Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?

bigyabai

The internet was also heavily surveilled 5 years ago, not much different from how it is today. Are you referring to anything in particular?

Hatien

A few years ago, you would've been banned for questioning the results of the U.S. election. And this was when "progressives" were in charge. If anything, you're more free to "express yourself" now.

ranger_danger

Absolutely. People have already gotten in trouble with US immigration just for posting negative opinions on social media, or simply speech that the government doesn't like (see all the recent pro-Palestine protestors whose visas were cancelled). The state department/homeland/etc. can choose or not choose to let people in based on just about any criteria they want. If they find out I said something critical of the government, I could either be denied entry, or kicked out, and both have already been happening to people in the last year and a half. Even if what they're doing isn't legal, that doesn't stop them from potentially ruining your life in the process, maybe even getting away with it.

onion2k

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fcarraldo

Yes, as AI models will now be slurping up everything for indefinite amounts of time

danielrmay

I think as I've gotten older, the fear of expressing myself has increasingly turned into a sense of duty to do it anyway. The more people feel pressured into silence, the more important it seems not to be.

arjie

Hmm, probably a little. I am a fairly public person but I wouldn't want to be one of the characters in So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. It's nice to see that Sacco got her job back eventually, but that grade of internet mob cancellation goes after some random person and then that's the end of it. Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't. From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.

maxime_

Mostly with how easy it has become in a corporate setting. Before they had an easy access to the data but the barrier was their capacity to go through it. Nowadays any middle manager with data access and an OpenAI subscription can potentially get a sentiment and summary of your public (or even private with some saas plans) conversations. I’m more careful with my words than I ever was.

Georgelemental

I've always used a pseudonym. I have never felt free to speak my mind on the internet under my own name, the cancel mobs scared me away long before the state did

add-sub-mul-div

In general, no. But I'd never make anything but anonymous throwaway posts here because this is the one place that doesn't let me delete my posts. (I know you can make manual requests, but if it's not self-service I can't rely on it.)

petermcneeley

The speech might be judged socially but the punishment is always economic.

OuterVale

There are things I'd like to say on the web but which I haven't because I fear I could be arrested in some countries I am likely to visit in the future.

mbgerring

I started feeling that way around the time ICE illegally broke, entered and ransacked a low-income housing building in Chicago, terrorizing residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Once I realized that fear of reprisal was preventing me from expressing how I felt about it online, I resolved instead to get louder and more strident in my public speech than I had been in years.

newsomix9xl

Totes mcgoats. Its why I use unnamed sock puppet accounts.

adrianwaj

If so, the solution may well be making more private speech more public, rather than making more public speech more private. Imagine if every email provider had an option to "publicize" next to the ability to star an email or email thread. It's the private, anti-free speech stuff that would be interesting to see up close. And I'm just talking about email communications.

DylanG26

Yes. AI makes it more trivial than ever to extract your sentiments, and when you combine that with a government that's eager to crush dissent then things get tricky.

SubiculumCode

Risk? Or correctly assumed truth that surveillance is occurring?

richardchilders

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