and democracy in my country and the rest of the EU. Is that so strange?
logicchains · 3h ago
There is abundant factual evidence that the US worked to undermine democracy in Ukraine in 2014 when Ukraine elected a candidate favourable to Moscow. It's not propaganda to draw attention to that.
hkpack · 1h ago
As a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit.
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
zosima · 3h ago
No, it's not. Social media is massively censored in many EU countries (and UK).
f1shy · 4h ago
Not OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
OKRainbowKid · 4h ago
Please post a source
f1shy · 3h ago
Here one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park.
"Demnach soll er im Frühjahr 2024 auf X eine Bilddatei mit Bezug zur Nazi-Zeit hochgeladen haben, die möglicherweise den Straftatbestand der Volksverhetzung erfüllen könnte."
f1shy · 3h ago
The police was sent when he wrote “schwachkopf”. Not before. The association with nazi came much later, and had a pretty good explanation. If you look the coments that guy wrote was CRISTAL CLEAR he was not nazi, and much less antisemitic. Was a clear case of using a law for what it was not intended.
nani8ot · 3h ago
In 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1].
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
Being called a dick on social media is now hate speech? I thought it was constructive criticism.
poly2it · 5h ago
In an ideal society there would be no need to block propaganda.
rvnx · 4h ago
Still concerning that there is a Ministry of Truth.
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
simonask · 4h ago
They do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources.
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
Spooky23 · 4h ago
It’s a cycle.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
linohh · 4h ago
Exactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.
djfobbz · 2h ago
Interesting...so facts are just whatever comes pre-approved by your worldview? Handy system!
tomp · 3h ago
That is a retarded justification.
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
user3939382 · 5h ago
Is Chris Hedges a Russian propagandist?
zahlman · 4h ago
I must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses?
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
petre · 3h ago
Who cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.
Argonaut998 · 4h ago
Yes?
ur-whale · 4h ago
> Are you seriously crying about the biggest Russian propaganda channel being blocked
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
sorushn · 4h ago
Can't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.
littlecranky67 · 5h ago
Just checked the list of blocked domains, and my very first try if I can open it, I got also a censorship website from the spanish government (I'm in spain, provider is DIGI) for fitgirl-repacks.site - other (mostly german) piracy sites from the list open fine.
diggan · 5h ago
Spain here too, Vodafone, and fitgirl-repacks.site also displays "ESTÁ USTED INTENTANDO ACCEDER A UN SITIO WEB ILEGAL" if I accept the (obviously) mismatched certificate they're using.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
littlecranky67 · 5h ago
just set my DNS to 1.1.1.1 and am no longer bothered with that censorship.
cluckindan · 2h ago
But now you are telling CloudFlare about every domain you visit.
littlecranky67 · 1h ago
You are right. Found out there is also DNS4EU with a bit more privacy-friendly orientation. How much they log, well, unless they get audited, I won't know.
I feel like someone junior tried to hide their oopsies and did this in an unprofessional manner like all juniors are bound to do at some point (like youtube killing IE6).
jedimastert · 1h ago
Ethics aside, how is what the engineer did "unprofessional"?
Hizonner · 3h ago
It's really getting to be past time to migrate things off of the DNS.
superkuh · 1h ago
Oh, you can be sure any new protocol approved by the IETF today is only going to reflect the needs and use cases of large corporations (see HTTP/3). We gotta work with what we have.
Hizonner · 32m ago
Why would you ask the IETF?
chris_wot · 32m ago
We really need an alternative to DNS.
chris_wot · 29m ago
Oh, please, downvote away. But there is GNU Name System and Freenet, but are they any good?
breppp · 5h ago
Europe and Germany in particular took from the 30s-40s the lesson where freedom of expression is a risk in democracies because a demagogue can easily sway opinions.
For that reason they are in a better position to protect themselves against the 21st century threat to democracy of foreign influences networks
Argonaut998 · 4h ago
No thanks. I’d rather form my own opinions.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
breppp · 4h ago
Yet even if you were never manipulated by false information or narratives in your life, if you live in the US you live in a country where pizzagate happened, the capital riots, the george floyd protests which also became very violent at times and other events where the russian IRA had a hand
Dilettante_ · 4h ago
"We need more government action and control to protect you from le bad people" does not in fact strike me as the opposite of what happened in Nazi Germany.
breppp · 3h ago
Yet, free speech and democracy was exploited by a group that aimed at dismantling free speech and democracy (among many other things)
Dilettante_ · 2h ago
So, to prevent that from happening, we ought to dismantle free speech and democracy?
bitwize · 3h ago
It's what kept the Nazis from rising again in Germany for 80 years.
Dilettante_ · 2h ago
Guy goes to the psychiatrist, he keeps clapping his hands. Explains that this is to keep away the elephants. Doctor goes "But there aren't any elephants around?" Guy replies "See? It's working!"
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
herbertgreen · 4h ago
The progress of censorship in every single Western country is an admission that "democracy" is a fallacy born from an exceptional small period of time of civil peace, economic growth and wealth. Countries can only follow a stable political path - good or bad, this is not the point - if they have an authoritarian regime.
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
simonask · 4h ago
A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media. Every single functioning democracy in the world has institutions that can apply some amount of sanctions against newspapers and other media that do no live up to the expectation of accuracy.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
Amezarak · 3h ago
When exactly was there “free and accurate” media? Did you mistake the restrictions on some 20th century broadcast media that originated as a consequence of government licensing as some sort of centuries-old universal truth prior to social media? If anything newspapers in particular used to be much more irresponsible and scandalous, certainly as bad as anything on Twitter. And yes, there was plenty of foreign influence operations as well.
I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
Could they have noticed this HN post and sent their shills to "clear things up"?
Nah, they would never do that. They're only looking out for all of us, like some kind of supply side guardian angels.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
Ha.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
lol the US has had that door removed
> just
So... you do both?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
We do both, yet it does not work, so I ask the parent, now what do you suggest?
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
https://www.joindns4.eu/about
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
https://www.eleconomista.es/tecnologia/noticias/13287968/03/...
https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
https://tebas.tv/
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...
[0] https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
No comments yet
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ix309/e... .
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
“Why can’t I play with the kid who is in timeout? Is it because you hate my freedom?”
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
And ... ?
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Screw Russia and China. The Internet blocking committee should probably also block Tiktok while they're at it, as it makes people's brains rot.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
[1] https://archive.is/hETjp
[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.