I am absolutely SHOCKED, I did not expect this in a million years. Why would I ever have any reason to believe the government isn't telling me the truth? And, as a law-abiding citizen, I can't imagine what they'd even want with it anyway. This must have been an honest mistake.
That's very silly. Between all of the people capable of spying on you, it's exactly your own country that has the most ability to harm you. The Chinese government can't arrest you if you're not in China, but your government can.
>I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish.
I disagree. Whatever is put on the internet belongs to everyone on it, just because you made it doesn't mean you should have any kind of control over what people do with it. Enforcing redaction is obviously impossible but why would you even want to? You'll never get a guarantee that it's gone but also telling other people they cannot access information you originally created is kind of a jerk move.
The reality is that 99.99% of people will never care about their phony "right" to be forgotten and the 0.01% who do most likely do so because they posted something worth wanting to be forgotten, which will be picked up by interested parties and reposted ad infinum because that's what people do with that sort of thing (dox, embarrassing pictures, etc), while the information of the 99.99% who don't care will be lost when Quora inevitably stops existing and then nobody gets it.
>If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create.
They don't have any, and they shouldn't either - everything on the internet should be given freely as virtually everything is received freely as well. People should be allowed to retain or repost or modify anything for any purpose, and they pretty much do. Allowing "content creators" to control their work would mean any modification of it unacceptable to them (which encompasses a lot of territory) would be impossible to distribute, making remix cultures like YTP and others impossible. This is completely unreasonable, they should just learn to deal with other people using their work for things they never intended and move on.
I almost never discuss anything important with people outside of extremely close and likeminded friends because of the current political climate. I worry about being ostracized/alienated by them for not believing in the same things as them, so it's not at all worth the risk to actually discuss anything meaningful with them if the outcome might be permanently destroying our relationship.
The title of this is extremely amusing to me because I've only ever thought of online moderators as basically the lowest form of life, almost exclusively petty tyrants and ego-tripping jerks who try to flatter and ingratiate the people above them and are heavy-handed despots to anyone beneath them. Their role as "gatekeeper of ability to communicate with people via the medium under their control" is typically done by encoding their adolescent morality into policy and silencing anyone who goes against the grain or threatens their social standing.
It's actually gotten me thinking a lot about distributed moderation. Wouldn't it be better if access to any particular medium of communication (a forum, an IRC channel, a mastodon server) was federated? Democratized moderation would mean that people could then subscribe to whichever style of moderation they prefer, and people with unpopular styles of moderation (e.g. "ban everything I don't like", the style of the vast majority of forum moderators) would cease having so much power over mediums of communication.
The idea that the citizens of the United States are somehow responsible for what their illegitimate government does is ridiculous. The people who actually will have to physically coexist with the refugees and the people responsible for their plight in the first place are not the same, the refugees will live around normal poor or middle class people who do not make major foreign policy decisions and the latter will live in rich gated neighborhoods in expensive houses and will probably never set eyes on a refugee in their lives. Whether it's in the interests of the natives to let in so many people who have a legitimate reason to hate the country they are moving to is also something to consider, this being supposedly the only real concern of government after all.
Uh, people have their livelihoods destroyed and lives ruined for having unpopular views all the time. James Watson literally had to sell his Nobel prize because he was destitute, Curtis Yarvin was disinvited from Strange Loop, to name two examples. Another example of the difficulty people have in going against the status quo is this article, which was on HN several months ago: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p... .
The problem is not that they can't accept criticism, the problem is other people disenfranchising them for their opinions.
Rallying against objectively "fake" news doesn't do anything about the much more serious problem of the way that mainstream news is less than truthful in more subtle ways, such as under-reporting or not reporting things that are true, emphasizing certain facets of a true story to follow a crafted narrative, reporting on things that otherwise wouldn't be newsworthy to advance that narrative, etc. Disproving blatantly fake news is trivial, disproving years of propagandizing full of half-truths and consistent narratives is impossible.
Ideological convictions are not the same as smoking or child porn. Proving that smoking is wrong is easy. Proving that an entire ideology is wrong is not even possible, because "right" and "wrong" in this sense are subjective - they are relative to a specific person with specific interests. You might think "well obviously 'right' is whatever is the best for the most people", but should you really always prioritize the interests of the group as a whole over its constituent parts? For example, should you suppress Tibetian/black/white/Uyghur/etc nationalism because secession movements are against the interests of their host nations? Your condescension is mind-boggling, putting a system of ideas on the same level as satisfying base desires in an antisocial way is ridiculous.