>One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.

Thinking dumb things about politics is how you end up bringing your AR-15 to investigate a pizza parlor... or trying to kidnap the governor.

I’ll say everything sounds like a bad game of “telephone” — that maybe someone told a friend that there’s a guy Epstein that keeps videos of powerful people, and then somehow 10,000 stories later, the story becomes the “pizza parlor around the corner is a powerful pedophile ring”

For those unfamiliar, telephone is a game in the US (maybe western countries) where 12 or so children sit in a circle and one whispers a phrase to another around the circle, something like “there’s a banana in the cabinet.” Then everyone has a big laugh at how ridiculous the story began and then ended up after going around the circle.

So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them?

I don't understand your argument here. An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories.

Based on your argument, we also shouldn't report on police abuse because people may riot and burn down stores?

An astonishingly large percentage of the population are parroting this and all manner of other misinformation on social media, all day, every day, for months, and it's getting worse as one by one the dominoes fall and yet another impressionable mind is swayed and joins the chorus.

I don't think censorship is necessarily the right approach to mitigate this torrent of bullshit, but it's clearly out of control.

> So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them?

There is no "we".

The platform is YouTube. It is their prerogative (and indeed their right to freedom of speech) to host content as they see fit. The Senators are merely asking them to exercise their freedom to a very reasonable extent.

>I don't understand your argument here.

>Based on your argument

I was pointing out how "believing dumb things about politics" is a deliberate minimization of the effect of disinformation.

>An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories.

But an astonishingly large number of people are afraid of vaccines/black people/corona jihad/the deep state pedophile ring because they read something that isn't true. Can you think of any effects this might have had recently? Any you think of anything bad going on that isn't strictly a crime?

What I didn't learn until recently was the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was the analogy applied to pacifists opposing the draft in WWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...). It was a bad ruling but the analogy itself stands.

So in that vein, should incitements for violence against the opposing party be unfettered free speech? At what point does it go too far?

> I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury

Wide scale misinformation about election fraud could result in a mini civil war. I don't see how you could be so sanguine about that.

If only there was some way of auditing an election to calm peoples fears.

Which has been done right? Practically all the states have certified their results, after recounts and legal challenges heard, etc. Google has left it until now for the precise reason that "legitimate" scrutiny was taking place.

At this point continuing to assert wide scale fraud escalates beyond "reasonable" and up to the level of "recklessness" that brings it into parity with "yelling fire".

It’s not reckless. It’s criminal. And all the people that are spreading this misinformation are complicit of sedition.

Do you think the spread of misinformation causes harm? It doesn't sound like it, by how you diminish the impact of political misinfo ("The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.")

Not to take too strong a stance until I understand your position better, but record number of mail-in ballots doesn't imply there wasn't significant voter suppression.

this is an imposition of bounds on acceptable political thought; kto kovo. "misinformation" is a political label created to influence political processes. that is not to say that there is no truth, but rather that there is an official truth which is subject to the contingencies of power.

the implicit justification for censoring this idea is that it delegitimizes the democratic process; it is ridiculous on its face to assert that overt censorship is any less delegitimizing. this is an expression of ideological power upon an opponent.

So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge?

I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.

We have experts, in other words.

We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.

Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?

Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.

>So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge?

We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources.

Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be.

>I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.

We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does.

>We have experts, in other words.

No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us.

>We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.

That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority.

A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno.

>Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?

>Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.

Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube.

It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age.

We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that.

Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.

The equivalence absolutely has merit. "People thinking dumb things about politics" absolutely has the ability to cause panic, potential injury, and death. You can look at Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide in Malaysia as a quick example.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-resists-handin...

Off topic, but I think you mean Myanmar (formerly Burma), not Malaysia here.