Comment on Iran plans permanent break from global internet, say activists

• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.

  Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.

  The US doesn’t really block VPNs or many websites. I can access Baidu and QQ stuff in the US without a VPN. My parents regularly use WeChat here in the US without a VPN. In contrast, in China you can’t access a lot of western sites like Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia, and, intermittently, Reddit, gets blocked without a VPN, and VPNs are much more difficult to obtain and use in China compared to the US.

  As for Facebook/Twitter censorship, that’s on the people. They could easily switch to alternative platforms without using any VPNs but they just choose not to.

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  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Oh yeah, certainly. The US Government isn’t openly censoring the Internet and most of the ‘censorship’ is done by private individuals (who, I would argue, have even more power over the average person’s life).

    I’m not making a false equivalence, just pointing out that even if the government isn’t doing it the people in the US shouldn’t be so smug because they are also getting viewpoint-filtered Internet, except their viewpoint dictator is some tech bro billionaire of questionable morality.

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    I will say, to the passive readers, it’s very possible to live without a site that recommends you content. Avoiding those sites avoids a huge amount of propaganda and emotional priming (which affects you even if you know it is misleading, very important!). Get your news from reputable polls, primary sources (like court documents and case filings) and trusted news organizations (which absolutely exist, despite the drumbeat of ‘don’t trust the media(trust Elon instead!)’ propaganda over the past decade).

    Delete Meta, TikTok and X as if your sanity depends on it. Stay away from Reddit, stay away from Lemmy communities that primarily pedal in content that makes you angry, outraged or afraid. If you see a piece of media that makes you outraged, angry, afraid or to think conspiratorially stay far away. Those emotions can be primed into your subconsciousness through content that you rationally know is misleading, knowing that something is misleading does not protect you from it.

    Read psychological textbooks about how this works. Look for terms like respondent conditioning, semantic/context/social priming. The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are excellent documentaries that show the technology involved(The Social Dilemma) and how it can be used to affect political outcomes like Brexit and Trump’s first campaign (The Great Hack, and also any journalism covering Cambridge Analytica).

    These are techniques that have been used for advertising purposes for a long time. Now instead of promoting body shame to make you buy makeup, they’re selling conspiratorial thinking so that you doubt the reality that you see with your own eyes or fear of government agents so you avoid the polls and fear of social/career/legal retribution so that you don’t speak your mind on social media.

    Get rid of that garbage and protect yourself from this kind of attack, anyone who is paying attention can see the damage being caused in the world… this is how it is being done. Delete it.

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