Public discourse is not a random walk. It is an evolving phenomenon that gets refined as the participants become more informed about the sources, arguments and facts relating to a subject. It's a messy and seemingly chaotic process, but over time, it works. The force of reason eventually sees through the lies, as long as there are those who persist in showing evidence of the falsehood of the lies.
Lies only work when discussions are superficial, and evidence for the various positions doesn't need to be compared. Substantive discussion exposes lies.
Even when it comes to those who, when shown convincing evidence that their beliefs are based on lies, stay wedded to those beliefs out of emotional/tribalistic attachment, it is valuable to go through the process of discrediting their beliefs, because it demoralizes them, and makes them less effective evangelists for their deluded view of the world.
The process of dialogue and debate is also valuable in its own right. It is beneficial to the population at large for people to make public their reasoning, sources and evidence in the attempt to demonstrate their claims are true.
Again, the benefits of debate are hard to observe on the shorter time scale. It can seem futile at times, especially when you want to immediately enlighten hopelessly deluded individuals, but the forces that guide the evolution of society work on longer time scales, and a determined effort to expose falsehoods and propagate truth through dialogue has benefits on that longer time scale through its long-term ripple effects.
If countering political misinformation with political information is hard, then public-minded individuals can increase their efforts 5 fold, to make up for the additional difficulty.
This, to me, seems far less costly than the risk-adjusted cost of introducing a new norm of society being more tolerant of censorship.
best way to fight disinformation is to
challenge it with true information.
A better way to fight disinformation would be to challenge it with... an appeal to popularity.
But if Copernicus or Richard Feynman were alive and on Youtube today, they'd be unknowns compared to PewDiePie.
So neither sunlight, nor an appeal to popularity, are going to help us here.
I may not love censorship, but it beats having some deluded moron shoot at my car in a civil war, or infect me with Covid-19 thanks to a lecture by some Youtube science-ist.
If the choice is stricter Facebook moderation or to live in a new Dark Age... well, you catch my drift.
Far more than 200,000 people can die in one year if we set up an apparatus of censorship, as these tools could always be commandeered by corrupt individuals and used to horrific effect.
Look at autocratic societies around the world, and see what giving any group, no matter how seemingly altruistic and enlightened, the power to censor, can lead to.
Once the social taboo against violating the right to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility, as it becomes possible for voices to be silenced and concentrations of power to magnify their control through constricting the flow of critical information.
Once the social taboo against violating the right
to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility
The types of censorship proposed in the article deal with expressing beliefs pertaining to highly complex and contentious social issues about which powerful special interests seek to shape the public's perceptions about. Once this class of speech becomes acceptable to subject to censorship, politics becomes a much more dangerous, winner-takes-all game.
Yes, lets use censorship to improve our democracies.
Good idea! Let´s also put all those who disagree in prison.
History shows there exists a subset of issues that drive deep emotion or passion, whether for historical reasons or otherwise, for which this approach won't work. It assumes rational debate is possible in an environment antithetical to it. The hard part is defining that subset, in real-time, on a globalized planet. Hard to say that anyone is capable of this kind of definition.
Edit: I too don't think censorship works in the long-term. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands up at this problem and give up. It'll be with us whether we like it or not, so we as a society better solve it.
Censorship is the lazy and dangerously elitist alternative to doing the hard work of engaging those spreading falsehoods and debunking their arguments in the public forum.
And yes, Gavet here is advocating censorship, no matter much she tries to couch it in excuses and euphemisms.