Given the expansion of the fed/state/local/corporate surveillance net, do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?
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.
It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing. Obviously it's disruptive for the existing legal tenants; but it sounds like it was a building in disrepair - that's why it was cheap enough for large numbers of illegal immigrants to be living there - and in general I think that tenant protection laws in major American cities are an impediment to building more and better-quality housing units.
> It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing.
Innocent children were marched out of their homes in the middle of the night by masked & unidentified Federal paramilitary troops with automatic weapons, who broke into the building by helicopter.
I will do everything in my power, for the rest of my life, to comprehensively politically disempower anyone who believes this is “ultimately a good thing.”
The thing is, this forum often tells us that the government is not allowed to do that, it's against the law. So I'm curious why they did, and how they were able to?
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.
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'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
Very much this. I also chose a different pseudonym from place to place. However, a bigger chill to my online speech is fatigue and ack of joy in participating online. I think the last place I felt community online was on Usenet.
Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.
I lived in China for a while, and my wife is from China. We moved out almost 5 years ago, and she still was a bit freaked out about a picture of Xi Jinping's book next to Winnie Pooh book I took at a Book Expo here in Germany. Once you lived 1-2 generations with censorship, this gets from "chilling" (as in, you're aware of the thought but suppress it) to "not even thinking about it".
I don't know if it's a net negative on society, in the end in China people are very apathetic towards all of this, their lives are fine, they can get food delivered in 5 minutes, trains run on time, flying cars, and all that. Bread and circuses, bread and circuses.
being a third generation myself (parents and grandparents lived under a "regime"), as long as you tell them how it was for you, the kids might be the ones who will stop eating the poison bread and tell the clowns to take off their makeup
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.
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.
> Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.
I think it's unclear whether the Brendan Eich case "worked out" or not, depending on what exactly your stance is with respect to his original political donation, and what you think about the trajectory of his career after he was forced to resign from Mozilla. I certainly know queer activist types who are not happy that he is still in tech, and still the CEO of a browser company.
Ah, considering the subject of speech chilling I meant for the cancelled party. I meant "it worked out _for_ Brendan Eich that he was cancelled". Without judging whether the outcome is good or bad, it seems that he landed on his feet.
It's like asking the prisoners in the panopticon whether they behave differently due to the risk of being watched. The answer is 100% yes, whether they know it or not. That's the point.
We live in the USA. I had a friend tell me they won't use Chinese models because models like K3 only have moonshot as the provider which is in China. They were afraid of surveillance. My rebuttal was that the Chinese can't send police to our door based on the conversation you have with their models while US companies can.
I'd rather the Chinese have my data over a US company because... what could they do? I live here, not China.
This is a really underrated point, law enforcement that doesn't operate in your jurisdiction isn't a threat to you in the same way that law enforcement that does operate in your jurisdiction is, regardless of what specific thing you say to get on their radar.
Mass online surveillance has destroyed my dream and passion of participating and contributing to a free personal higher quality internet. To be specific, running my own websites, and participating in public forums.
I feel forever stuck in a never ending dilemma.
It is difficult to get to own a domain and a webserver that is not tied to oneself. Cryptocurrency gives options, but I have no clue how to acquire it without it being tied to me. Buying crypto through credit card is seen as capital investment in my country, and it is on you to prove to the tax agency if it was not the case.
One may ask, what is my threat model? What am I so scared about? To me, it feels like giving up. It is the principle of mass surveillance and tracking being against my values, purpose and passion. I want to share with the world, but I don't want it forcefully tied to my real identity.
I feel okay sharing what I have made with friends and real people that I meet. But I do not feel okay being forced to share to mass automated surveillance. The thought of going through the airport of e.g. America, and immediately, my interests, my way of thinking, what I like, what I don't like, what I know and what I don't know, is being tied to my identity in real time is uncomfortable.
And even assuming that I own the infrastructure without it being tied to me, there is the threat of stylometry. I will be writing a lot of text, and that will be possible to tie directly to me. Using AI to transcribe or change my stylometric fingerprint destroys the way I want to express myself, the words are no longer my own. This worry, of leaking my stylometric fingerprint, is also the reason I barely at all use AI, when I do, I obfuscate how I express myself.
Maybe one day I will care less.
It perhaps has a big hint of maladaptive perfectionism.
I developed OCD two years ago, with my obsessions being focused on taking risk.
That does not change the fact, that it heavily has impacted me and the way I am expressing myself freely on the internet.
I semi-frequently discuss my opinions about government officials who should be sent to prison for their crimes, agencies who everyone should boycott, and laws that I no longer consider legitimate. I've never had anyone from the government talk to me about this or been punished in any other way. Perhaps I've gotten lucky, but I really do think that free speech protections remain strong in the US, despite the attempts from the aforementioned criminals to change that.
I do wonder if I could automate the expression of uncontroversial opinions in the public sphere though. For example things about movies, music, or sporting events. These are valid interests that I simply don't have. I have at times been regarded with (I think) unfair suspicion for not engaging with social media to a meaningful degree.
So many platforms banning people for not having the site’s chosen position was a bigger impact than anything that’s happened in the last 5 years. I think online speech was dead well before that. It’s just a bunch of people agreeing with each other, because everyone else has been banned or is afraid of being banned.
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.)
You do understand everything is continuously sucked up everywhere right ? (I mean the pentagon mysteriously unaccounted billions have to go somewhere...)
There are things I don't say online anymore, not because I don't think they're correct, but because my opinion could be deemed offensive.
Whenever I say something I think could risk being seen as offensive, I tend to add a lot of footnotes explaining my reasoning for the things I'm saying and why I'm not trying to offend.
I also never share remotely offensive humour to friends over social media or messaging apps anymore, which used to be fun. Lots of people have been arrested for jokes so just not worth it tbh. Even if I don't think it's that offensive the law is too subjective to take the risk.
State by state, but that was massively blown out of proportion by the media. You were never at risk for saying boo about the lockdowns on social media.
But obviously if you tried to organise protests during lockdowns, that's a different kettle of fish.
But if you start making some big posts about Woodside etc, you can have AFP knocking at your door.
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.
Surveillance no, but potentially being banned, yes. Reddit is Exhibit A for this for me when I think about how I used to use it versus how I use it today. I wish Musk was actually serious about that whole free speech absolutist shit because the straight jacket gets tighter every day on every platform.
The risk of being denied entry to US and my lack of interest in visiting US share a reason. That's the only change vs 5 years ago as far as governments are concerned.
As for corporate I've always assumed no internal communication was private.
I've been under surveillance since I was 15 mainly because people made money off of me saying funny stuff. I'm used to it after 17 years. Personal computing was a mistake.
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.
100% yes, it has. I used to post under my real name, but when Trump was re-elected I deleted all my old social media accounts and created this pseudonym. Even still, I don't say everything I want to say because if the government wants to find my real identity it wouldn't be hard for them to get it.
Look at NPSM-7 [1], which basically says anyone who doesn't like capitalism or Christianity is likely a terrorist. Look at that Texas judge who threw a guy in prison for 30 years simply for moving a box of political contraband [2]. Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].
It's pretty clear that this administration is bent on throwing its political opponents in prison, whether they be actual politicians, protestors, or just bloggers.
> Look at that Texas judge who threw a guy in prison for 30 years simply for moving a box of political contraband [2].
The guy in that case was sentenced for attempting to hide evidence that might show that his wife was associated with an activist group that had vandalized an ICE facility and shot a cop who came to investigate. It's possible that this is in fact an overreach of existing laws defining what counts as attempts to conceal or destroy evidence in court cases, but the legal justification for the prosecution was grounded in evidence and court procedure law for a legitimate prosecution (it is good to legally prosecute people who vandalize government facilities and then shoot cops who come to investigate; unless you genuinely support completely overthrowing the local government and replacing it with a different one through violence), not based on the political content of the pamphlets.
> Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].
Is it incorrect that secret agents of Cuba have attempted to increase the influence of American leftist movements like the DSA and Black Lives Matter? That seems plausible to me; and it doesn't contradict the proposition that there's also substantial organic domestic support for these movements by people who are generally unaware of or unconcerned with Cuban intelligence involement; or that it is and should be legal to voice support for domestic political movements in general even if some foreign intelligence agency thinks it's in its interest to also support the same movement.
Not exactly. I don't really have much interesting to say. I'm trying to use the internet less in general not because of surveillance, but because of overall enshittification. Reddit has become a normie platform at this point and there's no point using it. 4chan still allows free speech but truth is, I'm not an interesting person and nobody cares about my personal issues. There are quite a few intelligent people on HN but the culture here promotes staying on topic and being civil, which is good for productive debate, but not really fun.
Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.
But a modern platform consolidation, zero tolerance practices and shitty spaghetti code written by a cheapest contractor - does.
Remember good old days of "forums"? Apart from some of the outliers on both ends (both cesspools and invite only elitists) a majority of the forums had this concept of warnings. So a user may have been rude or broke a rule or just got unlucky, he get a warning. Then maybe additional warnings. Or next there is "TEMPORARY" ban (absolutely alien concept nowadays), for a few days, then a few months, then a year. And it was actually possible to come back after a year long ban and see that the admins honored their own rules and did indeed unban you. I know a friend who was a frequent posted on a city automotive forum who served two year-long bans and he still posts there, soon it will be 3 decades or so :) . And the list of issuers, bans, dates and ban reason was usually public for all.
So all of that culture of being nice and polite is gone now. There are no warnings anymore (well, HN is tiny little exception, even then warnings are informal here, no automation like it was done in the previous century). Bans are instant and permanent, there are no temporary bans anywhere anymore, except for some deliberately gloating bans, like "you are banned until 2126, haha". And in case a discussion platform is owned by a corpo providing other services, they will ban user everywhere too. And mods are often using some crappy code to autoban users based on some primitive pattern matching. Write an ambiguously interpreted comment and poof, off you go. Some platforms even officially allow report abuse, like FB where a bot owner can take down any post, regardless of its content.
Ironically, the lack of niceness culture and extra harsh extra fast punishments didn't lead to the better talking spaces. Instead people are now using hundreds of throwaway twink accounts and now they don't moderate themselves. Why would they, the punishment to a rabid foaming at the mouth crazy user registered 1 day ago and to a old timer registered 15 years ago and who said some less radical comment in a latest political discourse or doubted some newest fad or whatever, maybe he was simply genuinely mistaken as happens to all - well, the punishment is the same. So why bother? Why write 4 paragraphs of reasoning to explain why entity A is bad in some specific way and the reasons for that, when user can just fire off a one liner hate message and get the same results? And so on.
As a weirdo who never uses twink accounts I'm in a minority and by old habits I still post as if I'm on some oldschool sane forums, but I do often stop and rewrite parts, to avoid being automodded into oblivion. And I certainly don't post on FB or Instagram or YT or other platforms anymore. The collateral damage over there would be catastrophic.
The "less likely to express" isn't from surveillance, but from the professional shills that moderate every site which makes it worthless to put any effort into posting anything because it will just be removed with no justification.
"do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?"
No, because five years ago was probably the high point of online speech restriction. A time where people were banned from platforms like Twitter and Facebook for expressing political opinions or stating scientific facts
Quote from the NSPM-7:
> There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization)