For one, now mistruths can be made much more quickly than truths - hello GPT-3 - and can be delivered in a far more convincing way than any other time. I have a hard time telling AI generated video apart sometimes, which will only improve as time goes on.

Nor was there an existence of platforms that not only enable but encourage the creation of echo chambers that reinforce preexisting views and actively attempt to intervene for our attention. There is no practical limit to mistruth "content" that can be made, whereas proper information takes time and effort; I think we're nearing a point where genuine information will simply be crowded out and buried.

Bullshit. If anything, widespread misinformed beliefs were ever more common and deeply rooted prior to the modern digital age. Today many people do indeed pick up stupid concepts and begin to believe them, but the very same system of rapid digital communication of ideas, and evidence, that you seem to think worthy of censorship today also rapidly allows people to convince others of how false their more foolish ideas are. Truthful information may indeed travel more slowly than misinformation (though I'd love to see a citation for this constantly repeated claim) but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find. This is a direct result of open, free expression of ideas in the digital sphere with fewer restrictions than at any time in history. I can't think of an easier way to crush such a good basic thing than some idiotic, misguided and emotionally driven crusade against "misinformation", or fake news.

> but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find.

This assumption does not really work when "the echo chamber" of algorithmic curation and optimization for attention does not expose you to ideas outside of your bubble. It's also true that access to evidence based research, say in open journals, is now easier than ever; that doesn't mean I have enough knowledge to properly understand their implications. That significantly limits the permeability of good, solid information compared to garbage.

It's not at all related to the topic at hand, but Japan recently liberalized their power plan so that consumers can choose who generates the power; a study on Japanese public perception of energy liberalization[0] found that over 30% of these that did not consider power plan switching and over 20% that seriously considered it decided to not go through with the provider switch because they couldn't find enough information or had a hard time understanding. It's just a singular data point, but I think the actual hurdle to absorbing the information as opposed to accessing it is a lot higher.

Things like COVID safety or the shape of the Earth is far more personal and complex (once you go down to quality, evidence based information) than power plans, and they lack the financial incentive that switching power plans have. What makes you think that these people in a bubble would venture out to find quality information or listen to an outsider pointing out just how wrong they are?

Unlike the GP, I'm not personally in favor of censorship, as you say, the freedom of expression and information has far too much benefit to restrict mindlessly. Rather, I want to go back to the pre-"algorithm" days where quality content was spread via word of mouth and not through some engagement metric.

[0] 10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.026 - It's just something tangentially related that I've read recently.

One doesn’t need AI generated content for this to be true, just AI generated suggestions. The founding fathers almost certainly never anticipated that “newspapers” would have the capability and incentive to make every human being feel like the local conspiracy theorists down at the pub were actually representative of all of society. But here we are.

To be fair, James Madison didn't live in a time where someone could easily spread their beliefs to millions of people instantaneously. Historical comparisons have their place, but this probably isn't it.

It's easier to spread information, therefore the ability to spread information should be restricted?

By analogy, consider how frequent spam phone calls have become as a direct result of VoIP technology making it trivial to automate them.

Email has been in that position for a long time, so much so that the quality of censorship is frequently advertised as a feature by mail services.

You can mark things detected as spam as not spam though. Filtering is not censorship.

Sure, but filtering spam is different than the censorship being done by social media platforms. I can easily opt in to calls and messages from a person or group by adding them to my contacts. However, if my contact is deplatformed, then that removes my ability to opt in. So the locus of agency shifts from me to some corporate or governmental authority, which is what people actually have a problem with.

You're confusing a protocol (email) with a platform (e.g., Twitter).

You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that.

This is similar to how you can't force [email protected] to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own personal email.

The locus of agency is on your friend to put in the effort themselves if they can't find anyone willing to help them spread their speech.

Doesn’t it boil down to the same problem, though?

Maybe [email protected] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to censor information on a massive scale, even on decentralized protocols like email.

So yes, at that point, you could argue that the locus of agency falls on Bob to start his own tech empire or whatever, but that becomes absurd. We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There’s always a middle man on the Internet, or any peer to peer system with more than two edges for that matter. The problem arises when that middle man grows into a giant leviathan hell bent on manipulating the conversation of parties between itself.

> Maybe [email protected] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

If these people continue to use Gmail rather than more open alternatives, does that not indicate that they don't want to hear what Bob has to say?

> We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote (replicated below for convenience):

> it is better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.”

There is a lot of validity to the quote. I largely agree with it. But the second part is important - it cannot be interpreted as "we better make it illegal for Twitter to ban people calling for genocide".

> There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote

How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

There will always be some moral veil put forth by censors to justify their actions. A good example is banning discussion on Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. Some consider that a noxious branch — quackery endangering public health — but if it’s immediately pruned we won’t be able to see if it yields proper fruits.

> How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

Because that quote fundamentally discusses cases where pruning said noxious branch is a risk to non-noxious branches.

Sometimes you can just prune a noxious branch and that's that.

It sounds like you’re misreading the quote. He is not saying noxious branches should be pruned to protect non-noxious ones. He’s saying do not prune them, instead let them fight it out and see which one bears the best fruit.

This quote is from the The Report of 1800 [1], where he goes on to say:

> Had “Sedition acts,” forbidding every publication that might bring the constituted agents into contempt or disrepute, or that might excite the hatred of the people against the authors of unjust or pernicious measures, been uniformly enforced against the press; might not the United States have been languishing at this day, under the infirmities of a sickly confederation? Might they not possibly be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke?

He’s crediting the formation of the United States to speech that was “noxious” to either the British parliament or the Confederate states in power at the time. This noxious speech was absolutely a risk to the extent that sedition acts were being threatened. He’s advocating freedom of the press even when their speech may excite hatred.

[1] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-17-02-020...

Yes, logically: If it were becoming harder to spread harmful misinformation, then the need to restrict it would be less; if it's becoming easier, then the need to restrict it becomes more acute.

One would think that's fairly obvious. What did you think; that there would be more of a need to restrict it if it were becoming harder?

I'm certainly not advocating for restricting free spread of information. My point is just that opinions are informed by the historical context they came from, so the comparison isn't really relevant given the drastic differences between communication abilities in the relevant time periods. Making the point that we shouldn't revisit that opinion because we're in prosperous times without considering the differences in the context informing the opinion seems disingenuous to me.

s/information/misinformation, then yes, yes it should be

You are begging the question of how to differentiate information from misinformation. Truth cannot be decided by a central authority.

In his time, to send a letter from the US to the UK took 6-12 weeks. "Fruit" was relatively rare, whether noxious or proper. Too much of anything can be harmful.

Your appeal to authority could also be applied to suffrage or the abolishment of slavery. "What makes you think that now, xxx years into the most propsperous society in human history, is the right time to revisit the institution of slavery"? Times change.

That said, there's nothing in particular to stop a political party in the US from being completely anti democratic and bringing down the entire system of both government, elections and the constitution. It just hasn't really started happening since the civil war until now.

What makes you think that everyone who wrote the Constitution and relevant documents 250 years ago was infallible?

The founding fathers got plenty of things wrong, knowing they were designing an imperfect system.

For example, first past the post voting. Washington cautioned against the rise of political parties knowing full well that they were an inevitable consequence of the system he was complicit in engendering.

The noxious branches have mutated into kudzu- invasive, ever-spreading, and damaging to the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. Madison's analogy imagines a world that was true up until 20-some years ago, where most people believed in a common view of the world, with different philosophies about that world.

Today, a significant percentage of the population believes that the election was stolen from donald trump due to extreme election fraud. Another, similar, significant percentage believes that vaccines are at best dangerous and at worst implanting microchips and turning people magnetic. That's people not operating under the same basis of facts as everyone else.