One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and we don't need any analysis of what specifically the discourse was to make our determination, which is why your comment abstracts over any value it could be. Full disclosure, I don't fully understand this worldview because it seems to enforce a particular discourse on Mark Zuckerberg, which seems a bit contradictory to me although I assume there must be some way philosophically to resolve this objection.

The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis, and we don't need any analysis of what Zuckerberg "disagrees with" to decide if it's right to limit. Obviously the people who will advocate for removing a discourse are people who don't like it, but that's separate from analysis of whether the discourse itself is a force against democracy.

These ideas are at cross purposes, and success of the one is often at the expense of the other. For this reason we seem reluctant to just lay out the underlying value systems the way I did here, which is unfortunate, because I think the fundamental disagreement is really important to discuss.

This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon.

Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.

Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way.

There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large.

If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

I believe the hardcore freedom of speech view has a few important underlying assumptions:

1) More information is better, and shining a light on something is better than trying to selectively hide it, because eventually the real truth comes out through persistent discourse. This is only really possible with the maximum amount of information, and especially all viewpoints laid out on the table with the least amount of obstruction.

2) People are broadly able to parse out untruths, or irrelevant positioning, or anything that is of low quality, and they will not be persuaded by it. This isn't true of everyone, but it is true of enough people; that's an inherent assumption of democracy. We live (or want to live) in a free market of ideas, where ideas can compete, and the market (what people are persuaded by) will be broadly rational and land on the best position in aggregate, even if some people are persuaded by bad or malicious arguments.

3) Limiting the visibility of any information detracts from the overall quality of discourse because it robs people of the ability to improve their thinking. It negates the possibility of refutation, because the untruth is hidden. Giving people all information, including misleading information, in the long-run leads to a population that can have better discourse and evaluation of all the information thrown their way.

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I think the above puts the ideas in the best possible light. However, I disagree with enough of these assumptions that I can't take this worldview myself. My main counter to these ideas is that, similar to (pure) free market proponents, it takes on a very idealistic view of rationality that doesn't match real behavior. In practice, people have to take shortcuts to understand things—it's inherent in human conciseness—and those shortcuts can be exploited. I don't believe this is something we can grow past on a large societal scale, because it's embedded in how we think. To improve the quality of discourse, we have to explicitly protect against these biases. There are a whole host of difficulties there, too, but I think they are more surmountable than all the downsides of allowing deliberate manipulation and misinformation to spread broadly.

It's a justified fear, since it's happened repeatedly in living memory, and is happening still: you're welcome to go hand out pamphlets about the June Fourth Incident on Tiananmen Square if you don't believe me.

If you want to discount that risk, ignoring it or glossing it as some sort of slippery slope argument, that's your business. I won't, and we find ourselves on opposite sides of the debate for that reason.

To be clear, I don't think it's a slippery slope, because I don't think it's an accidental or avoidable consequence of allowing authoritarian control of the terms of discourse. I think it's the expected outcome, and that people who think that end state can be avoided are being used by people who crave that power over others.

I’m positing that in the long run it will be easier and less detrimental to society to establish some kind of editorial guidelines around misinformation and hold platforms accountable to them than it will be to educate enough people quickly enough to vet misinformation for themselves, especially as misinformation becomes increasingly hard to spot. I say this knowing fully that defining what misinformation is will be extremely hard, and you’re putting a lot of power in the hands of whatever person or group does that. Every decision is a trade off where you choose what benefits you think are best and what problems you think you can solve best and trying to balance them. I think we can better solve the problem of effectively limiting power abuse than we can of limiting the broad abuse of inherent human biases.

Edit: I should also note, I agree with a handful of the assumptions I listed above, specifically that democracies are built on the idea that people can broadly reach the right answer together. I still believe that. But I also believe in clearing out the brush and debris in the way so the crowd can actually use that superpower well.

Facebook is powerful, but it's not an authoritarian state. I'm not sure I see much danger in Facebook weighing in on different kinds of falsehood (i.e., your insight that things can be false in different way). It seems more akin to a journal having standards for what it publishes, or HackerNews hiding or removing egregiously bad comments, than it does to the Chinese government jailing dissidents.

The main historical analogy to Facebook which seems relevant is the phone company. Either Facebook is so large and influential that misinformation on Facebook can threaten our political process, or it isn't, and clearly it's the former.

When Ma Bell was the only game in town, they weren't allowed to deny use of the network to the Communist Party, because that was clearly a violation of the concept of free speech.

I don't think the difference between a natural monopoly and a state monopoly has much relevance here, what does matter is that if you ban, say, a political party, from Facebook, it absolutely cripples their ability to participate in the democratic process. That's too much power for me to simply shrug and say "their house, their rules".

It's a bad situation, and we should get out of it. And yes, Facebook itself isn't the Ministry of Truth, and doesn't have jackbooted security waiting in the wings.

But I firmly believe that the parties who are pushing for control over social media discourse absolutely want that end state, they are driven by power, and the only way to fight that outcome is to resist it early and often. Denying a victory here will spare expensive battles down the line.

I also used to be a free speech absolutist, but I'm not anymore since I realized that it doesn't actually result in the kind of educated discourse and debate where truth prevails (as libertarians seem to think it does) - it results in 8chan and QAnon. Human beings aren't rational, and are rife with cognitive biases towards bigotry and cruelty that can easily be hijacked by populists.

I wouldn't discount the "slippery-slope way", because a slippery slope is not a fallacy when the slope is, in fact, slippery (and demonstrably so).

> My main counter to these ideas is that, similar to (pure) free market proponents, it takes on a very idealistic view of rationality that doesn't match real behavior.

That cuts both ways, though. Some vocal proponents of the "there's bad speech" view weaponize the Paradox of Tolerance argument, way past the point it's rationally applicable, and use it to beat people into submission. It's a very big problem in well-known online communities (including Facebook, Reddit and HN). For now, the effects are mostly limited to being called an -ist or -obe if you don't agree with maximally extremist view on some issues, and every now and then someone loses a job due to a Twitter mob. But I wouldn't want to live in a country ruled by the same principles.

Note that the side effect of extreme policing of wrongthing isn't just that the bad people get underground instead of being "disinfected by light". It's also extremely polarizing, because those on the fence now have to pick a side or get accused of being inssuficiently rightthinking - and some of those will adopt the wrongthink, at the very least because the wrongthinkers are nice to them. The historical equivalent of that is running your country by calling everyone not conspicuously patriotic enough a traitor and executing them; at some point you'll find that a chunk of your population actually defects to the enemy just to save their lives.

The way I see it, I'm all for maximizing accuracy and precision of beliefs and opinions, which correlates with rooting out disinformation. As for wrongthink - I believe the Paradox of Tolerance is recursive. That is, if in the process of rooting out the intolerant you start causing collateral damage among the innocent, you become the intolerant that should be rooted out.

Indeed. Here's the original Popper's statement of paradox of tolerance:

Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

If anything, it is rather the censors that are "who are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive", and recent "peaceful protests" are exactly an "answer to arguments by the use of their fists or pistols".

They could all be false (eg more information is not better, people are frequently unable to parse out untruths and limiting information actually improves discourse quality) and still it is vastly more harmful to allow private institutions to wield the power of defining acceptable discourse than to permit all discourse.

The key issue is what the endowment of discourse-approval power grants to that institution. The issue is not whether discourse is true, productive or high-quality.

A bunch of nuts spouting off conspiracy theories on Facebook is low quality, likely to mislead people, and does not add useful information.

But allowing private entities to have the power to make policing decisions about it is a dramatically greater evil.

In what different way? Has not both been scientifically refuted by reputable scientists? Just because one sounded more plausible doesn't mean it's not false.

To me, both needn't be banned, because I believe and agree with your premise, but I don't agree there's a difference.

I see an important distinction between pseudoscientific crankery and just bad/refuted science. I've read some of the 5g corona stuff; it's batshit insane, like I'm fairly sure the primary sources on it have serious mental illnesses.

Any physicist with a mailing address can tell you all about cranks. Refuting cranks is not a part of their job, if they do that, they won't have time for anything else.

I don't think the gain-of-function paper has been comprehensively refuted, yet. It's certainly been dismissed, dissed, and evidence is strongly pointing in the direction of it being refuted.

But it was written by a credentialed virologist, and more importantly, it is in the process of being submitted through channels.

Will it survive peer review and be published? Probably not, and that's what peer review is for. As far as I'm able to determine, it's just a bad paper, but it's real science, not a parody of science.

Banning such people sends the wrong message. We rationally should update our priors in the direction of a conspiracy to suppress the truth.

I'm no virologist, but I've spend enough time in genetics labs to be able to follow along with their conversations. What I can't do, is tell the difference between a shadowy ChiCom conspiracy to suppress the truth, and overzealous enforcement of a vague mandate to ban disinformation about the novel coronavirus.

I mean. I know some people who work for Twitter; it's the latter, you'll never go broke presuming institutional dysfunction as the cause of any malaise on the birdsite.

And yeah, I don't think the 5g whackjobs should be banned either, but for a different reason: they'll just go find another forum where people like me won't be around to tell them how full of shit they are. The only think worse than a weird cult of people who believe schizo stuff is a weird isolated cult of people who believe schizo stuff.

But, yes, it took decades to be broadly accepted, and we're lucky that Wegener wasn't "canceled" in the meantime.

We should always leave a little margin for the possibility that we're wrong. When it comes to 5g causing COVID, I don't think we'll need it...

The irony of course is that the "experiments with official truth in the 20th century" in the US were often defended on the grounds of protecting "liberal consensus" from opposing viewpoints. See the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals statement of principles, the trade group responsible for the Hollywood Blacklist:

"We believe in, and like, the American way of life: the liberty and freedom which generations before us have fought to create and preserve; the freedom to speak, to think, to live, to worship, to work, and to govern ourselves as individuals, as free men; the right to succeed or fail as free men, according to the measure of our ability and our strength.

Believing in these things, we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of communism, fascism, and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life; groups that have forfeited their right to exist in this country of ours, because they seek to achieve their change by means other than the vested procedure of the ballot and to deny the right of the majority opinion of the people to rule."

The Devil can indeed cite Scripture for his purposes.

My point exactly. Aphorisms such as "Liberal consensus" don't exist in a vacuum, and are often used as an excuse for intervention rather than a protection against intervention.

> So, without knowing anything about me, would you guess I'm pro-blacklist, or anti-blacklist?

Do you think the Trump administration should outlaw certain subjects from being taught, such as Critical Theory? You surely would agree that the stranglehold certain departments have on academic discourse makes free speech impossible, correct?

But I think we are still saying talking points instead of getting to the core. I understand and I share the concern about an important voice being silenced. But I think the mechanism of that silence in the current environment is probably related to loudness of noise rather than quietness of signal. Obviously, it may be different at different situations and times in history. But I think if our goal is to hear quiet voices we ought to consider both sources of the issue pretty seriously. A philosophy that only considers the problem of transmitting and ignores the problem of receiving through a noisefloor seems an incomplete troubleshooting procedure to me.

Whereas you perceive a threat about the slide into censorship, I perceive a threat about the slide into unrest and violence. In reality, it seems likely we will get both: one of them first and the other following as a reaction. So I think our interests would really be best served by hammering out a workable compromise so as to hang together rather than separately.

I agree that we ought to return to the "liberal discourse", but we may perceive its makeup differently. Limitations on discourse have always been part and parcel of the institution. Some limitations have been very harmful. Others, like 'you can't threaten not to leave when you lose an election', have been very helpful. Liberal discourse is presently threatened because we have abandoned that sort of polite limitation, and it is by reintroducing it that we can recover the institution.

> If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

This is a bit of a strawman. I do empathize with the skepticism of authority in our present climate. However, you rely on some method to determine whether a person is doing censorship in the same way I rely on a method to determine if a person is doing misinformation. I expect it is a similar method, which is to say, imperfectly, based on values present in our historical age, individual biases, and so on. Which is the "same sort of stuff" that democracy otherwise uses to make any of its decisions.

I expect this dispute arises because, in your worldview, limiting the discourse is very exceptional, and doing it properly should require an exceptional method. Whereas from my perspective, laws, elections, jail, and wars are very serious, and we have processes to decide those.

> Whereas you perceive a threat about the slide into censorship, I perceive a threat about the slide into unrest and violence.

I certainly only addressed the former, but I'm also concerned about the latter.

It seems to me that cooler heads are more likely to prevail, if hotheads remain on the same platform as those cooler heads. Not going to go full horseshoe theory here, but part of what makes the far left and far right "far" is their willingness to engage in violent rhetoric and follow it up with action.

Garden-variety guns and beef conservatives are more likely to speak the language of actual white supremacists, but they aren't going to go onto Stormfront to do it.

Extremists are angry people, with a story about oppression: either the shadow globalist cabal is trying to replace them, or the evil capitalists are trying to grind them under their boot. So it's a bad idea to actually go in and oppress them. They will absolutely find a forum to air their grievances and plot revenge, and moderates will no longer be a part of the conversation.

Why do you believe that only the the second viewpoint will suffer from this slippery slope? We also seen similar examples in the first worldview. A conversation can quickly go from being against illegal immigrants, to being against all immigrants, to being against a specific race of immigrants, to genocide of that race. We have already seen this laissez-faire approach from Facebook help contribute to genocide in Myanmar.

That said, this argument structure sounds a lot like "US leadership was warned about the attacks on Pearl Harbor". It looks like FB under reacted to these warnings, probably because they didn't realize how bad the outcome would be. How can info/escalations be presented so as to break out of the noise? (I'm assuming here that FB also has been warned of a lot of really bad things that never came to pass, which isn't something we can know - but it's an interesting thought experiment.)

What is the expectation in terms of separate the signal from the noise? How can the critical factors be identified ahead of time? Was it foreseeable that the targeted hate speech would turn into violence? What level of reaction is appropriate, given the uncertainty of hate speech -> violence?

Apologies for the brain dump - not expecting answers to all of them. And not defending FB here. I just think these types of questions are very interesting (plus I just read Superforecasters, which examines similar decision making w/r/t the decision to kill bin Laden).

And the idea that the "general consensus" is against all forms of censorship is quite false. In America it is, but in Europe and other countries censorship of hate speech (e.g. racism, Nazism, etc.) is quite accepted as part of the general consensus.

And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. And arguably, spreading blatant viral lies on social media close to an election is akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, since the national consequences could be so dire.

There are many intelligent arguments to be made that censorship of speech that is either a) primarily hate-directed rather than information-directed, or b) outrageously false but capable of swinging an election, could be outlawed, and neither of these would be incompatible with modern-day political liberalism, which is more commonly called "social democracy" to distinguish it from the classical liberalism that Mill did so much to defend.

And the idea that this would somehow depend on an "oracle of truth" is nonsense. Courts judge things like libel and defamation cases all the time. Sure, there are gray cases that could go either way, but drawing lines in gray areas is what courts have done ever since they existed in the first place. Holding Facebook moderators ultimately responsible to judges, for example, isn't inherently difficult to do if we wanted to.

Well, if you believe tangential dicta that was grounded in no preexisting law offered in a since-overturned case allowing the repression of core political speech, sure...

But best not use that example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

If you're feeling pedantic, perhaps you can replace the phrase with "yelling things to incite an imminent lawless action" (to crib from Wikipedia's summarization of Brandenburg) any time anyone ever says it. Does that work for you? Because the underlying point remains: that there are limits to free speech.

It is a misquote (leaving out "falsely", a modifier which is key to the meaning of the original quote) of a statement the original of which is inaccurate as a description of the prior state of the law when the case it was in was decided, or the state of the law once the case was decided (being dicta, it itself had no binding effect), or the current state of the law, from a decision now widely recognized as anathema to the central protection of the First Amendment.

It is, almost literally, the worst example that you could use.

But it's the one everybody knows. Society has chosen it as the common term for the concept by now. Its original source or accuracy is entirely irrelevant -- in the same way it would be missing the point to complain that "black holes" aren't technically black.

After all, we're not having a discussion between lawyers about the intracacies of US free speech law. It's just a phrase for referring to the general concept of rights not being absolute.

>spreading blatant viral lies on social media

You even admit this is arguable. You're assuming people are morons who need big brother to help them out - you don't really believe in democratic principles if this is your stance. The enforcement of punishing such lies is inconsistent as well. One needs only to look at the blatant left wing bias of Twitter and Facebook, where conservatives are banned for expressing opinions whereas lies told by media outlets (with small corrections added days later) are left up and not punished at all.

So, what's different now vs when there was paid political campaigns and advertising on TV, radio, magazines etc.?

Partisan political ads have never been a source of reliable information as long as i've been alive.

I'm curious as to what elections you've participated in within your lifetime that wasn't full of campaigns full of misinformation or hell even an election where the candidate that won kept their word on everything they said.

My problem with this all is it feels just engineered and over reactionary.

Misinformation has existed as long as i've been alive in pretty easily accessible forms. There's always been tabloids next to checkout stands, there's always been bullshit news, ads pretending to be factual and mountains of garbage info heaped onto people and the same people that believed it then believe it now.

None of this is new and the only thing the internet changed about it all is now we can hear about whatever nonsense Joe Blow believes in.

I have a problem with it all because what people call 'misinformation' isn't always such, it's 'disagreeable information'.

Many of the things i've seen labelled as information.over the years, not your examples in particular, but in general, aren't even things with an objective correctness to them.

The whole second viewpoint relies on the idea that there is a morally superior group of people out there who know the correct ideas and everyone would just be better off if we just listen to them as any other ideas are just misinformation against the 'correct ideas'.

Again, this reminds me very much of the way things were when the church ran things. Just replace God and his commandments with the correct world view and beliefs.

This is very much the idea behind wrongthink and thoughtcrimes in 1984. That holding a non conforming belief makes one guilty and requires them to be punished by those that believe 'the correct thing'.

In the end, it all comes down to the idea that one group of people has the moral authority to decide what's right for everyone and should be allowed to crush any dissenting opinion.

And this, yes, I have a huge problem with. It's no different than what any other oppressive dictators have done to crush dissent.

It's Facebook that is undermining that norm -- even though they have the same standard for ads from non-politicians.

There's a GOP pac head that is running for something just to dodge Facebook's policy about lying.

If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first.

But isn't the basis behind MAD and the whole premise behind the continued existence of the world since nuclear weapons became a widespread thing, that, we're all safer having nukes instead of ridding the world of them, because if nobody had nukes, then someone would make one and use one?

I mean, i'm on the 'remove all nuclear weapons from existence' team myself but...

I wonder how the math breaks down on whether you're safer having fun at the gun range, or on the road driving to it.

> The absolute "freedom is simple, and restrictions are all bad" position is nonsense.

I think this statement is needlessly antagonistic. Restricting the freedom of individuals who are acting in good faith and with sufficient personal responsibility seems wrong to me. This harms everyone who ever had to get a license just to serve drinks and wipe tables, as a common case.

> Ignoring that there are people who would use their freedom to infringe on others is naive and childish.

I don't believe anyone here has said that we should ignore bad actors. If someone has bad ideas, people should be free to refute them. If someone engages in behavior that harms others the legal system can intervene.

Censorship is a stupid mechanism for improving society. If you can use it against those you disagree with, what happens if they end up in power and use it against you? Rigging the rules is short-term thinking.

If everyone who is responsible has a gun, we are all safer.

Personally, I am very much in favour of regulating some forms of speech (regulating doesn't necessarily have to mean prohibiting btw), but I am very wary if big, quasi-monopolistic private companies are being tasked to do so, because their incentive structure now will lead them to over-restrict in order to avoid potential legal issues. If it's just a newspaper comment section, that's fine because there is enough competition, but for things like Twitter/FB/YouTube, I find it problematic, and this is why I find some of the more recent laws in the EU to be somewhat dangerous; we're basically asking unelected, unsupervised people from Facebook et al. to intransparently enforce laws.

You will mostly find this worldview on the political left of the spectrum, and more often than not you will find the discourse they find to be “against freedom” to be the one held by their political opponent.

And when they promote their view in the form of a policy, they are effectively trying to outlaw people having opinions differing from theirs.

Rather current examples: identity politics and diversity policies. If you simply disagree with the basis of their argument, that disagreement is considered “hateful” in itself and your speech must be banned, no matter how civil.

How can one have free discourse, when the one righteous part has decided that only they are allowed to speak? There’s no freedom here. Not even close.

Network broadcast television operates under standards and practices, where certain things are not allowed for broadcast. That includes the news---even news stories are subject to S&P constraint.

Does network broadcast television "police political opinion" if it doesn't give a pedophile a half-hour of air time to plead their case?

The world of decentralized bidirectional near-lightspeed mass-communication, where there is often not a gatekeeper, is relatively new.

It's still an open question whether it's a net positive for society. I would say there have been a lot of positive consequences. Negative consequences are also stacking up quickly.

Historically, nobody would batt and eye about a network policing the opinions represented in its programing. However, there would be uproar if a phone company controlled what was said in a call.

Facebook fills so many roles that a single solution does not exist.

In the past, the effects of freedom of speech were bounded by the cost of communication. Very few people could afford a soapbox with which to reach the world, so only certain messages were broadcast widely. Now everyone can send (and even amplify) messages quickly and easily.

Previously celebrities, politicians, the media, and advertisers had a wide channel. Now interest groups, state actors, echo chambers, and individuals with access to technology such as GPT-3 can do the same.

There's a lot of good, but also a lot of bad. We're now testing how humans respond to this deluge. It's fascinating (and somewhat worrying) to watch unfold.

My biggest fear is that state actors will inject information designed to polarize us, and that we'll respond exactly as they want.

This may be correlation that does not imply causation. But demagogues had, for the first time, a way to reach into people's homes directly with their messages all the time, if they had access to microphones, video cameras, and broadcast towers. And it was a mechanism that excluded the ability of any antithesis messages to reach people on those same channels (once the government had control of the channels). Mussolini and his ilk certainly knew how to take advantage of these tools.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemiti...

Surely you mean both fascism and socialism?

Are you being facetious with this? This has been a long documented behavior of Russia. The future you fear is already here.

With the goal of allies gaining power. That is fundamentally different than Russian's initial goal of simply knocking the US out of their superpower role by causing polarization, internal strife, loss of faith in institutions, and just general chaos. I think people associate Russian disinformation as purely a right wing phenomenon because that is where they have had more success, but there is plenty of Russian disinformation targeted at and supporting the left wing too.

Why do you think Russia is trying to knock the US out of its superpower of its superpower role? They’re not doing it just to be petty.

There is a fundamental difference between let's interfere with this country to install a friendly government and let's interfere with this country so it rips itself apart.

America learned a bloody and horrible lesson trying to install a friendly government in Afghanistan after Russia diminished their influence in the region.

The people of the US are the primary target of Russia. Their government is actively trying to do us harm.

It is indifference versus malice. This isn't a defense of US foreign policy. We have a history of doing awful things. It is simply recognizing differences between the two countries approaches and noting that the fears that initially sparked this tangent match up nearly perfectly with Russia's goals and actions.

And why do you think this supposed intent matters so much? Do you think outcomes will be worse for the people of the US than living under Pinochet or in modern-day Fallujah? Or do you think polarization and misinformation are not the least of the strategies the US uses in its foreign interventions?

I’m legitimately confused by your viewpoint.

I have explained my viewpoint numerous times. I don't think I need to explain it any more. I am legitimately confused on what you are trying to achieve by repeatedly questioning that viewpoint. I already admitted the US does bad things. I am not making a value judgement of US versus Russia. I am stating that the specific situation outlined matches closer to Russia's behavior than the US's.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/trump-militar...

And I fail to see how the US fits into the category of manslaughter anyway. For instance, there has been plenty of strong and well-documented anti-communist malice at the highest levels of power in US government and intelligence. But even so, imperialist histories like to portray this country as somehow stumbling into the atrocities it has committed.

How so?

The elections are happening, legislature legislates, judicial system is adjudicating, the military is following the constitution. What are the signs of the collapse?

The sole link you provided has nothing to do with a coup - it talks about Trump potentially deploying military to quell riots. It is his constitutional right to do, however the generals are of course free to resign from this. Is this a coup on your book?

The signs? The words of the president and the people around him. The article I linked is one example in which people are having to seriously consider dangerous situations that were thought impossible during all recent presidential elections.

The edge of collapse also doesn't mean it has collapsed yet. I wouldn't even say it is a likelihood that it will collapse, but there is some non-trivial chance that the US democracy fails between now and the end of the year. It has been at least decades since anyone would have said something like that previous sentence. The cold war might have been the last time in which there was this high of a chance of catastrophe.

>The sole link you provided has nothing to do with a coup - it talks about Trump potentially deploying military to quell riots. It is his constitutional right to do, however the generals are of course free to resign from this. Is this a coup on your book?

It is talking about Trump potentially deploying military in either the lead up to the election, on election day, or in the wake of election day. This can be done for any number of reasons. It can be done to rile up his base like he did with his photo-op at St John's. It can be done to intimidate people away from voting. I can be done in the wake of the election to challenge it's legitimacy or to quell protests and civil unrest in response to him challenging the election's legitimacy. The first example is clearly not a coup. The second probably doesn't qualify either even though it would be illegal. The third one is using military violence or the threat of it to illegally seize power from rightful leaders. Isn't that a text book definition of a coup?

Yes, also completely made up.

Trump talks a lot, often times incoherently and faster than he thinks. This is not the greatest quality in a president, but also not the worst.

This is only "completely made up" in the sense that every hypothetical the military prepares for is a made up scenario.

Trump is within his authority to send the troops into the streets to quell an insurrection against constitutional order. This being an unusual situation naturally the generals should be getting prepared. Where's the coup?

Which behavior is that?

>he refuses to concede

This is not supported by the NYT quote re Pentagon officials you have provided. Do you have a quote where Pentagon officials discuss actions in case of Trump's failure to concede?

"Collapse of democracy" doesn't impute lawlessness. The attempt to cripple the USPS under DeJoy was legal, for example. If the US continues its slide into authoritarianism, you can bet it will happen with the pretense of legality.

But that aside, Trump has indicated that he won't honor the election result [1]. GP's link mentions that as well, and links to the article:

> “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” the president said.

There are also many scenarios in which the election result leads us into Constitutionally uncharted territory. The Atlantic painted some plausible pictures recently [2], including a quote from a Trump campaign legal advisor about appointing electors that don't match a state's popular vote result:

> According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/trump-power-t...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...

And how is this going to happen? The Constitution puts firm limits on the President's power, the Supreme court will not approve of anything contrary to that (no matter who appointed the justices), and the Congress is not going to change the constitution by a vote of 2/3rd. What is the mechanism of usurping power that you see?

Trump has spent the last four years flagrantly breaking the law and suffered no real consequences. It strains credulity that he wouldn’t accelerate this with another four years and a solid Supreme Court majority.

He already had four years. What exactly did he dismantle? The courts, the congress, the senate, the elections, the state rights? Did anything change at all in the "political infrastructure"?

> courts that Trump and McConnell have spent the past four years packing only rule against the most flagrant of Constitutional violations

This trope is getting old. Justices are not puppets of their presidents. Sometime a conservative appointee turns out liberal and serves out their term long after the president is gone and forgotten. The terms "conservative" and "liberal" apply to justices only very loosely. I invite you to read opinions of, say, Justice Scalia [1] - he's not the freedom-crusher you imagine them to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas#Scalia's_dis...

He and the Senate have aggressively confirmed judges at all levels. He’s purged all but the most obsequious members of the executive branch. He started to gut the USPS and will continue after the election. He’s attempted in multiple ways to undermine the census, specifically to undercount minority residents. He’s sown misinformation about voting. He’s encouraged police and private citizens to intimidate voters at the polls. While not his own doing, he will take advantage of the 1982 consent decree that expired in 2018.

> This trope is getting old. Justices are not puppets of their presidents.

I never said they were “puppets”. But they’re obviously biased — otherwise, why would Mitch McConnell try to block so many of Obama’s nominees and confirm so many of Trump’s? A case in which the conservative bloc of the court voted to uphold a law prohibiting gay sex in a private residence does not support your assertion.

True, but Justices are extremely consistent with their appointing President’s preferences on political issues that are salient at the time of their appointment.

Another one that may be worth mentioning is the elimination of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. This doctrine used to hold news companies with a broadcast license to a certain standard which is now gone - effectively allowing them to report on things with whatever amount of slant and bias they choose.

> The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been considered by some to be a contributing factor for the rising level of party polarization in the United States.

The main agenda for the doctrine was to ensure that viewers were exposed to a diversity of viewpoints. In 1969 the United States Supreme Court, in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, upheld the FCC's general right to enforce the fairness doctrine where channels were limited. However, the Court did not rule that the FCC was obliged to do so. The courts reasoned that the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum, which limited the opportunity for access to the airwaves, created a need for the doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

So effectively, we have echo chambers on TV and social media fed by algorithms and analytics, wherein people can participate to confirm their biases and preconceptions without having them challenged.

Was TV a net positive for society? It's anybody's guess.

There's tons of software engineers, product designers, etc. on an ideological bent. If companies like Facebook and Netflix hire these types of people, even if they think they're on the same side, they shouldn't be surprised when their employees begin making collective demands.

> I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to police the opinions of others?

Intellectual types tend towards seeing every issue in life as an engineering problem that can be solved with code or mathematics, so control over dangerous ideas makes sense to them and appeals to their ego sense that their intelligence gives them. It's just more apparent than ever because our environment rewards the ego in ways we didn't see even 5 years ago. We haven't even reached peak ego yet.

This is another concept that confuses me 'dangerous ideas'. How is that different than what the church did with things like witchcraft and paganism, those were 'dangerous ideas'.

What makes an idea dangerous?

If there's dangerous ideas are there safe ideas?

What makes an idea safe?

Can you give me and example of a safe idea vs a dangerous idea?

Who decides which ideas are safe and which ones are dangerous?

Is this a static thing? Like once an idea is declared either safe or dangerous, do they stay that way or can a safe idea become a dangerous idea or vice versa?

That's not even beginning to get into the definition of 'dangerous'.

It seems like a pretty vague and arbitrary term to me. Say for example, if I decided to go free climbing, I'd be in a lot of danger. I have no experience, for me that would be a dangerous thing to do. But, for my Buddy who's been climbing most of their life, it's not so dangerous.

So can one build up skills that let them deal with these dangerous ideas effectively, such as with other dangerous things or is the danger of ideas just beyond anyone to deal with?

Is there some kind of elite group of people who can handle these dangerous ideas that us normal folks can't?

I hope you see where i'm going with all this.

Are you surprised that arguments about which messages get amplified and which do not happen? That they happened historically and that they happen now? That Facebook (and other pieces of modern technology) have reinvigorated this discussion because they change the economics and effort and reach of people's actions?

One difference today is that we're having much more of this with just words in the private space and fewer legal or governmental ramifications... you could've gotten in a lot of official, thrown-in-jail-or-killed trouble for having the wrong ideas in the past!

Could you stop speaking in "what even is a dangerous idea" questions and put forth your own arguments? What do you picture your ideal world looking like, in terms of person A thinking one thing, person B thinking another, and person A's actions after person B starts trying to convince persons C, D, E... to take up certain positions... Let's use one of the "obvious" historical examples of a dangerous idea: "people like this are evil and we must kill them."

Each of these arguments presumes that if somehow, you'd managed to control the ideas of these people, then just maybe those terrible things wouldn't have happened.

The kinds of people that let ideas sway them into terrible actions aren't going to suddenly not find an excuse to do terrible things, they'll just look for another idea that justifies it.

You can't police ideas based on the worries of bad things happening because ideas exist.

People do shitty things and justify it with whatever excuses they want, trying to remove an idea is a pointless gesture and in the end impedes on the freedom of all because, something bad might happen if the wrong person hears the wrong idea.

And again comes down to:

'There's a moral authority that knows best and the rest of humanity is too irrational to be left to their own devices, therefore the moral authority must control the beliefs and ideas of the rest'

People are drinking bleach because they read on Facebook it will cure COVID-19 or their child's autism. Should Facebook delete those posts? Add an official warning disclaimer (counter-information)? Depend on other users to reply with counter-information in comments?

Certain ideas that its morally right to eliminate some people who happened to be born a certain way seems to me to fall into that category of dangerous ideas, primary because it offers no appeal, no rectification, you cant convert/repent your way out of death.

It's one thing to join in occasional political discussion as part of a variety of intellectually interesting topics, but quite another to only (or mostly) be using the site for that. Once that line is crossed, HN is clearly not being used as intended, and there's a huge difference in how those two different kinds of account impact the site. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and adjust accordingly?

If you or anyone want more explanation about how and why we draw the line this way, there's plenty here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

If you think this is just political battles, perhaps do a bit of self reflection and maybe Hacker News is not the pinnacle of intellectual thought you are giving it the credit of being.

Please follow the site guidelines when commenting here.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/21/facebook-keeps-failing-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" resulted in countless deaths but who owns that responsibly besides whoever wrote it, read it, and acted on the information within? You could blame it's publishers but that seems pretty off-track.

Also every company I've ever worked at has angry, self-righteous employees who disagree with upper management. We all think we're smarter than everyone else and most of us aren't afraid to share it.

You could do a lot of good with one of those! The ultimate anti-anxiety treatment, the ultimate in letting people become the cooler heads they need to be for good ideas to prevail in tense situations.

You could also hack into it with almost no effort and turn a whole city into a bad knock-off of Resident Evil; hit the neurons that rabies hits, get people tearing and biting at each other.

Should people be allowed to install it?

I think it's possible that books were a great idea and a machine like the one I described (without proper constraints to put control in the hands of the owner) would be a terrible idea. There's probably some technology along the line between these where we say "Whoa, wait. What this could achieve is grand, but the way it gets there is, uh-oh."

The more powerful a technology is, the more obligation it implies upon the people holding control over its implementation and execution to consider moral and philosophical concerns of its use.

There absolutely are such machines and we call them computers.

> Should people be allowed to install it?

Communication is the powerful 'technology' that changes people's emotions directly. The mode of communication is a side-note. Tear down FB and none of this goes away - not because something rises from FB's ashes but because communication is a central facet of humanity.

You can plug into a happy room surrounded by your family and friends and it will be as though you are all together instead of thousands of miles apart. You can spend time with the children you miss, the grandchildren you hardly know, and it all comes for free.

You know that there will be commercials, of course, but that doesn't worry you too much. So what if every so often a handsome man comes in and tells you how delicious Coca Cola is? You've been around commercials before, you don't expect this time it will be much different.

But there are darker agencies at work. They suss out facts about your life, your joys, your fears, and they prey on them.

If you are a left-leaning person in a blue state they fill you with horror stories of religious fanatics who are determined to create a theocracy.

If you are a right-leaning person in a red state, they tell you of radicals who want to take away everything you've worked for and destroy everything you believe in.

It fits so neatly into what you already suspect that you never question it. Each new story becomes more and more outrageous, but you are a boiling frog at this point, you'll believe anything about 'the other side' no matter how outlandish.

So now you are a tool, a soldier, a person who can be manipulated in any way to support any cause as long as you believe that you are standing up to 'them'.

If it's not a PKD story, it should have been.

Should it be 'allowed'? I'll have to think on it.

Facebook is kind of different, it argues that it's a platform not a publisher. They do have some ground to argue for looser guidelines. But their business model targeting engagement incentivises them to promote divisive and false information. I'd be much more comfortable with Facebook if they didn't promote extreme and dangerous content. What those standards should be is a thorny issue, but better moderation would be an improvement.

I don't necessarily disagree and I'm sure there were plenty of reputable publishers who wouldn't touch the protocols.

But should the agency who did published it have been hauled up before a congressional investigating committee?

Facebook has also lobbied super hard to maintain their status as the private regulators of two extremely large social media platforms and a social messaging platform, representing a substantial percentage of the US and global population.

Facebook has also insisted that it is a public square and platform for free speech, but Groups, algorithmic content, and an extremely successful paid advertising model have made that claim specious at best. In the public square, everyone gets to shout equally - sure some will have a slightly larger crowd, but it will be difficult to monopolize the attention of the entire square. Facebook's model necessarily advantages some speech over others, and can be influenced by money both directly and indirectly.

I agree everyone should have the right to their opinion, and no one should be able to enforce their opinion on another at the barrel end of a gun. Facebook has created a position where they (1) have the right, as a private company to censor their users; (2) as a "public square" (if you subscribe to that) they have a moral obligation not to censor their users; (3) a business model that benefits from promoting some speech over another; and (4) employees who can see the effect of this model, and disagree with it morally, socially, etc., and have no other means of redress.

> Actually, just people in general these days seem to believe it's their right to enforce their views on others...

Only a small number of people, who we used to call liberals, ever believed this.

Isiah Berlin:

> It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

I hope we swing back the other way but it's worrying that so many people no longer see the value in pluralism of thought.

This is how people almost always behaved. In the Middle Ages the term "heresy" was used, today only slogans have changed, the social mechanisms are the same. Of course there is a group of opportunists, but there is also a large group that really believes their ideology (it used to be some religion) will do good.

This is a huge farce, of course, it's all completely unfair pay to play and black-box algorithms.

Now, I could be wrong about this -- but it would be incumbent UPON THEM to prove that, by opening up and showing us how they do things. Barring that, I very much welcome insiders in Facebook applying pressure.

This is a common misconception, but that's not what the law actually says. I'd encourage you to go read Section 230 yourself. It says a platform can't be held legally liable for:

"any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"

The NYT and Fox News are publishers but they're only liable for the stuff they write and publish themselves. If someone on their comments section posts objectionable or illegal content they aren't liable for it. And they're free to moderate their comments section in any way they wish.

BTW consider the alternative if it wasn't this way. Activists could flood 2A message boards with "guns evil, ban them all" spam and the mods could do nothing to stop them lest they lose Section 230 protections. Trolls could harass users on forums for sensitive topics such as dealing with grief, cancer, PTSD or other traumas. Every online forum would become totally unusable.

At that point, whatever damage is being done won't be undone, but facebook can genuinely say it is not maintinaing editorial control.

But, they won't do that, because their business model is based on editorial control. There's no way around their culpability.

It's their platform, they can remove or restrict what people post in any way they want. If you don't like it you don't have to use it.

Every platform "polices" content. If they didn't every site would be 80%+ spam and full of porn and hate.

This seems to be a question of the times. "What right do I have to police you?" - goes for masks as well as ideas, innit?

> believe it's their right to enforce their views

IMO this is deeply ironic, since a lot of "social justice" is "stop telling me who I am", either directly or as the irritant at the center of the "pearl".

Like, Manifest Destiny was literally this backed up with guns. Jim Crow was this backed up by laws. McCarthyism was this by congressional committee.

What's novel here isn't enforcing views on others.

Since physical actions don't equal thoughts/opinions, well, clearly no.

> "since a lot of "social justice" is "stop telling me who I am""

Except they flipped right around and started telling other people in the center and right who they are, at full volume. Hard to blame people for not taking them seriously.

As a friend says, "genocide is not an opinion". IMO it's clear one should police speech advocating for it; between here and there is a gray zone.

IMO that gray zone looks awfully similar (although def not to the same severity on the far side) to the one between here and "I have COVID and will not wear a mask."

> flip

Aye. Appearances (and recent events) aside, the "right" does not have monopoly on hypocrisy.

Two things about this: 1. When FB Answers was a thing. I was very quickly banned from it, through various obscure mechanisms. All I was doing was gently being a contrarian on newsworth/fad topics. Partly contrarian because I was read up on a lot of scientific literature and other times, I just had different opinions than the 'popular' one. There is a culture of control there, full stop. Especially when your valid and potentially correct opinion goes against FB employee. I knew immediately than FB Answers wasn't going to succeed because they wouldn't allow a plurality of perspectives. 2. Let's be fully clear about this. This is entirely Zuck's decision. He runs a tight ship with clear guidelines. Zuck is playing politics right now, full stop. Saying one thing publicly and saying another privately. This 'leaked' memo isn't something that Zuck had no idea that it would be leaked. It's calculated. It's a public statement. How enforced will this leaked memo be? Will that be leaked? Doubtful. Zuck is trying to skirt responsibility with this 1st amendment problem. If FB really allowed dissent then Alex Jones and others would be allowed on the platform.*

*I do think the worst ideas need to be allowed on a platform. It allows the possibility to discussions. There are cults around various topics but...that doesn't mean that those with scientific understanding have perfect rhetoric about everything they say. Everyone needs to refine and it's best done with allowing everyone to the table.

Censorship bad for this issue. Censorship good for what I don't agree with.

Discrimination bad in this case. Discrimination good for the sake of diversity!

Racism bad. But wait, positive racism is totally different and good!

Diversity is what we want! Except when it results in things I disagree with.

Of course they have the right to. Any website can make whatever rules they want about what's allowed. HN has rules too.

Wait till you read some 19th century US history, you're in for a treat

Sure, some people may disagree. If you disagree then you have to to fight it back.

edit: s/censor/moderate

edit: btw I'm not saying it is GP's opinion that Facebook can do whatever they want. I have no idea what GP thinks about that. I'm only saying their argument wasn't specifically about that.

"any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"

Translation: they can "censor" or moderate or remove spam to their heart's content, even beyond what's legally required.

Without the safe harbor, activists could flood 2A message boards with "guns evil, ban them all" spam and the mods could do nothing to stop them lest they lose Section 230 protections. Trolls could harass users on religious or parenting forums or support groups for cancer, grief, PTSD, or addiction. Practically any Internet message board would become unusable.

Not only that, but they seem to be responsible for policing political opinions in the US alone.

Also, I never told them what citizenship I have in the process of creating my account. Why do I get so many US election reminders on Facebook but not election reminders for the 97 other democracies in the world?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

That's pretty unambiguous to me.

And to preempt people

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364535

It's the rest of your comment I take issue with. Wake me when dang rolls tanks into a public square.

(... and I'll use my own logic to defend Facebook any day of the week. It's their site and their rules. If anything, I think the employees who believe they should be responsible and forthright about their policies there instead of pretending to neutrality are in the right).

Facebook isn't a dumb pipe. If it feels like it can fiddle with my feed to maximize its profit, its perfectly reasonable for its employees to demand that it does so in an ethical way.

Your argument would work if it were a dumb pipe (Like my phone line is.)

We're a global species. Technology made us become larger than the sum of our parts. It is our moral duty to police those opinions that are so polarizing, or so devoid of empathy, that they do harm.

"Policing" can be milder than all out censorship. Personalized feed algorithms can push us into filter bubbles, there's no reason why they can't police toxic views by injecting counter arguments or labeling (not censoring) rampant misinformation as such

Downvoters: please explain why censorship would be identical to moving feeds away from filter bubbles.

Yes, but NOT by censorship, but with counterfactuals! And certainly not by a gigantic megacorporation like Facebook.

They are not the arbiters of speech and quite frankly it's too much to ask of them. And imo, anyone who is happy to be an arbiter of speech is somebody you should be very, very afraid of.

In my opinion, 24-year-old Stanford grads getting paid upwards of six figures directly out of college should not have any say in what people are or are not privy to seeing, hearing, or reading.

You mention it is "our" moral duty - who is the "our" here?

1) A distinction between 'opinions' 'facts' and 'hate speech'.

and 2) Media is an existential power, almost like a wing of government. If you control the media, you can control a nation. Which is why authoritarian states take a very active role.

FB and others already do have policies against very aggressive speech, for example, if you start calling people the 'N-word' - you'll get banned.

But where 1 and 2 collide is on the issue of factuality.

Take the pandemic: it would be quite easy for 'big name politicians' and others to outright lie about the nature of COVID. These lies perpetuate into behaviours and outcomes which are very bad for everyone.

I'm not sure if the statement 'COVID doesn't kill anyone' is much of an opinion, more or less statement of fact. (Edit: which is wrong of course, I hope that is obvious)

When you take this information and push it into the political arena, where facts are harder to discern ... it becomes a problem.

This ultimately is the crux of the issue.

We have no choice but to 'call out bad information' or it will hurt us severely. We did this traditionally by forcing some kind of consent and responsibility with the major news outlets - they were 'free' but responsibly managed.

Press owners, are kind of 'part of the elite' - they have a kind of status of responsibility.

Once there's no control, you have 'Democracy by TikTok' and it's not good.

It's an issue we have to deal with.