> There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless.
I’m sorry but what?!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation
The only difference these days is everybody has a printing press. So what you’re advocating for is removing someone’s first amendment right.
Per your own link, the earliest use of this technique is ~1920, so bringing up the Magna Carta is not too generous. And it is naive to state that the only difference is everyone having a printing press — there are emergent qualities and we have only begun to discover what this new way of communication means on a global scale.
Well I didn’t bring up the Magna Carta.
And you’re wrong again, there’s even a story in the Bible about the tower of babel. Same exact thing. When humans, all humans, can communicate easily and quickly it’s dangerous.
How is tower of Babel relevant? It’s about why do we speak different languages. How is anything done in the previous tens of thousands of years similar to ordering a bunch of bots to say what I want? When could an arbitrary algorithm decide what is seen by whom, completely opaque to almost everyone? Yeah sure the Church censored some shit. But that’s not at all similar to youtube/facebook’s algorithm and it’s dishonest to say so.
Man that really got you riled up didn’t it?
It’s relevant because the reason the languages were confounded was for the exact same problem we have today. Too many people with a megaphone. Too easy to spread information, good or bad.
Please point to where I’ve mentioned either facebook or youtube. No idea where this is coming from.
There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless. Censorship is a trivial problem to overcome in the modern world contrary to the last century’s vision, one can’t really hide anything on the internet. The censored information itself will be available in some way. What is much more effective in preventing information flow is the other direction, obfuscation or overloading of information.
A great example of it is an older Russian voting fraud, where video footage leaked of a man repeatedly throwing in ballots. It got quickly shared over Twitter with the name of the town in hashtags — there was no chance of censoring that. The solution was to spam twitter with unrelated bullshit with #NameOfTown, effectively putting out the flame.
And unfortunately bullshit like antivaxx, anti-climatechange, and political campaigns do use this technique very effectively to counter the usually more complex scientific arguments. People prefer taking only a few logical steps instead of the whole “we create the replica of parts of the virus by injecting the …”. Unfortunately I don’t know what would be a solution to this. Perhaps better education..