I am absolutely SHOCKED, I did not expect this in a million years. Why would I ever have any reason to believe the government isn't telling me the truth? And, as a law-abiding citizen, I can't imagine what they'd even want with it anyway. This must have been an honest mistake.
That's very silly. Between all of the people capable of spying on you, it's exactly your own country that has the most ability to harm you. The Chinese government can't arrest you if you're not in China, but your government can.
That's generally how I see it. For the most part, other countries don't care much about you. You're only subject to their laws in particular circumstances. And taking you into custody is relatively complicated and expensive.
But there are exceptions. China has gone after supporters of the Dalai Lama globally. Dropping malware, backdooring servers, etc. But yes, they can't arrest you.
The US, on the other hand, has more "friends". Consider The Pirate Bay. Even Russia has turned over "cybercriminals".
For a nuclear power petrostate with minimal economic ties. China would get the shit boycotted out of them at least and Iran would get the shit bombed out of them as many politicians have been caught openly drooling at the prospect.
>I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish.
I disagree. Whatever is put on the internet belongs to everyone on it, just because you made it doesn't mean you should have any kind of control over what people do with it. Enforcing redaction is obviously impossible but why would you even want to? You'll never get a guarantee that it's gone but also telling other people they cannot access information you originally created is kind of a jerk move.
The reality is that 99.99% of people will never care about their phony "right" to be forgotten and the 0.01% who do most likely do so because they posted something worth wanting to be forgotten, which will be picked up by interested parties and reposted ad infinum because that's what people do with that sort of thing (dox, embarrassing pictures, etc), while the information of the 99.99% who don't care will be lost when Quora inevitably stops existing and then nobody gets it.
>If anything its a battle on both sides, a battle to provide control to the content creators around the content they create.
They don't have any, and they shouldn't either - everything on the internet should be given freely as virtually everything is received freely as well. People should be allowed to retain or repost or modify anything for any purpose, and they pretty much do. Allowing "content creators" to control their work would mean any modification of it unacceptable to them (which encompasses a lot of territory) would be impossible to distribute, making remix cultures like YTP and others impossible. This is completely unreasonable, they should just learn to deal with other people using their work for things they never intended and move on.
That wording might be a tad harsh, but, essentially, yes, the "right to be forgotten" that most people seem to believe the GDPR provides is just an illusion. It only applies to very specific types of information gathered for specific purposes. It most certainly doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of content posted to Quora.
That being said, there are other laws that could be at play here, such as intellectual property laws, but I'm assuming Quora either has you turn over ownership of anything you post or has you grant them an exclusive right to distribute it as they please. And if they were to decide to allow archive.org to archive it, you probably wouldn't have any right to request removal.
If you choose to disseminate information on the internet, there's no going back. You're broadcasting whatever you post with the world's largest megaphone. It's foolish to think you can reverse that process. If a government passes a law banning a book, people who've read that book still know what it said--and chances are there are still copies of the book floating around.
If you write something on the internet that you regret, that is your burden to bear for the rest of eternity. You chose to broadcast it with full knowledge of the fact that you would lose any semblance of control over the content the moment you hit Submit. It might not be ideal or fair, but that's the way it is, and laws aren't going to change it. Next time you're about to send a nasty email, think back to this comment, because what you're about to do is irreversible.
I almost never discuss anything important with people outside of extremely close and likeminded friends because of the current political climate. I worry about being ostracized/alienated by them for not believing in the same things as them, so it's not at all worth the risk to actually discuss anything meaningful with them if the outcome might be permanently destroying our relationship.
Right, at school, you could say some awful stuff, and someone would tell you "that's awful because <x>", and you'd usually change your mind. Now, even established science is "controversial", and differing opinions aren't exciting, they're somehow personal attacks. What i mean is, opinions seem to have become an important part of their self to people, maybe through social media. I don't mean somebody thinking they're being argumentative/clever/fun when they're just being rude. Some people are socially inept, but that's a too easy cop-out to use in all of these cases, and does nothing to help those people, or show more socially apt people that it's occasionally ok to open up your guard.
Of course, you can't just launch into such topics with new acquaintances, but to a degree the climate makes it hard to go from acquaintance to friend because everything is small talk. At least that's my feeling, which is why a night of drinking seems to be involved at some point when I make new friends.
The title of this is extremely amusing to me because I've only ever thought of online moderators as basically the lowest form of life, almost exclusively petty tyrants and ego-tripping jerks who try to flatter and ingratiate the people above them and are heavy-handed despots to anyone beneath them. Their role as "gatekeeper of ability to communicate with people via the medium under their control" is typically done by encoding their adolescent morality into policy and silencing anyone who goes against the grain or threatens their social standing.
It's actually gotten me thinking a lot about distributed moderation. Wouldn't it be better if access to any particular medium of communication (a forum, an IRC channel, a mastodon server) was federated? Democratized moderation would mean that people could then subscribe to whichever style of moderation they prefer, and people with unpopular styles of moderation (e.g. "ban everything I don't like", the style of the vast majority of forum moderators) would cease having so much power over mediums of communication.
Speaking as someone who moderated a torrent site forum in my teens, there's unfortunately so much truth in what you said in that first paragraph. Especially the part about adolescent morality as policy.
I was exactly the kind of petty, bordering on tyrannical, moderator back when I was a teenager. I moderated a website with an active community of over 10000 teenagers. This was a big deal in the 1990s. It quickly went to my pubescent, hormone-fueled teenage head. But it ended up being a valuable experience. In terms of being confronted with my own 'dark side', and in terms of learning how to deal with people.
The power hungry moderators you describe certainly exist, but they are generally just the loudest not actually near the majority. Most moderators deal with general internet bullshit as quickly ad possible while trying to avoid making more work for themselves.
I mean, I already believe in a lot of basic principles that would horrify a lot of people - free speech, freedom of religion, I don't care at all what someone's sexual orientation is, and so on.
So I don't see where this should stop us from trying to form principles as an alternative to arguing that something must be or must not be true because of what someone wrote down millennia ago.
