More transparency in advertising would be good…if I could trust the transparency. Which you can’t when it’s funded by ad revenue.
The main problem with that article is the title itself. Clearly it shows favor for deplatforming. And that’s a big problem for a browser maker.
For I see deplatforming, as it is practiced today, as something that isn’t just removing rule breakers or sources of information of which there’s a universal agreement that all were better off not seeing.
The sources of information you heard about that got removed are things you heard about because they had a large following. People wanted to look at their content. Not everyone did, but very large numbers, hundreds of thousands. More people than ever bought a Librem 5 or Pinephone. And then, their service providers changed their rules, or heard about some unsightly possible flow of information between them and undesirable people, and shoved them out the door without even talking to them.
Were the deplatformed wrong about things? Of course. No one is perfect. There have been several Librem 5 reviews posted here containing inaccurate information. One might even go as far as to call it misinformation and not be wrong. Should people be unable to view those videos on those grounds?
Mozilla seems to think we need this and more. And that’s a problem, because they can make Firefox remove access to websites that they disagree with. And they can do it for money.
Consider the websites that come recommended in the default configuration of the URL bar. Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Wikipedia. What’s the point in promoting these places? It’s not to showcase them, everyone’s heard of them. They’re popular, but it’s not for convenience, you can just bookmark them, put them on your home page, or type twitter.com and you’re there. That leaves money. Much like the money Mozilla gets from Google to promote Google Search. All of these have alternatives that act similarly but do things in a way, or have content, that their users find more agreeable. Firefox could block B&H, Bitchute, Ruqqus, the fediverse, infogalactic, and any web page recommending them. They just need a moral excuse, some event after which no one can object to it without being associated with the bad guys in said event, and it’s gone, anyone types in mastodon.social into the URL bar and it just gives a generic can’t connect error.
This is why it’s important to have an alternative that isn’t signaling a desire to do this.
Is it a bit far-fetched at the moment? Yes. But I’ve seen a lot of once far-fetched things happen.
Any time I hear someone say they want to “amplify factual voices”, it immediately worries me. This is just a benign way of advocating for censorship. What’s the point of an “open” web if it’s being controlled and moderated by a group? Even if it’s done with good intentions, at best it temporarily cleans things up; but it historically just turns into a tool for abuse.
Mozilla lost points for me when I learned they were living off Google money, while at the same time preaching about privacy, but I get it; it’s done as a way to survive.
With the statements on their blog recently, and what they did to their former CEO, I’ve been looking around for a replacement.
Ouch! I’ve used Mozilla as my browser if choice since Netscape Navigator, but it appears that they’ve crossed the Rubicon.
I want to check out LibreWolf on my Mobian Pinephone (still waiting for the Evergreen). I found some flatpaks on Github, but I can’t seem find one for ARM. Any ideas?
… particularly as it raises the question as to who determines what is “factual”, how they determine it, etc.
I would rather an internet where, for example, the QAnon conspiracy is free to spread even though I myself have no interest in it.
The best long-term answer is to eliminate the platform, which is after all a middle man between people who wish to send and receive information. Then the platform doesn’t “amplify” anything and the platform doesn’t “target” anyone and the platform doesn’t involve itself in “pay for ads” - because the platform doesn’t exist.
However we digress.
I don’t see how any of this is relevant to PureOS, given Purism’s stated intention to move to Epiphany. That’s the power of defaults, but you are still free to use whatever other browser you can e.g. Firefox, LibreWolf, …
Purism indeed chose Epiphany as their default browser, but on their Fund Your App page, you can see that Firefox rightfully takes the first place as the most valuable app on the phone.
To pull it back from the politics, so sorry, Purism switch from Purebrowser (internal Firefox fork) to Epiphany was because their fork was too much for one person to work on.
Now that their is a community fork, its more tenible for Purism, and whomever else, to offer a Firefox fork without all the Mozilla cruft.
Edit: and to help out LibreWolf it as well. Debian packaging and insertion into Debian proper would be one way.
Purism believes in the power of defaults. As such Purism should make it so that Firefox/fork-of-Firefox is made available in the PureOS store under PureOS 10 Byzantium as well … so as to REFLECT the fund-your-app page (where Firefox is TOP ranked)
Try this (confirm if it works for you): apt install libgail-common libgail18 libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common
After downloading New Moon package: dpkg -i newmoon_28.17.0-2+devuan_arm64.deb
With terminal keyboard Ctrl + minus sign (twice) this Browser looks quite usable on 5.7 inch screen (after recent fresh install, based on following your advice/idea). And if you like this app here is link on how-to expand Debian testing sources.list (for future upgrades).
P.S. LibreWolf amd64 Debian options I might test some other time (for myself).
There are many many things for Purism to work on i.e. things that don’t work properly yet - across the entire spectrum of functionality.
I would rather one browser that works well than the choice of, say, three browsers where none of them really works well. If Purism decides (as previously announced) that it’s Epiphany then I am happy with that, knowing that later on other choices can be created and worked on.
That would violate the second principal of the Mozilla Foundation’s Manifesto:
Principle 2. The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
However, Mozilla recently added an Addendum to its Manifesto, which includes:
We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.
These two principals can be contradictory, but I feel the same way as Mozilla. I generally want a free and open internet, but I also see the threat to humanity if we allow misinformation and disinformation to run rampant on the internet. Millions of people don’t believe that the coronavirus is dangerous or can be killed with quack medicine because of misinformation that they encountered on the internet. 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were ethnically cleansed and forced to flee their country because Facebook allowed the Burmese military to conduct a disinformation campaign about the Rohingya for half a decade, so that the Buddhist Burmese population believed that the Rohingya Muslims were terrorists, that they were massacring Buddhists, that they were raping Buddhist women, etc.
The Myanmar military’s Facebook operation began several years ago, said the people familiar with how it worked. The military threw major resources at the task, the people said, with as many as 700 people on it.
They began by setting up what appeared to be news pages and pages on Facebook that were devoted to Burmese pop stars, models and other celebrities, like a beauty queen with a penchant for parroting military propaganda. They then tended the pages to attract large numbers of followers, said the people.
…
Those then became distribution channels for lurid photos, false news and inflammatory posts, often aimed at Myanmar’s Muslims, the people said. Troll accounts run by the military helped spread the content, shout down critics and fuel arguments between commenters to rile people up. Often, they posted sham photos of corpses that they said were evidence of Rohingya-perpetrated massacres, said one of the people.
…
One of the most dangerous campaigns came in 2017, when the military’s intelligence arm spread rumors on Facebook to both Muslim and Buddhist groups that an attack from the other side was imminent, said two people. Making use of the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, it spread warnings on Facebook Messenger via widely followed accounts masquerading as news sites and celebrity fan pages that “jihad attacks” would be carried out. To Muslim groups it spread a separate message that nationalist Buddhist monks were organizing anti-Muslim protests.
A settlement for Rohingya arrivals in Thang Khali, Bangladesh. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar in what United Nations officials have called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”Credit…Adam Dean for The New York Times
The purpose of the campaign, which set the country on edge, was to generate widespread feelings of vulnerability and fear that could be salved only by the military’s protection, said researchers who followed the tactics.
To use an example that is closer to home, millions of Americans believe that Joe Biden isn’t the legitimate president of the US, because they were fed misinformation for months claiming there was massive election fraud in the last election, but no verifiable proof was ever presented to back up these claims. Based on that misinformation, a group of these Americans violently took control of the US Capitol and tried to prevent the certification of the election. If they had succeeded, it would have resulted in the overthrow of democracy and a coup d’etat.
I personally think that many of the proposed remedies to deal with misinformation on the internet will be worse than the problem and I fear the consequences of handing censorship power to private Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., which are unaccountable to the public. Whenever this subject gets debated, I get frustrated with both sides because they fail to address how they would handle the problems that arise with their preferred solution.
The people who scream their right to free speech on the internet seem to be totally unwilling to acknowledge the damage that misinformation is causing or do anything to address it. They often refuse to denounce or act against the people/groups/companies that are producing it. In fact, they often refuse to acknowledge that it is misinformation.
On the other hand, the people who want to deplatform and censure information generally ignore or ridicule the people who bring up free speech concerns. They seem to be totally fine with censorship that has no clear rules and no democratic oversight. They don’t seem to care when groups are deplatforming for their political views, rather than specific, identifiable offenses.
Frankly, both absolute free speech and unlimited censorship on the internet will lead to dystopias in my opinion. If we are going to have any reasonable discussion, we need to talk about what solutions we think are acceptable.
Here are some studies that should be taken into account when debating this topic:
According to a study by Vosoughi et al (2018) of 126.000 news stories tweeted by 3 million people between 2006 and 2017, stories which were verified to be false were transmitted 6 times more rapidly than stories that were verified to be true.
According to a poll of 25,000 internet users in 25 countries by the Centre for International Governance in January 2019, 86% reported that they had been fooled by fake news and the large majority of it came from Facebook.
According to Facebook, it deleted 2.2 billion fake user accounts in the first quarter of 2019, whereas it had 2.38 billion monthly active users in the same quarter. Even after deleting all those fake accounts, Facebook still estimates that 5% of its active user accounts are fake, meaning that they don’t belong to real people.
According to a study by Guess et al (2020) of 2500 Americans that tracked their web browsing behavior before the 2016 election, 44.3% of the Americans in the study viewed stories from untrustworthy news sites, and 6% of the total news articles that they read came from those sites. Facebook was the worst purveyor of fake news. 16% of referrals on Facebook to news stories in the study group were to untrustworthy news sites, whereas only 6% of referrals were to trustworthy news sites. In contrast, 3.3% of the referrals on Google sites were to untrustworthy sites, whereas 6.2% were to trustworthy sites. In Twitter, 1% of referrals were to untrustworthy sites, whereas 1.5% of referrals were to trustworthy sites.
Looking at these studies, I think that Mozilla is right to call for an “internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.” However, it is one thing to recognize the problem and another thing to try to do something about it.
I doubt that Mozilla will ever implement censorship of fake news sites, because there will be so much debate about what sites should be included in the blacklist, and the Firefox users will be so loud in their objections that I predict any attempts to implement it will be shut down pretty quickly. The last thing Mozilla wants is to lose more of its already tiny market share, and any proposal to block untrustworthy news sites by Mozilla will cause a huge public uproar and the exodus of many of its existing users.
If censorship is ever attempted (which I think unlikely), we can be pretty sure that it will be voluntary and transparent (and nothing like @especiallydirect imagines). Look at the way Mozilla currently implements its Enhanced Tracking Portection and its phishing and malware protection. These options are turned on by default, but users can easily change the setting in about:preferences under the “Privacy and Security” section. It is easy to opt out, and it is very transparent why the sites are being blocked. Mozilla does not try to deceive its users and clearly informs its users why a site is being blocked and how to turn off its protection measures.
