The article is perhaps poorly titled, and the modern age headline-skimmers will take it at face value. The article isn't calling for more extreme action or censorship... It's saying that deplatforming isn't the solution and what we should do is have transparency of advertisers & algorithms and support / fund research into studies on disinformation. I'm not sure how anyone can disagree with the substance of the article.
Ok, so no political issues... Still waiting on the privacy argument.
> It's saying that deplatforming isn't the solution
It's saying deplatforming is not going far enough to be the solution. And it advocates (among other things) "amplifying factual voices", which for a browser platform can mean only one thing - abandoning neutrality and privileging certain type of content - one that the gatekeepers agree with and thus call "factual" - while excluding other types of content, that they disagree with and thus call "misleading". To remove all doubt, they bring Facebook - which exercises clear viewpoint-driven editorial control over the content, even if unconsistently, haphazardly and ineffectually - as an example of what they're looking for. For a browser platform, advocating such approach means they plan to install themselves as the gatekeepers of the Internet, choosing what information you are and aren't allowed to see. While once currently can route easily around Facebook censorship, once browsers join the game, it won't be so easy. And of course, for anybody who values unrestricted access to information as much as privacy, it is the reason to avoid using platforms that advocate such principles.
First of all, I'll say that I _obviously_ don't want to live in some sort of Orwellian, Ministry of Truth, 1984-esque dystopia. However, I think there's an unnecessary amount of fearmongering going on currently about organizations pushing back against disinformation. There certainly is a disinformation problem and from a U.S. perspective it is quite obviously a foreign adversary and malicious actor problem.
It seems that this Mozilla article is too vague, open-ended, and short to be processed correctly. I personally interpreted the article differently than you did, which doesn't mean either of us interpreted it incorrectly.
I'm sure you don't want to have minitrue. Just as I am sure most people who made Russian revolution didn't really intend to have Gulag, Joseph Stalin, Hungary of 1956 and Prague of 1968. These things however have certain logic of its own, and gatekeeping tends to unfold into the direction of minitrue. That's just the internal logic of the things - and we can see it unfolding right now. First it was promoting the rightthinkers, then demoting the wrongthinkers, then banning the wrongthinkers from a platform, then banning the wrongthinkers from all platforms, then banning all mentions of wrongthinkers, then banning services that allow wrongthinkers, then destroying all services that allow wrongthinkers... Pretty soon there's just no place where wrongthink can happen, and how it's different from minitrue? That it's a trillion-dollar corporation that is doing it, not the government? DO I really care? The result is the same.
> "amplifying factual voices", which for a browser platform can mean only one thing - abandoning neutrality and privileging certain type of content
If you equate being factual with abandoning neutrality, you're not being political nor apolitical. That's just anti-intellectualism.
> one that the gatekeepers agree with and thus call "factual"
And the fact you're putting the word factual in scare-quotes only emphasises this further.
Your comment then veers into some vague Facebook comparison which I frankly couldn't parse: I'm not sure if you're making out that Facebook is benign or not?
It's not "being factual". It's you forcing me to accept your definition of "factual". That's the crux of the question - it's no longer my choice, the gatekeeper chooses for me what is "fact" and what is not, and I have no option of applying my own intellect and make my own choice - the choice is made for me, the conclusions are prepared in advance for me and the information is pre-filtered and pre-arranged to push me into accepting whatever vision of the world the gatekeeper privileges. I don't have an option to even know there exists something outside of gatekeeper's filter, let alone build my own filter according to my own preferences.
That's why the quotes are there - because it's literally what the quotes are for, to emphasize it's not my definition and not may decision - it's gatekeeper's, and I have no control and no input on it. If you think eating up pre-filtered and pre-digested information is "intellectualism", you definition of it is very different than mine.
> you're making out that Facebook is benign or not?
That's what using pre-digested information does for you - you become unable to parse things that aren't pre-digested. I will help you to make it clear - Facebook is evil, but the major point is not whether it's evil or not, but the role of information gatekeeper that it performs. Applied to a browser platform, this approach is dangerous and unacceptable to anybody who values their own intellect and is not scared of actually using it once in a while instead of outsourcing this function to a gatekeeper body.
> It's you forcing me to accept your definition of "factual"
Do you have a link to this definition that doesn't match your own? I'd be curious to see varying definitions of "factual"; it might make this issue easier to discuss.
> it's no longer my choice, the gatekeeper chooses for me what is "fact" and what is not, and I have no option of applying my own intellect and make my own choice - the choice is made for me, the conclusions are prepared in advance for me and the information is pre-filtered and pre-arranged to push me into accepting whatever vision of the world the gatekeeper privileges
You use two words here: "pre-filtered" and "pre-arranged"
Pre-filtering is not what's been proposed in the article. We've already covered that above, so lets not reiterate... any implied pre-filtering here is imagined.
Pre-arrangement is the world we live in and the very definition of the modern internet. What's been proposed is to introduce an improvement to how things are pre-arranged. I'd love to live in your utopia where we have the time to read everything in Google's index one-by-one and select which ones we value individually, but here in the real world, things are pre-arranged. This is about trying to find the best way to ensure that that pre-arrangement is not horribly skewed and corrupt.
> I'd be curious to see varying definitions of "factual"
Go to any "fact checking" site, they regularly "fact check" opinions and predictions about the future, which can't be "factual". Ask any of the current gatekeepers, which regularly block people expressing controversial opinions (about things like how to handle the beer bug or riots or any other current issue) for "misinformation" - completely ignoring the idea that opinions and facts are different things. The definition of "fact" in "fact checking" is basically "fact is something you don't get deplatformed for saying", more or less. Of course there's no better definition - why would they commit to any definition if "fact is what we say it is" works so well?
> Pre-filtering is not what's been proposed in the article
It is. That's what "amplifying factual voices" is - that is the only thing it could be - a filter. It doesn't have to be 100% block - but to be of any efficiency, it has to privilege one viewpoint and suppress another, and the choice will be made by the gatekeeper. It's not imagination - it's a basic requirement without which any mechanism like that would be useless. It has to make privileged opinion easy to reach, and excluded opinion hard to reach, otherwise there's no amplification.
> What's been proposed is to introduce an improvement to how things are pre-arranged
"Improvement" is a tricky word. When you define what is better for me, and "improve" things according to your definition, what happens if I disagree about what is better for me? Then your "improvements" are actually obstacles for me. But what if you're so sure you know what is better for me that you are determined to force it on me regardless of my opinion? That makes any such "improver" my enemy - they may think they are helping, but they are not, they are hurting.
> This is about trying to find the best way
When the "best way" is determined unilaterally by the oligarchy of the gatekeepers, it's usually the way that is best for them, not for me. I didn't ask for their help, and yet they are determined to force their "best way" onto me, whether I want it or not, whether I consider it best or not. This is a very common pattern that is repeated in human history again and again. Being on the receiving end of it is never fun, and rarely improves anything for the people being "helped" against their will.
I could not have put it better myself. Once a browser gets political, you can bet for others to join them. And allowing a browser to control what articles/arguments you see is allowing the company behind the browser to control you politically. I think we can all agree this would not end well.
An example for the privacy focused argument is the EFF panopticlick (I think they renamed it recently) test, which shows that, while Firefox is definitely good, Brave seems to be a little bit better in some aspects. And again, I want to repeat that I do not think that Firefox is a bad browser in any way, I just disagree with some of Mozilla's business decisions. The browser itself is great.
I initially responded to this thread with being legitimately "genuinely curious" as to why you think Brave > Firefox, as it seems a lot of people have that same thought. However, every time I get into a dialogue like this there isn't any proof in the pudding. I'm sure Brave is a decent browser, but there doesn't seem to be any real reason to switch. I've been using Firefox for more than a decade, it's open-source, from a non-profit, great community, frequently updated, on-par with Chrome in-terms of performance/speed.
Everything I hear is just hollow words- "I just disagree with some of Mozilla's business decisions" / "it's more privacy-focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "it's less politically focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "Brave seems to be a little bit better in some aspects"
Why don't you count these examples as arguments if I may ask?
Even small things being better in one or another browser are still arguments if both browsers are good.
Also, for me, the company behind the browser matters too, especially since donations to mozilla barely go to the Firefox dev team.
I get that those are not good arguments for everybody, but just dismissing them just because you do not care about them that much seems a little bit harsh.
Well so far you've given me a political article you misinterpreted based on a headline and I did try googling the EFF Panopticlick study on browsers- and there's an article from 2017 but no data or stats I can find? You haven't told me why you disagree with the company / business decisions so I have nothing to go off there...
I'm not being harsh, you just haven't presented anything beyond empty words.
As I said, in my opinion Mozilla does invest too much into side projects, upper-level managers and marketing and too little into the browser development and web development itself (for example the MDN layoffs). That's also why I stopped donating to them.
The panopticlick test (now renamed to coveryourtracks) is not a study, but a test you can actually do yourself with different browsers: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
And at this point I don't think it is worth it for me to invest more time arguing anymore, since you seemingly did not read my comments. There are plenty of other comments addressing all the "issues" you were talking about.
Brave beats Firefox on the EFF test because it randomises parts of its fingerprint, which the Tor project seems to reject as a strategy for anonymity [1].
I find the claim that Firefox is less privacy focused than Brave a bit questionable. Brave certainly seems to have good and probably better defaults in that regard, but remember that Firefox is basically developed in collaboration with the Tor project and as a result has various significant (mainly non-default) privacy features architected in such as first party isolation, containers, and Tor-project-approved fingerprint resistance. Easily-disabled telemetry seems like a small hassle compared to such concrete privacy features which do not exist elsewhere.
And for example with something like first party isolation, it is unclear whether Brave would even want or be able to to maintain such a patch set on top of Chromium when it requires quite deep integration with the browser engine.
There’s also the manifest v3 stuff which will presumably end up in Brave at some point.
You hadn't mentioned your first point, so not sure how I would have known that.
I will indeed test both browsers, if Brave is objectively better obviously I want to use it... However, I wish there was just stats on both browsers we could see side by side.
People in the other thread clearly read the article more thoroughly than you read the other thread.
Everyone in that thread knows what the article says. You’re just rehashing arguments here that they’ve already responded to there. And you’re not even addressing any of their points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25839923