Re:The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
by tsimionescu on Saturday February 06, 2021 @04:42PM
(#26050234)
All your arguments seem to assume that public knowledge is always true and that there are no conspiracies going on. And yet we know from very recent history that potentially world-destroying facts have been deliberately hidden by people in power - tobacco, asbestos, global warming would be some of the largest. If you were to go by mainstream knowledge 20 or 50 years ago, claiming that cigarettes cause cancer and tabacco companies know about it and are paying doctors to hide it from everyone would have seemed like utter lunacy. Or claiming that our use of fossil fuels is likely to cause huge areas of the planet to become uninhabitable, oil companies know about it and are paying good money to keep it hidden. Or that there are no weapons of mass destructionin Irak and our intelligence agencies and government just made that up as an excuse to invade.
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.
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.