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2525 points hownottowrite | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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IanSanders ◴[] No.21191494[source]
I agree 100% that we should boycott and sanction, however doubt there will be enough people who will, and enough people who care. And I don't blame most for not caring, there are more things to worry about than we have time available. Maybe 1% of hearthstone players will see your comment. Similarly, there are other entities which need to be sanctioned, which you and me won't find out about as it's outside of our areas of interest.

Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority", which would process information similar to this and make informed decisions who to boycott, how and when. Less informed would be able to make an impact without having to do research (which not everyone would do equally well)

Obviously this authority must operate with complete transparency, so that we could verify its decision process when required.

Any hostile actions against it must be treated as a crime against humanity?

Somehow it must be immune from corruption. Perhaps some mechanism to revoke user trust in case of wrongdoings.

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__MatrixMan__ ◴[] No.21192353[source]
I don't think it needs to be a moral authority, it can just be an index of well defined problems to lists of the top couple actors responsible for those problems.

Such an organization need not say that you should boycott anything (i.e. be a moral authority) but instead can say that IF you think that American companies participating in the Chinese censorship machine regarding Hong Kong is bad THEN boycotting companies X Y and Z would be effective. The morality comes from the users. In order to organize against a common nebulous baddie we need a mapping from nebulous baddies to actionable targets.

As much as I hate that everything needs to be a social network these days, this probably needs a social aspect--a place where you can post evidence that you cut the power to Company X's headquarters, or whatever, so you can check back occasionally and feel relevant when people attach metadata to your crime.

It would have to be careful to avoid being too specific to be liable for the actions of its users, while not being so vague that users can't use it to channel their frustration towards actions that actually do harm the entities identified. Alternatively, it could be specific as hell but hard to take down.

I guess what I'm proposing is something like Kickstarter, but for civil unrest.

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1. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.21196243[source]
What you describe is something that holds itself out as a moral authority.