The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.

You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.

I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.

Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.

The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.

When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.

The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.

Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.

In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.

Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.

You felt the need to identify your field of expertise there. Does this not imply that you actually do believe it matters? There is body of knowledge shared by the experts in a field that help facilitate the process by focusing efforts on productive discourse. Sure every now and then som crazy theory needs to be entertained to advance the field. But it would be a colossal waste of energy to give credence to every amateur with a dissenting view point no?

It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.

Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.

No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the United States would already be considered considerably right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there. What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right leaning publications.

It's just going to be a little harder to organize the next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's fine.

Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.

Instead I would say that there's some hot button topics like immigration, racism, climate change, discrimination of all kinds, etc and there's a faction which is for more immigration, aggressively and militantly fighting racism and climate change, etc and several factions which don't agree with the above to different extents. The positions of the pro faction have become the default in mass media, to the point that the media is educating and shaping opinions more than reporting facts. Members of the against factions are typically portrayed as wicked and associated with negative labels such as nazi, right-wing (has become a slur), racist, sexist, etc and silenced or forced to grovel in order to not lose their jobs/reputation/standing, etc.

This is by the way not localized to the US, instead it's visible in several (if not all) Western European countries.

Again, I understand that the crux of your argument is that this discourse (that of the "crazy right wing,") is solely the fermenting ground of lies; however, I find that very difficult to believe, personally, and I believe that--while any side may develop misconceptions--exposure to these allows you to better explore your own beliefs in the face of adversity.

What is crazy is a relative concept--to be cliched, homosexuality was considered a mental illness until fairly recently.

Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.

We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.

But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.

The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?

Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.

In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I don't care) to its origin.

One of the communities I wondered about for a while was The Great Awakening. They had a way of speaking that was so over the top that I couldn’t help but wonder just how real can it be? Specifically, they keep always calling each other “patriot” the way that Soviet citizens called each other comrade. Except, in the Soviet case it was a long thing in the making while TGA popped up overnight on Reddit so where did that come from. And their way of speaking really smelled to me like there were a ton of bots there. So, can you imagine waking up one day and realize that the political identity you’ve taken on and been discussing with people you now consider friends online has been in fact handed to you by a bunch of boys? And on top of that, the very “friends” you were talking to were largely bots? That’s gotta be a rude awakening to say the least.

So there won't be any rude awakenings, or, at least not many of them.

But I’ve also been reading some stories of people who were seemingly true QAnon believers who after January 20th realized that marshal law wasn’t being declared and that Trump really was leaving and how it seemed to shake them. There was also the woman who called CSPAN if I recall correctly, crying because she felt like Trump betrayed her by distancing himself from the Jan 6th insurrectionists and how she just couldn’t make sense of the world. To think that she is the one who finally saw reality for what it was while others continue to believe that this is all a part of some grand plan... how do you even come out of that?

Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.

The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.

Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis

https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...

> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.

> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.

I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.

From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...

Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.

They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.

Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!

There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.

These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.

Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).

But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.

Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.

I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.

However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.

Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from...

People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.

If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.

If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.

One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.

Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.

Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?

Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.

You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.

So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"

So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.

If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?

You should check out Poland.

I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.

> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will

Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.

this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.

You often can. Let's try some exercises:

1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'

2) COVID-19 is a hoax

3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

4) 9/11 never happened

5) Asbestos causes cancer

6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree

7) Disinformation is harmful

And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.

Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.

Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.

Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.

- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.

- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer

- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces

Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?

These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.

Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.

This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.

Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.

I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace

All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong

Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.

As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.

The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.

I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them

EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.

What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?

8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.

Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.

Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.

But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.

Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity

not

Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity

The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.

There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.

If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?

It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.

For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.

Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).

A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?

> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.

https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...

trailing slash gives a 404

This will not age well.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/

In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will eventually be disproven.

People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.

By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33446136/

One of the main planks in the "hydroxychloroquine is bad" narrative actually had some disinfo elements itself: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...

So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.

But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.

What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?

> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.

(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?

(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.

The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.

Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.

I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).

Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it be taken apart and ignored in the public view.

Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”

However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.

I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.

You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide .

This is a good point.

Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.

To quote a German of ill repute:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all techniques which work much better than simply telling a lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.

It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.

"Q" wrote his initial lies once, and people ate it up and spun it around among themselves. This is folklore, not propaganda.

The polls I've seen show between 67%-80% accepting the result as correct; none support anything like half believing Trump won.

Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?

It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.

> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation

The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.

The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.

they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it

We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..

But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....

The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...

Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.

Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.

Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.

If you read the article, you will see that the point is that the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those who dissent.

If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.

It just so happens that I think that's accurate.

Framing anti-disinformation as anti-dissent is about as deliberately evasive as it gets.

Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:

"Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"

Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?

Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result. Thanks for helping prove my point.

> Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?

That is indeed what that title implies: that the root causes are the same and that therefore both fears - and the subjects thereof - are equivalent. And that implication is not just wrong, but - I'd argue - deliberately misleading and in bad faith.

And unsurprisingly, the people who disagree with that assessment are also apparently the ones who appear eager to frame said assessment as somehow "illogical" or "irrational" - you know, as is characteristic of bad-faith argumentation.

You must have really struggled with poetry in school.

Poetry at least makes sense,

unlike those headlines.

And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.

If you want to level some relevant criticism of the OP then you are better off with the "read the actual article and not just the title" line.

> The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice

This article isn't saying that Drugs is Racial Justice.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971924?seq=1

If I were to write an article saying "the war on terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that terrorism doesn't exist?

There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.

This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.

Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."

One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.

So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.

I could follow you right up to there.

The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.

[0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-democrat...