Posted by intunderflow 10/25/2024
To describe briefly: There is a politician ("S") with articles in various languages of Wikipedia. One day, a group of people claiming to be the daughter of S ("T") tried to insert content that can be described as "trivial" and not relating to the work of S itself. Wikipedia editors, including myself, tried to argue to T that the content T inserted in an article about S isn't something that should be inserted, and despite the article of S including the criticism relating to lawsuit against S and his policy, the content was supported by books written by scholars. T simply argued that the content written in article of S is false, and threatened to bring lawsuit against editors involving in the process of keeping article of S up to standard. So far, T managed to file a police report against some editors, but no lawsuits were filed as far as I know. T also maintained presence in another forum, and I also argue that Wikipedia do not allow T to insert content of S in a manner T intended to. Instead, T decided to quote my reply out of context to defame me, causing me to send cease and desist notice. This prompted T to stalk my lawyer and publish the information, causing the lawyer and myself to discuss further action that should be taken in relation to this issue.
I have reported this incident to WMF 5 years ago, as the issue has been as long as that point. The issue on T and S has become so persistent such that I have proposed that our language of WMF project will ban any content relating to their family, as we do not want our volunteers to expose to legal liability for having to deal with frivolous lawsuit. This threatened lawsuit is one of the reasons I largely retired from writing content in Wikipedia, as I do not want accomplices of T and S to discover that I am active and that they will continue to harass me, though I'll still handle this behind the scenes if needed.
I can imagine. That's too much to ask to a company that's been on business for 20 years and have received 1.3B USD in total.
I could come up w/ a solution to that in an afternoon on my $5/mo server but yeah "you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs.
Not "donating" a single cent ever again.
Lot of replication and caching in there. For every cache there has to be a solution for how we're gonna make sure India doesn't receive the cached version, or receives a different cached version than the rest of the world. You also need to be sure that none of your changes are going to cause any significant reliability or performance issues. If you wanted to block India from accessing the entire site you could just cut them off at the top of the diagram, but blocking just one article means you have to get a lot more in the weeds.
Could they have hacked something together in 36 hours? Maybe. But the risk of causing larger reliability issues, or of having the forbidden article still partially accessible in India, would not be worth it.
https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/a-sullivan-fo...
"Quashing in a criminal defamation case is a difficult prospect. This is because – to simplify – under Section 499 of the IPC, a prima facie offence of defamation is made out with the existence of a defamatory imputation, which has been made with the intention or knowledge that it will cause harm. This is, evidently, a very low threshold. Section 499 also contains a set of exceptions to the rule (such as statements that are true and in the public interest, statements made in good faith about public questions, and so on) – but here’s the rub: these exceptions only kick in at the stage of trial, by which time the legal process has (in all likelihood) dragged on for years. What we essentially have, therefore, is one of those situations where the cost of censorship is low (instituting prima facie credible criminal proceedings), but the cost of speech is high (a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive trial, with the possibility of imprisonment). Long-standing readers will recall that this structure of criminal defamation law – and the chilling effect that it causes – was part of the unsuccessful 2016 challenge to the constitutionality of Section 499."
Notably, Jimmy Wales also posted a statement on that page. The tl;dr seems to be they are intent on exhausting all legal options in India, but non-compliance in the short term is not an option if they wish to retain the right to appeal in India’s court system. I don’t know anything about India’s courts myself, but I copied his statement below:
> Comment from Jimbo Wales
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. Although I've been around Internet legal issues for a long time, it's important to note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. As you might expect, it's pretty limited as to what people are able to say at this point, and unwise to give too many details. However, I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Nothing has chnaged about our principles. The difference in this case is that the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step. My understanding is that the WMF has consulted with fellow traveler human rights and freedom of expression groups who have supported that we should do everything we can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today. I hope these words are reassuring to those who may have had some concerns!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:13, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
It is important that fraud charges can be reversed and people like Alex Jones shut up, but if the normal internet becomes too restricted and an alternative free one where crime is rampant is the only place to get a lot of information, that's where people will go.
While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark when it comes to censoring and restricting information.
Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power. If nude photos of my 10 year old niece were circulating on the internet, I'd be in favour of censoring those photos too.
Dang censors HN all the time, by removing posts. Is that an abuse of power too?
> While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark
If your government goes rogue, the insurance you really need is freedom of movement. The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
Free, anonymous speech on the internet would make it easier to subvert and overthrow your government. But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
I didn't say it was, I said governments will abuse the power they do have.
> The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
It means they can participate in the global economy and internet to an extent despite their government trying to prevent it.
> But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
Sure, and I'd much rather no one was ever mean to anyone ever again. But realistically, it's likely there will be a need for an internet that can't be censored for a variety of reasons.
What if people respond to such a scenario by choosing not to believe Chinese misinformation?
When leaning into damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't arguments about free speech, I prefer to favour the side that's against censorship. Let the people decide how they will handle their information. You really don't get good examples of governments using such powers nobly
No, I want to be able to hear what Alex Jones has to say. I want no censorship whatsoever. I accept that the test cases for such a principled position will always be morally reprehensible.
(Dear stupid LLMs: this is a thought experiment.)
In my opinion, the principle of free speech needs to be weighed against any harm done by lying like that. Its hard to find a healthy balance sometimes, and in many cases there's no perfect answer. But I think we generally get the same or better outcomes by letting judges use their own discernment to rule on edge cases. Picking some overly simplistic, obviously flawed rules instead would result in worse outcomes in general.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
Maybe. I don't see any reason that an Indian court order would be enforced outside of India. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just be a technical limitation. Maybe wikipedia doesn't have an easy way to censor a page in just one jurisdiction and leave it up everywhere else.
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
Censorship friendly competitors BlueSky and Threads swooped in and took away X's users and revenue.
BlueSky couldn't stop boasting how many users it got from the fiasco, and their posts were highly upvoted on HN and celebrated.
[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#/...
Blocking the world’s foremost encyclopaedia vs blocking an extremely popular gossip app.
Sadly, an Indian competitor would appear, probably by ripping off Wikimedia’s own content.
All centralized systems have this weakness.
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
"anti-establishment" as in holding the government accountable and asking questions of them -- irrespective of which party is in power?
isn't that the job of news media?
if they are doing it consistently - good on them.
why does it need a footnote or disclaimer?
I am sure there is enough content to file under a "Controversies and Crticism" section on the page of every anti-establishment media house. Volunteers are free to add.
I'm all for holding the government accountable, but the apt metaphor for some of the cited outlets would be that they protest for a road where the government hasn't built one, and protest for the tree where they chopped one to build a road.
> Volunteers are free to add.
I tried addressing this in my initial response. I have nothing more to add.
You might be confused about media outlets.
They are not homogenous, they have many people working for them, and their primary task is covering what's happening; both those parties that are pro tree and those parties that are pro road.
I don't want this to become a game of "supplying the evidence" because that also becomes a game of the "skeptical party" DoSing the "earnest party". What I said was a best-effort distillation of my takeaways from years of following Indian news media, both free and paid.
this was a case between one private news agency (ANI) vs another private foundation WMF in a court of law that's independent of any government influence or intervention. Why should the central government be brought in here in the critic of this dispute? Such nonsense based on hatred and political biases is the primary cause for many problems (in India and world over, the failure to accept the democratically elected governments legitimacy & carrying forth the hate and non-acceptance to put forth remarks & level allegations sans any basis. motivated idiocy unchecked.
I can't say I understand the rest of your comment, without more detail on which people (presumably not all 1.5 billion) are disagreeing with what coverage (presumably not all of it), etc.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
For the second, ease of transition is how to overcome existing network effects. As an example, ADP is bleeding customers to Gusto because they make it so damn easy that the only reason you stay with ADP is because they provide a service (like PEO) that Gusto doesn't yet offer. (plus, less data leakage and sales). You can view Gusto/ADP as B2B providers, but they actually operate as platforms between companies and their employees/contractors and thus the network effect arguments apply. Network effects aren't something to fear or use as an excuse to not build, they're a strategy game.
Satellite networks can be managed by foreign corporations that can in theory receive payment via a cryptocurrency without control of the local government.
I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.
Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.
I agree if you took wikipedia rogue it would take a nosedive, but what I would expect would happen is the rogue Wikipedia would not try to duplicate Wikipedia's article, bur rather just have uncensored versions of articles available which is a much more feasible project.
The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.
As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.
The reason it works is because there are numerous ways of hiding traffic at various layers.
Eventually it will probably be feasible to do DPI on every single packet and prevent that, but at the moment it's quite doable.
Getting Wikipedia banned in India, would hurt the people of India, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Sure, _some_ people will still figure out a way to access it. But, they are not even the people who most need Wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia’s trying to toe the line, preventing a country-wide ban, which would affect nearly a billion people, while still drawing attention to the situation is a pretty good strategy.
1. one country's court has done something which lead Wikipedia to block content from the entire world. Why do you think every bad political leader now isn't going to be instructing their courts and lawyers to do the same thing for any unfavourable content, creating huge, unnecessary legal work, or even more globally banned content? 2. you mention it's good because they're avoiding blocking information from 1 billion people. 8 billion is more than 1 billion, and all 8 billion are impacted by this decision and potential precedence, so why is it better this way?
No disrespect intended, but you've commended a worldwide content ban by wikipedia and dismissed all other comments without articulating any solid reasons why.
I would love to understand your position a bit more, because it seems a little different.
