the_hydra_on_the_web--challenges_associated_with_extremist_use_of_the_fediverse.pdf

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   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Mar-2025 09:29:19 JST pistolero

   in reply to
   @Countermeasures @judgedread
   
   > It's the old "who watches the watchers" problem
   
   Well, yeah, plus the incentive created: if you've got a concentration of something, and a way to manage that thing as a unit, then there's more of a reason to get control over that mechanism. Maxwell's demon and entropy, right? A briefcase of money has a handle you can grab, an army has a general you can deal with, a business has an owner or a CEO you can talk to. (Sherman noticed it: "An army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every enactment, every change of rule which impairs this principle weakens the army, impairs its value, and defeats the very object of its existence.")
   
   So fedi is this big, disorganized mess (that I intend to disorganize further), and it's difficult to take control of. The German government is frustrated about that (see attached if you haven't seen it yet), because with Twitter or Facebook or whatever, they can make a phone call to their guy at the office and have something removed; the US government was doing this, too, and has backed off from that practice (at least ostensibly; Obama's PRISM followed Bush's warrantless wiretapping, and that line stretches all the way back, and the whole "Five Eyes" thing meant that if you wanted something fixed and you couldn't do it, you have four other eyes that are usually happy to do it). They can't do that with fedi, so this paper includes their thoughts about removing "misinformation", like trying to figure out a way to use NetzDG as a pretext, etc., because that "misinformation" interferes with the PR machine the governments use to avoid having to behave or use force to enforce their misbehavior. You can't have someone ruining your branding like that.
   
   That was why Bernays got to be where he was: he realized that mass media was a lever. But it's not as universally accessible as the Internet: look at the lengths Ted Kaczynski had to go to and his demand was that his essay be included in a national publication. But a blog post some dingus types on his phone can be read everywhere. And people find it by search engines (initially created by nerds that were excited about making the web useful, then taken over by people like Eric Schmidt) and places like Twitter (initially created by some nerds that wanted to see what their friends were up to and then taken over by venture capital) although if you force comms through a small number of channels and those channels are centrally managed, you get something that people think is organic but that is actually the same as the mass media, in practical terms: they see the same things they'd see otherwise, but they see them spoken by people they trust. (One of the extremely appealing things about fedi is the chronological timeline for almost exactly this reason.)
   
   > Your work here is an important part of solving this problem:
   
   :bigbosssalute: Appreciated. That is the goal.
   
   > *decentralized counterintelligence network*.
   
   One might even use the term "countermeasures". :bruceforsythe:
   
   > Without state backing or the IRL identities of the other participants, we can share information that at a minimum can be used to protect *ourselves* from attack by manipulative exploiters.
   
   :bigbosssalute:
   
   > We should talk more
   
   Here's fine with me, we can figure out other channels if you prefer.
   the_hydra_on_the_web--challenges_associated_with_extremist_use_of_the_fediverse.pdf