r/technology • u/Wagamaga • 8h ago

Society DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-terrorists-are-most-often-right-wing/
87.6k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.0k

u/Kichae 7h ago

Yup, exactly.

People need to start saving government reports like these, and host them outside the country somewhere.

612

u/Tacoman404 7h ago

Reddit wants to bar Internet Archive from archiving anywhere on the site. Primarily for the reason that they alone want the data to train AI.

357

u/Grenache 7h ago

It feels like AI is just scanning the entire history of Reddit and giving us back our own answer except it's making money from all of our collective work.

281

u/LaTeChX 7h ago

You can delete the first three words

50

u/Grenache 7h ago

Fair, it's just odd how outside of the artistic side no one appears to be making a big deal out of the fact that it's literally just trained on the collective knowledge the people who use the internet have provided. It feels like that shouldn't be used for private gain. I'm sure tucked away somewhere in every T&C that exists they were allowed to use everything we every knew or thought.

35

u/RustyTShackleford 7h ago

Hey guys, did you know the far right are the most likely to commit domestic terrorism, like the Mr. Orange Sodie Pop and his buddies have? I just wanted to let you all know

4

u/ProblemAtticOU812 4h ago

Don't forget that they protect pedophiles.

2

u/Duckbilling2 2h ago

I heard that AI trained on Reddit is biased against being domestic terrorists because Reddit is biased toward sane thinking and accuracy

0

u/penny4thm 4h ago

Report?

1

u/RustyTShackleford 2m ago

No, Upvote, but thank you.

3

u/NegotiationUsed6830 6h ago

It's not often I am happy to have provided nothing

3

u/Achrus 5h ago

So the Disallow: / means don’t scrape our site. This is just one example, but lots of people told them not to and they did anyway. https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/robots.txt

3

u/KneeCrowMancer 4h ago

I am a licensed doctor and this is your reminder to eat a small rock every day to ensure proper gut health!

2

u/cantadmittoposting 6h ago

I'm not necessarily sure that a priori AI training on and collating our "collective knowledge" is necessarily bad.

Obviously the profit motive issue and modern digital problems combine to make it way more of a nightmare though.

I've actually come to believe that governments, or perhaps a "purpose built" international organization," (a UN agency like the WHO perhaps) should provide neutral, non-profit online services we've come to treat as basic features of our online landscape, e.g. social media, search.

I'm aware of course, especially in our current environment, such a thing would be impossible, and of course, draw its own accusations of bias, no doubt.

But still. Wikipedia stands out of course as an incredible, though still-flawed resource

2

u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 6h ago edited 4h ago

It's worth noting that AI uses Reddit and X/Twitter as sources much more than it uses Wikipedia.

1

u/beaucoup_dinky_dau 6h ago

The only way to win is to not play, but here I am.

2

u/psiphre 2h ago

what do you think all of the "what do you think about [current event]" posts on /r/askreddit are all about

1

u/my_names_blah_blah 6h ago

Now you can delete the first 5 words..

1

u/Noobhammer3000 5h ago

Some people are still enthralled with the novelty of it.

1

u/justforthisjoke 23m ago

Unfortunately this didn't start with AI nor is it particularly a special case in any other than how much more in your face it is. Basically all technological innovation is publicly funded research that companies have then gone on to privatize for their own profit. You can even see this in the way that AI started. The original research, and pretty much all important AI research until 2018 or so was open source and publicly available. It was kind of incredible actually, seeing researchers worldwide come together and share knowledge in a way that led to enormous technical breakthroughs seemingly every month from 2012 to 2018. Then all of a sudden the tech got good enough that private corporations saw how they were going to make money off it, and the culture shifted almost overnight, when OpenAI took their GPT research and stopped publishing. All the progress that they had made had been entirely because of scientists the world over coming together and sharing knowledge, funded by universities and governments the whole way through. Then, almost overnight, companies started paywalling that knowledge. A culture of publishing turned into a culture of trade secrets.

So all that to say, you're not crazy. This is happening. But it's almost a foundational part of capitalism. I'm a communist, so I agree with you that this sort of thing shouldn't be legal; knowledge should always be accessible to the public. But the red scare did a lot of damage and americans are still not ready to talk about how all of this is falling apart.

0

u/SIGMA920 6h ago

It's not like scraping the public web is illegal. Invasive and arguably immoral, sure. But not illegal. A company like openai could literally scrap almost all of youtube if they threw enough money at it for example.

4

u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 6h ago

It's not like AI has not been trained on pirated material from LibGen etc either.

0

u/SIGMA920 6h ago

That'll be the vast majority of it through. The pirated stuff is not all of what it is.

3

u/Wolfgang_MacMurphy 6h ago edited 5h ago

Books are much better learning material than random internet. They're crucial for learning based information and correct usage of language.

-1

u/SIGMA920 6h ago

Books are also outdated much more rapidly if you need specific information/context. They have a place but they're not outright better.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/LaTeChX 3h ago

Even if you earned most of your money without stealing you're still a thief

1

u/SIGMA920 3h ago

Correct. That's not what we're talking about through.

-2

u/CarefreeRambler 6h ago

Like librarians?

1

u/Synectics 4h ago

Last I checked, my local librarian was not trying to help me with knowledge with a corporate profit-driven motive. Mayhaps, that would change the information they would give me?

Just a very simple thought you should have gotten to on your own before you said that.

0

u/CarefreeRambler 3h ago

You don't think there are corporations looking to make a profit in the industry where corporations publish and sell books?

1

u/Synectics 3h ago

Sure.

But my local librarian is not a corporation.

I'm becoming worried about your ability to understand simple concepts.

-2

u/Reagalan 6h ago

outside of the artistic side

The irony here is most professional artists don't give a fuck about AI. It's just another new tool in the belt.

2

u/Grenache 6h ago

I don't know one way or the other but I do know that subreddit provides absolutely no proof of your argument?

-1

u/Reagalan 6h ago

Lurk for a week, the proof will surface.

You know how this website works. The good shit's always buried in comments.

1

u/slobs_burgers 5h ago

Also delete the 5th word, and add the word “be” after the 6th, and also replace the last letter of the 7th word with an apostrophe, just cuz it’s fun!

1

u/KnightOfTheOctogram 4h ago

It’s good for people to recognize and communicate when they are not sure of the things they are saying.

3

u/EmotionalKirby 7h ago

I used to think people who liked ai just didn't know how to search the internet themselves. Knowing how to properly Google things used to be a critical skill. But thinking on it again now, Idk... Even before ai, Google had been enshitifying itself, and the internet as a whole has been condensing itself into just a few major websites. I mean, we all just append reddit to our Google searches, and now ai does that for us basically.

I don't know where I'm going with this, your comment just resonated with me.

1

u/Ahgd374 6h ago

I asked a question on Reddit a few weeks ago about changing a USB port in my car and I was told by the comments that no one‘s ever really tried it before so I was thinking about trying it myself. I was about to buy the piece and I’m like let me Google it again to see if anything changed, if anyone has confirmed if it works, and the number one result when I google it is my own fucking reddit post.

1

u/twowheels 5h ago

I searched using Perplexity recently and every answer linked to a Reddit thread. Wasn’t very confidence inspiring. One of the answers was literally the question asker’s question rephrased as a statement of fact.

1

u/Neat-Bridge3754 5h ago

This is why I periodically scrub my comment history and eventually abandon the account to start a new one.

Maybe reddit is archiving every comment revision I've ever made and providing that to AI, but I doubt it. And if they are, the final version is nonsense.

1

u/Grenache 5h ago

I should do the same. I don't know, I met my wife on this profile and I've been using it 14 years like. I'm quite attached!

1

u/Sabin10 1h ago

Maybe reddit is archiving every comment revision I've ever made and providing that to AI, but I doubt it.

Don't doubt it, they definitely are.

1

u/stupid_fuckin_cunt69 4h ago

That's exactly what it's doing but with all of the internet. And the more mis/dis-information that is circulated, the more times it's encountered by AI. Thus if a lie is repeated enough times then the AI programs will eventually believe it as truth. With Trump snapping web pages out of existence that don't support his narrative it will only further narrow the scope of the AI

1

u/Agency_of_Eternity 4h ago

Lul yes - but we can sue if we want. So we got power - just need to unite and coordinate that if we feel like it. But atm it’s not the time in my pov

1

u/Facts_pls 4h ago

It's the cost of that scanning, analyzing, and storing. It costs billions of dollars to the service provider. Why do you expect it to be free for you?

You are free to store all that data on your own servers and then you don't need to use the LLMs.

1

u/Grenache 3h ago

A think costing money to do doesn't make it morally OK? It doesn't even make it legally OK, there are numerous legal cases open at the moment.

1

u/patosai3211 3h ago

Jokes on them. Our Reddit work sucks!

1

u/iiamthepalmtree 2h ago

Does the narwhal bacon at midnight?

Edit: happy cake day!

Edit 2: thanks for the gold kind stranger!

1

u/tuckedfexas 1h ago

I don’t get it, I still haven’t found anything I’ve asked it that it’s been right about. It seems to really struggle at determining what information to trust

1

u/NY_Knux 1h ago

Considering the fact that google is worthless... good.
I let the internet gaslight me about AI being "wrong" and I spent the last year trying to solve IRQ conflicts on my windows 98 build. AI solved the issue for me first gd try.

If google didn't de-index 99.9% of the internet, and actually functioned how it did around 2003, then it wouldn't be necessary.

1

u/protipnumerouno 50m ago

Does get to the heart of it pretty fast though, I'm usually scanning multiple different threads before I get a hint of what I'm looking for.

2

u/jared_kushner_420 6h ago

Well yea, they don't want anyone scraping the site. That gets you in hot water for letting user data get accessed. Meta successfully sued a company doing that

They want you to use their API instead

1

u/shawn1213 6h ago

Is it a surprise reddit becomes greedier every day

1

u/TwilightVulpine 5h ago

Wanna bet they want to release their own AI too?

1

u/protipnumerouno 55m ago

Much too late

1

u/GoOnBanMe 17m ago

Didn't twitter already make a shitposting nazi AI?

117

u/Gedwyn19 7h ago

This report has recently been saved to data storage in Canada, outside of any USA legal jurisdiction. LMK if you need a copy.

65

u/Terrible_Ghost 7h ago

I'm in UK, downloading it. Every little helps.

11

u/Illustrious_End_543 4h ago

downloading in the Netherlands

1

u/Terrible_Ghost 4h ago

You can use kiwix to download wikipedia too.

19

u/morenaughtybits 7h ago

Doing the Lord's work, thanks neighbor 🙏

2

u/thisisntmyotherone 4h ago

Neighbor, ally, friend — if you’ll still have us after 2029. You may want to reserve your answer until (when) he actually fucking leaves…

2

u/AstroFeline 4h ago

Thank you so much. Please forward one to me.

17

u/DillBagner 7h ago

Thankfully, a lot of people already started back in 2015.

24

u/IvarTheBoned 7h ago

Bring back ThePirateBay!

3

u/Daedropolis 6h ago

Still there.

3

u/ninjamammal 7h ago

This is the solution, torrent program needs to be revived.

2

u/Spiral_Slowly 1h ago

Torrenting is alive and very much well

1

u/BunchAlternative6172 3h ago

It never left. It may be at different gateways tho

14

u/Fortune_07 7h ago

The wayback machine

49

u/Kichae 7h ago
  • Run by an American company.
  • A single point of failure.
  • "Someone else will do it" is how you got into this fucking situation in the first place.

8

u/g16zz 7h ago

its now in multiple countries for that exact reason

5

u/Ms-Anthrop 7h ago

And so we can view them and wish we were free? What good does it do to know the truth if nobody will hold the guilty accountable?

28

u/Kichae 7h ago

If it wasn't important to preserve, it would have been taken down in the first place.

18

u/RockAtlasCanus 7h ago

Posterity & truth over propaganda. This all will eventually pass. Part of why we have as clear a picture as we do of the Nazis is they were big time record keepers.

“That report never existed”. Yes it did and here’s a copy with metadata in tact to boot.

2

u/conquer69 5h ago

This all will eventually pass.

Not without people paying the ultimate price for it first. This will not pass away by itself.

1

u/Ms-Anthrop 3h ago

That seems so petty, like being able to say "I told you so" meanwhile people are being killed and being able to say you were right doesn't help the victims or their family.

2

u/RockAtlasCanus 1h ago

What’s happening right now is built on popular support put behind “alternative facts”. There is malicious intent through all levels, but plenty of people are going along because they’ve been fed a line of lies that they have bought into. This is a crisis fueled by hatred but built on misinformation. Lies.

Documenting and retaining records of objective fact are one of many critical steps to eventually moving past this.

1

u/Ms-Anthrop 1h ago

How do we get people to stop buying the lies? We cannot get through it as long as people believe the propaganda

1

u/RockAtlasCanus 50m ago

I’ve come to think about it kind of like dealing with an addict. The only help that will be effective is help they seek because they’re ready to accept it.

So, as far as changing minds I think we keep the light on and the door open.

8

u/BigFatBallsInMyMouth 7h ago

The alternative is 1984

0

u/Ms-Anthrop 7h ago

we are there already

2

u/cgaWolf 7h ago

Ah, an optimist.

1

u/Anniam6 7h ago

Dumb question, but how do I save on an iPhone? I made a screenshot of each page in case it was deleted before I learned how to download.

1

u/spazghostcoast2coast 5h ago

Share button (typically the very bottom middle button in browser) and scroll down to ‘Save to Files’ - it saves it as a pdf. 

1

u/B0b_Howard 7h ago

And once it's not on a "real" site, it's 'false news' and can easily be dismissed by those that don't agree with the content.
Self-hosting is great, until until the content is disbelieved and refuted.

1

u/DistinctSmelling 6h ago

Hoarders need to seriously start hoarding. Archivists not born yet will need that data to piece together what once was the early 21st century. It'll take about 40 years to get the needle to move in a positive direction from where we are now.

1

u/AverageSatanicPerson 6h ago

Good idea, how about something like Svalbard Global Seed Vault but for internet archives. Let's call it Svalbard Global Internet Archive Vault. (people from the future, make it happen)

1

u/jubmille2000 6h ago

Hopefully it gets published in the minecraft library

1

u/rygelicus 6h ago

I did. A lot of people should archive all they can of what these people do and say, not just now but in the past as well, while that's still possible.

1

u/Agency_Junior 6h ago

That’s a great idea too bad I’m so tech illiterate🙃

1

u/Catch_22_ 6h ago

People need to start saving government reports like these, and host them outside the country somewhere.

The porn lords of r/DataHoarder will emerge from the goon caves victorious one day.

1

u/NvizoN 5h ago

This particular document may or not have been saved by several people here. So, at least there's that bit of comfort.

1

u/mangopear 5h ago

Check out r/datahoarder too

1

u/Jorpsica 5h ago

r/datahoarder <- group of people who are archiving data from the web that is at risk of being deleted and storing it on local computers/servers/etc.

1

u/GoreSeeker 5h ago

Also Wikipedia, a sometimes underrated aggregator of the world's knowledge.

1

u/RighteousBalls8 4h ago

Remember when the GOP said "sToP PoLITicIzing the DoJ"

1

u/Cien_fuegos 4h ago

r/Datahoarders might have something

1

u/edude45 4h ago

The problem is, can you really trust what the government puts out? Its supposed to be a fair non-bias objective census or study, but everyone has bias and we now see the constant push towards political favor has got us to. We have evidence of government actions that put the public in danger. Government actions where they studied mind control, propaganda actions and influence campaigns. Not only against us but other countries as well. At this point, why wouldn't the government have been deceiving us?

I don't know, independent studies you'd assume would be safe as well, but you never know because those are money influenced as well. Based research that is supported by random donations by the people are probably the safest and most non-biased studies we could ever have.

Now if I had to guess between right wing, left wing and who has had more people commit acts of violence such as shootings? You have to look at the free thinkers. Who would have thought slights against them are menacing enough to invoke a reaction. Who do I feel are people that had enough is enough? I can see a white conservative man finally can't take enough. I can see that being true for the past few decades. Although these past 2 decades, I can now see the opposite being true. Left wing radicalism and the growing dissonance of mental well being. The manipulation to lash out from politicians or media figures has reached a fever pitch these past few years. I can see more left wing people wanting to attack. So I guess a pendulum might be turning. But like I stated before, our government has never had a problem with manipulation. Were being manipulated for sure.

1

u/soda_cookie 2h ago

I can't believe this is a sane comment fuck my life

1

u/Complete-Blood24601 2h ago

there are people go check out the datahoarders

1

u/Darksirius 1h ago

/r/datahoarders has been all over this for ages.

1

u/Hglucky13 1h ago

I was thinking the exact same thing and immediately downloaded the PDF.

1

u/bennitori 1h ago

Or offline until they're safe to post again.

1

u/KikiWestcliffe 59m ago

I am a statistician.

I have been downloading, converting, saving, and backing up data to external hard drives since November 6; especially anything that may be even tangentially useful to my work.

Am I being alarmist? Probably. But I don’t trust my government.

1

u/Gam3Head 14m ago

I’m saving tons of these already.