Reclaim The Net

Yeah, things like subscribe star exist in part for this reason, and there are plenty of groups that discuss alternative technology, such as this news org https://reclaimthenet.org/ or this group https://gab.com/groups/377 (though the last two mostly focus on political content)

I consider myself rational (at least enough to work in software). Here's a copy/paste of a comment I made before why I refuse the RNA vaxx... - I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid. - I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it. - CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible. - FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional…

...by ID checking everybody. Big Tech loves this. > Google Wants to Be the ID Checkpoint for Europe’s Internet https://reclaimthenet.org/google-wants-to-be-the-id-checkpoint-for-eur…

It looks like this is a generic paste-whatever-you-want site where someone duplicated the article from ReclaimTheNet [0]. AFAICT there is no paywall or subscribe wall. [0] https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-social-media-approved-news-boosting

This website recommends Gab, Truth Social and X under the claim "Unlike Big Tech companies, which often harvest user data for profit, these smaller, privacy-focused platforms tend to resist such practices". https://reclaimthenet.org/free-speech-friendly-and-privacy-focused-soc…

Easy, Reclaim The Net documents Twitter censorship for years. Here, you have dozens of links, pages and pages https://reclaimthenet.org/?s=twitter

Incredible to see mozilla steal the name of this obnoxious blog[1], which constantly gets to the HN frontpage[2]. I'll take this as an opportunity to express what has always bothered me about this line: To talk about "reclaiming" the net is to adopt the territorial language of revanchist movements, which does not make sense for networks. A website is not a territory. There's no need to "reclaim" what was never yours in the first place. You can make your own website. [1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/ [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reclaim+the+net&utm_source=opensearch&am…

I don't particularly like Techdirt, but DuckDuckGo's penchant for inheriting censorship from Bing [1] (and also doing it on its own [2]) is really disappointing. I think the Tor Browser folks (who obviously disklike censorship) should look into replacing it as the default search engine. The best (free) candidate for now is probably BraveSearch [3]. [1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/microsofts-bing-censors-tank-man [2]: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/duckduckgo-slammed-for-downrat… [3]: https://search.brave.com/

Can’t wait for the EU to introduce a digital euro CBDC just like the digital Yuan. /s Soon it will impose savings limits, expiration dates to incentivise spending [0] all tied up to your digital identity. When governments propose extremely unpopular policies on its people, it will be certainly used against their own people to quell and discourage protests much easily than before. You will then realise that all these digital identity solutions such as eIDAS, digital euro and wallets are essentially no better than Worldcoin. Governments around the world would love to do exactly what Worldcoin is doing for onboarding to a future CBDC. No thanks and absolutely no deal to both of that. [0] https://reclaimthenet.org/digital-euro-spending-saving-limits

https://gbdeclaration.org/ The Great Barrington Declaration specifically mentioned physical health of children. It did not specify this particular type of situation though. However, in this article the main author of the declaration did specify: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing… Here are the "cancelled" articles: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-behind-the-… https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great…

There are. Mastodon's problem (and/or best feature depending on how you look at it) is that it's pretty prevalent about their blocklists. So the most commonly federated and advertised places tend to be more liberal leaning. I don't keep close track of the community, but this is one blocklist that I just googled https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances Aside from the obvious terrible shit the list itself looks kinda passive aggressive in tone The more conservative demographic also has other more...professional(?) options in the form of Truth Social and Gab. At one point Gab was federated but got blocked into oblivion to the point where they decided to go standalone https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/

Firefox may be the best broadly available choice. However, Mozilla is just as guilty of implementing censorship in their extension store based on the whims of their leaders and employees. They are also a proponent of censorship more broadly than what they control. See https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-maker-mozilla-calls-for-more-than-de… or https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-introduces-extension-that-automatica… or https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-rejects-free-speech-bans-free-speech…

I use reddit unironically and few websites. The applications I use daily have few considerations, mainly privacy, security etc. I get my recommendations from https://www.privacytools.io https://www.privacyguides.org https://www.reclaimthenet.org https://www.restoreprivacy.com and a few other similar sites. Subreddits like https://www.teddit.net/r/privacytoolsio and https://teddit.net/r/privacyguides/ are helpful. If I need a note-taking app, I visit the above sites. IIRC Standard Notes, Joplin, Simple Notes (by simple tools) are recommended. If I require a basic application like PDF viewing, for which you may not get recommendations from websites, I go to above subreddits and simple search PDF viewer. Users would have discussed in detail about such an application, along with their pros and cons.

* https://quillette.com/ for heterodox views * https://reclaimthenet.org/ for news on free speech and cancel culture * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNdA_qZp4eQP5orJ1BsRBWA for wisdom from Thomas Sowell * https://newdiscourses.com/ for educating myself on critical race theory

F-Droid bans apps for “hate speech” too[1]. Any mastodon app that refused to blacklist Gab got banned from F-Droid or something like that. It is the perfect example of why I don’t even bother with federated projects. It’s just “wouldn’t it be great if _I_ were in charge?” If that’s the situation, I’d rather Big Tech be in charge because at least they have some name recognition and hierarchy for decision making. Nobody cares if pizza-witches wrongfully broke terms. With Twitter at least peoples’ ears perk up. In other words, there’s no rules in the alley. But there are rules in the town square. [1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

> STOP USING google SEARCH! USE DUCKDUCKGO! I want to stop using Google, but please realize that DuckDuckGo is only competitive with Google if English is your only language (maybe even only if you're American?). There are loads and loads of people on HN for whom DDG is a poor experience. In my experience DDG is extremely poor for localized results, especially those in other languages than English. Previously I recommended StartPage.com for my fellow Europeans, but StartPage has been bought by a shady company [1] and should not be used anymore either. I have no recommendation anymore. [1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

They don't trust the reader to 'understand the broader implications' in their other posts. For example: https://reclaimthenet.org/the-house-just-voted-for-kosa > If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. In their recent (two days ago) reporting on KOSA, they dedicate an entire paragraph (see above) specifically to explaining how a word choice is being used to hide the main thrust of the bill, and continue on for some paragraphs detailing how a single disguised and misleading word is the beachhead for an affront to privacy. So their failing to call out Google on this word choice reads as 'lack of familiarity with the terrain', as when on more well-understood ground — since US gov't reporting rather predates the tech industry, after all — they do call out such things.

That is the exact point. A "best intentions" approach to e.g. solve age verification through a "privacy respecting" mechanism leads to the government mandating that only physical devices with the built in security verification mechanisms, as allowed via government approved signatures, would be able to run these age verification apps (because otherwise you could cheat the mechanisms). This is a direct attack on general purpose computing and facilitates digital fascism by requiring that all software is signed in a manner approved by the government (directly or indirectly). This is not hyperbole - Android will be locked down in only 115 days [0]. Further, in order to enforce such an age verification mechanism, you will end up requiring all software to either account for why it would not need to be integrated, or integrate with such a government mandated mechanism. This introduces accounting, surveillance, and approvals for every possible use-case. How would an online forum dedicated to discussing political topics survive? They would have to prove that they are complying with such measures that increase the barrier to operate and ensures that any forum or other arena of interaction would have to be accountable and justify how they are verifying interactions within the bounds of these laws and mechanisms. Further - beyond locking down devices you would clearly need to lock down networks and communication in order to enforce such restrictions - which leads to deeper and broader…

There is very little publicly known about them. All the bylines appear to be pseudonyms used almost exclusively for posts there. No contact information other than email addresses at their domain. They don't release any information about what funding sources they have, if any, other than donations and merchandise sales. In this article [1] about X being ordered to obey the DSA requirements to make election data available to researchers they go on at great length about the importance of knowing who is funding the organizations asking for the data. Maybe they should set an example and disclose their own funding. Also in that article they suggest X is being singled out for enforcement, ignoring that the the other platforms covered by DSA are at least partially responding to requests for data under DSA. That kind of biased framing is common in many of their articles. I've never seen any reporting by them where I could not find the same thing covered with less bias from a source that is much more transparent over who funds and controls them. [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hungary-elect…

I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now. It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right? Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time. "Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink" Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts. "It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod" https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-biden-admin-held-weekly-censors… https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story-right-in-… "We're just doing commons sense stuff. Like following science." https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-quietly-dropped-covid-censorship-rul… Etc, etc. All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who…

Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads. In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1] It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus. In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2] In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored. Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content. [1]…

> What is woke about that company to you in particular? My main issue is them getting involved in them supporting censorship, deplatforming wrong-thinkers, and more nonsense. Plenty of articles about this here: https://reclaimthenet.org/?s=mozilla > What do "woke politics" have to do with Mozilla's failure? 1) The more time and effort they spend focusing on non-technical issues is time away from the one thing that matters. 2) Also, the more they appear to be favoring certain political views, the fewer conservatives, libertarians, centrists, etc may want to use them. When a company starts favoring one political side over another and loses its appearance of non-bias, especially when it concerns information flow, it's hard to trust them again. DuckDuckGo made the same fatal flaw of trying to be explicit about bias and though there's some noise in the stats, it looks like their search results have peaked as well. Without as many users, you can't progress nearly as quickly. > Their political leanings are basically unchanged dating back to before Chrome even existed. I'm not sure, but I can't remember them supporting the censorship stuff until a bit more recently. Even when they were pretty gay friendly and whatever, they never supported censorship as far as I can remember.

I don't think it's silliness; I actually find it quite concerning. In recent times, there has been lots of evidence about how the government and social media companies have been colluding together to "prevent the spread of misinformation" [0]. They have been very transparent about this, and discuss it openly [1]. However, it must not be up to the government to determine what is or is not misinformation - this transposes to government censorship in the worst case, and prevents a healthy marketplace of ideas in the best case. In the case of the "Hunter Biden Laptop" story (which was misrepresented often), it wasn't Facebook deciding on its own to censor it - it was at the behest of the government. You don't know what you don't know. What knowledge are you missing because it could never be shown, because it wasn't shown to you? In the last few years, I've seriously worried about this. I've had to diversify my media intake as an attempt to mitigate this, even when the reporting itself was of worse quality in non-standard media channels. (In many cases, I found it to be of higher quality, which was surprising). I would recommend the same to you, because, especially in this case, you won't know what you're missing unless you look for it. [0]https://reclaimthenet.org/fb-cdc-misinfo-collusion/ [1]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_were_flagging…

https://reclaimthenet.org is a good resource

> censoring of content The supreme irony of this is that Aaron's role as a co-founder has long been censored from Reddit's founders page [0], despite agreements to the contrary [1]. More generally, Aaron had strong views on censorship [2]: > I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent, we should fight back – both politically through protest and technologically through software like Tor... > How is compromising [by a technology company on censorship] supposed to bring greater freedom in the long run? That’s like saying “I’m going to beat you up now so that you don’t have to be hit as much in the long run.” The right answer is to stop beating people up. But I do think that physical violence resulting in part from the amplification of voices by algorithm would have been hard to foresee. I too would be curious if his thinking would have evolved. Sadly, we'll never know. [0] https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cofounder_aa… [2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

>The only place it has any advantage is crime. What? Wikileaks was censored without even being charged with a crime. The reality is people who have committed no crimes are financially censored on a regular basis. According to the EFF: >The actions of a small number of payment intermediaries— like payment processors, banks, and credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard—can heavily influence what kind of speech can exist online. https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship For example, Subscribestar was censored by political activists - they committed no crime. https://reclaimthenet.org/paypal-bans-subscribestar-after-the-site-is-… Paypal censored people for selling erotic fiction. What law did they break? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/legal-censorship-paypal-makes-ha… The ACLU is currently suing New York state for financially censoring an organization which likewise committed no crime. https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be-allowed-s… >The problem is a social one: we need to lobby the government to ensure folks like Snowden are protected, and not allow the tyranny of the minority through spending money in a way that can't be traced or censored. The problem is 9 times out of ten not the government. Here's a better idea: let's make censorship impossible in all forms. Addendum: Not to mention the millions of people who live in censored countries…

> There is really _never_ a time when a CAPTCHA will require you to execute code on your machine. Oh yeah? What about Google saying “install the reCAPTCHA app in the App Store” <https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-androi… It’s absurd, but these nominally-security tools frequently genuinely train users to become susceptible to attacks.

The article below sharply summarizes why all this is a dystopian surveillance setup: > how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old? > You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport. https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveillance-state

That is an issue you can pin on Google: <https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-androi… (8 May 2026). HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119> Though yes, Archive.is have continued using reCaptcha despite this recent change.

It isn’t about corruption, when your data is now shared freely with other “partners”. > Norway, Sweden, and Israel partner to test CBDCs (https://reclaimthenet.org/norway-sweden-and-israel-partner-to-test-cbd… Debanking someone is basically ending their lives in modern days, when your ID is linked to the banks, an ID that’s also to be used for digital services, you could get debanked for criticizing a politician in the future, for example. And uncle freedom sure will get that data from their “closest ally”, not to mention any breaches like what happened in Sweden recently, a country that also wants to strap tracking on 13yo. Digital ID is a nightmare anywhere’s used, it will turn any government into a totalitarian state.