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The post-truth Santa Claus and the concealed present
Alexandre Oliva
Santa Claus knows it all, and will reward authority-approved behavior. Grownups take other social control myths for granted. Enter the World Wide Web, and the propaganda machines behind them lose their local monopolies. Now, in the globalized competition for hearts (brains might tell fake from fact), they wish to censor fake news, the post-truth label for both competing propaganda and concealed truth. Such censorship will not stop at social(-control) media: (centralized) web searches are already censored and otherwise distorted, and even (proprietary) software assistants, running on our own mobile computers, may end up assisting not us, but the censors that control their software by concealing the present from us--our future. To make intelligent decisions, we need truth, and to get it we will need not just education for critical thinking, decentralized social media and a neutral network, but also software freedom on our own communication and computing devices.