Re:YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread electio...
by mlyle on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:41PM
(#25363468)
I just don't believe that having powerful intermediaries squashing views work well for democracy.
It doesn't work so well to stop dangerous ideas, and it has a whole lot of risk of being used against unpopular ones.
Trump's ideas are doing damage to democracy, but attempting to suppress them in this way adds credence to many peoples' belief that there's some dangerous tech/liberal cabal squashing the true majority conservative opinion, too. And even attempts to use these in a bright-line, careful fashion have often squashed the wrong speech and silenced the wrong people; this is before any actual malicious use which is sure to come if the precedent strengthens.
In our rush to get rid of the most repugnant ideas, too, we tend to lose our ability to discuss nuance. To avoid COVID quackery, we can't have an open discussion of the merits of specific policies and interventions. In our rush to squash the dangerous idea of election fraud, we can't have the discussion about how to make our actual election system robust and beyond reproach.
> So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.
Yes, which is why I acknowledged those risks in my first comment and said that I believed that these risks are potentially greater.
Think about how much important speech from the past few centuries has seemed dangerous and repugnant at the time it was uttered.
It doesn't work so well to stop dangerous ideas, and it has a whole lot of risk of being used against unpopular ones.
Trump's ideas are doing damage to democracy, but attempting to suppress them in this way adds credence to many peoples' belief that there's some dangerous tech/liberal cabal squashing the true majority conservative opinion, too. And even attempts to use these in a bright-line, careful fashion have often squashed the wrong speech and silenced the wrong people; this is before any actual malicious use which is sure to come if the precedent strengthens.
In our rush to get rid of the most repugnant ideas, too, we tend to lose our ability to discuss nuance. To avoid COVID quackery, we can't have an open discussion of the merits of specific policies and interventions. In our rush to squash the dangerous idea of election fraud, we can't have the discussion about how to make our actual election system robust and beyond reproach.
> So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.
Yes, which is why I acknowledged those risks in my first comment and said that I believed that these risks are potentially greater.
Think about how much important speech from the past few centuries has seemed dangerous and repugnant at the time it was uttered.