Relevancy to India : We have the exact same things described in the mailer below being put into effect, with different wordings and zero opposition.
Just yesterday or day before I saw on a TOI newspaper about social media giants agreeing to work with India's central government to stop fake news as 2019 elections come.
Fake news = everything that the government and the establishment deems as fake news.
Imagine if google, twitter and facebook had not allowed Indian users to share anything less than flattering about the Congress / UPA in the lead-up to the 2014 elections cycle, and if the same things had zero coverage on TV news too. Well, we might just see that get applied.
In our end of the world, lynch-mobs are the triggering issue. But no one seems to ask whether the false rumours that triggered lynch mobs were spread on zero-verification-environment whatsapp, or on openly-verifiable, linkable and openly-traceable social media like FB, Twitter, youtube, blogs, sites on the web. Also if it was truly simply reading whatsapp forwards that transformed people into zombies, or if there was something already going on and the forwards were the excuse. Everything has to be regulated now because a few people don't think the difference between speech and violence matters.
There's also a counter-opinion coming regarding the lynch mobs issue from an evolutionist's perspective. I'll let this meme explain it:
But what about the innocent bystanders, one may say? Well, I don't have a clear answer to that (though the ongoing mass migration of qualified individuals and businesses from more violent parts of India to less violent parts might be one indicator of people voting with their feet). But what I do know is that the proclamation that the government must be in charge of policing what people say to each other, is only going to lead to lesser and lesser ability to distinguish between speech and violence. Whether its fake news countermeasures or the blasphemy laws being put forth in Punjab (btw it'll be hilarious to see India's intellectuals opposing Punjab's govt doing for all religions what they cheered the UK doing for Islam), the end result is : when someone tries to point out something wrong that is happening, they will be silenced. And to re-phrase Kennedy, making nonviolent self-expression impossible will make the feared apocalypse inevitable.
All the fake news laws and all the blasphemy laws in the world will not teach you to be less triggered, less intolerant, less violent towards folks you disagree with. They will not help you call bullshit on people trying to deceive you into becoming their cannon fodder. Governing authorities (whether elected or unelected like the tech giants) cannot be trusted to arbiter between truth and lies, because they have an inherent conflict of interest. That's something you're going to have to figure out on your own.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jon Rappoport
Date: Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 5:11 PM
Subject: Humans are really Russian bots
From: Jon Rappoport
Date: Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 5:11 PM
Subject: Humans are really Russian bots
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