I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action
Both can be true. The large national news outlets can be faltering AND someone could find a partisan advantage by making hay out of that fact.
As an example, major news networks blatantly lied about the Covington kid because it fit their ideology.
Major news networks are untrustworthy, you just happen to support the narrative some of them are selling.
And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
Meh. Money buys speech has been a thing since day zero. If anything the internet has made this problem smaller because you don't have to buy a TV station to publish video anymore. Then the corporate propaganda isn't the only thing people see, which allows them to see it for what it is, which makes them think this is some kind of novel problem never previously encountered, when it's really a novel solution that makes the old and pervasive problem much more conspicuous through contrast.
You also have to see the irony in suggesting that corporations decide what people can see in order to protect us from corporations influencing the public debate.
> And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
That would be really convenient, but it's still as complicated as anything. There is a truth but it isn't a simple truth and that means getting it right is hard work.
Uncle Google doesn't have a magic wand of righteousness that lets them tell right from wrong over everybody else in the world.
Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it doesn't need fact checks, it doesn't need to be based on research. As long as you can get enough spread, you can get a large number of people to believe anything, simply because they heard it from someone. People are not rational actors.
Witness the demonization of pipeline protestors, people who protest the clear-cutting of forests, people who argue for trans rights. They upset the corporate-run status quo, so they are suppressed by the authorities, who act on the whims of the rich and powerful.
Witness the rise of the alt-right, the so-called "intellectual dark web" and the influence of sites like 4chan and 8chan.
Armed people barging into governmental buildings, and basically being allowed to do so almost unimpeded by police, photo ops for the media, a show of force for their allies. I've seen them ridiculed as yokels, but it didn't matter. What matters is visibility and the "look at what we can do without being stopped" factor.
Imagine what would have happened if BLM, a group of Muslims or any left-wing group had tried to do the same thing. Think Kent State and the National Guard.
The message is clear: Act against capitalism and the powers that be and you will be suppressed, by unlimited force if necessary
Sure, astroturfing and other misinformation campaigns can happen if speech is truly free, but the alternative is far worse. With free speech, if your ideas have merit then at least there is a chance they will be recognized and your audience can grow. With complete censorship, you have no chance at all. Free speech is the least bad of these two options.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. No ifs or buts about that.
In the same breath, it is very important to realize that your freedom of speech does not absolve you from responsibility for what you say. It does not obligate others to facilitate your speech, it does not entitle you to any platform you wish, and it does not obligate anyone to listen to you.
Similarly to the second amendment, which enshrines your right to own weapons (being the foundation of a well-regulated militia and so on) does not obligate anyone to provide you with weapons, nor the facilities to train with and maintain weapons, and it certainly doesn't require anyone to admit your onto their property if you are currently holding any weapons.
There is no legal obligation for YouTube to listen to us, but there is no reason we can't ask for less censorship. If they say no, then they are well within their rights, but we don't have to be happy about it either. Just because we can't legally force change doesn't mean we must abandon the cause. The most optimistic scenario would be if public sentiment changes enough such that YouTube feels they are being seen as unfair and it is damaging to their reputation/bottom line, perhaps we may see a change in their censorship policies. This is an ideal to strive for, and uses social/economic pressure as opposed to legal pressure. It is like your obligation to be a helpful neighbor or to be a caring friend. It's not by force of law, but people are expected to do it because it's "the right thing to do." In the same way, when you're the predominant video platform on the internet, the right thing to do is not to censor opinions you disagree with.
Does that apply to astroturfed reddit comments etc? I don't see why it shouldn't. Of course it's a bit harder to prove, but it's not always impossible.
This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem.
> We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong.
This is exactly what the censorship makes worse. You say "not here, go somewhere else" to anyone who disagrees and everyone who disagrees is separated, so that each camp has no exposure to the other side's arguments and whoever is wrong will remain so.
> We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
The world is complicated. Not everybody is going to understand everything. That isn't possible, but it isn't required. What you need are two things.
One is free and open debate, so that the people who choose to allocate their time to a given specific topic enough to come to an accurate conclusion on that topic are free to do so.
And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.
But you either do the research yourself (which nobody has time to do for everything) or you trust somebody else to do it for you. So now people need to figure out who they can trust to distill the informed consensus. But you don't do that by censoring the debate, you do it by being so consistently right that people begin to trust you over the lies of the blaring partisans. That doesn't come from force, it comes from hard work, which nobody seems willing to do anymore, which is why everything is messed up.