Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating.
Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm.
Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is.
PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons
Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?
Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.
As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become."
Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.
It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia.
I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.
Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.
There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.
But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.
I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual).
To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these.
So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed.
This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field.
It's a real conundrum.
And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.
The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you.
It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.
You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.
How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote?
> hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.
We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?
I'd like to hear some examples.
What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.
And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)
Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.
But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument.
Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.
Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.
This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.
So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.
Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.
Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup.
Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.
Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position.
If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.
And it doesn't not imply it.
And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.
Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?
Trump doesn't know how not to say the quiet part loud.
We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).
In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.