This idea that thinking critically of a government and even believing that perhaps the government as it stands today is not the government "of and for the people" (sure could be interpreted as anti-democracy by that same corrupt government)... And maybe that's not correct, but who is the government to say that we can or cannot challenge them in public discourse as it is supposedly protected under the first amendment?
This is indeed an insanely slippery slope and people willing to trade their freedoms because they think it's for the ultimate good, I think are really making a mistake... it's not difficult to understand that this is one of the first steps of an actual fundamentally corrupt government... This is easily open to abuse and vast interpretation.
Smart. It would have. That is indeed how you fight an insurgency.
Not sure how new it really is though. Compare and contrast to the Harrying of the North.
> to invent the concentration camp
I hear they borrowed the idea from the Spanish in Cuba.
Compared to alternatives, it was supposed to be more humane: "Get the civilians out of harm's way (and keep them from aiding the guerillas without killing them)".
It wasn't until the Nazi extermination camps of WW2 that the phrase "concentration camp" took on such negative valences.
Granted people did die in concentration camps, but the deaths were of things like cholera -- the same diseases that would run through army camps. Arguably we still have them today, under the new name "refugee camp".
> the Boer war
It shouldn't be left out that the British had a decent case for moral high ground in that war. The Boers were religious hyper-conservatives who believed God had given them a right to Black slaves, whereas the British had banned slavery throughout the Empire and were going to some expense to enforce this.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Democracy thrived before the printing press. Democracy survived the invention of the printing press, which was mostly in the hands of magnates who could afford it. Democracy survived the invention of television and radio, which was (and still is) in the hands of a select few magnates. We build up terms like "journalistic integrity" and look at the past with rose colored glasses as if these mediums delivered pure objective truth.
If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats. If you don't like to see the death of that plutocracy, or you're happy to see a new group of benevolent plutocrats come in to retake control the narrative, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you don't really like democracy.
Misinformation in this shape and form is a new phenomenon. And it is not just the scale;
- the number of agents that push their version of misinformation is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever, depending on the particular topic. So-called culture wars have so many different sides.
- technology not only scales misinformation, but it also accelerates it. The objective function of "increased engagement" meshes very well. Hard to grok, full fidelity facts don't get shared or recommended as much as rage-baiting or bias-confirming material.
- technology can on-the-fly piece together material to conform to whatever bullshit you want to hear, I want to hear or the other guy wants to hear. As it is optimized to increase engagement, it can efficiently generate personalized micro-narratives, which is ultimately a reflection of our personal biases.
The problems is it gets harder and harder for these narratives to converge. More on that below.
> If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats
As mentioned, original thoughts don't have the same propagation speed or reach as junk-infotainment, and you're just as subject to the narrative-shaping powers of those "plutocrats" as ever. They just blend in better.
But the larger issue is that you can't equivocate mere plurality with a functioning democracy. Ultimately there is a single reality, and even though we are in divergent positions due to having different entry points and framings, we should be - however little - converging in our narratives and understanding of that reality as time progresses.
But the opposite seems to be happening, we are getting dumber at scale, stuff makes less sense, institutional mistrust is at all-time-high. I am not putting this all on tech, but it certainly pours fuel on the fire of meaning-making crisis.
I wouldn't take it for granted that we could survive this without it creating a larger crisis first.
I want to point out that the biggest reason for this is that those institutions are worthy of mistrust, people just weren't aware of the need to mistrust them. The news media for instance has been gradually getting worse due to having to compete with internet sources and it was plenty shit back in the 60s and before...
Then there's things like the replication crisis damaging our trust in science-as-an-institution and the mask flip flopping damaging trust in science-as-communicated-by-prestigious-bodies.
And of course there's always departments attempting o justify their existence even when it makes everyone's lives harder for little gain (yes, I work for a mega Corp, how did you guess?).
A compassionate view of humanity would say that humans are basically accepting. This openness can then be abused by viral misinformation. We could take the view that humans should just be self protecting and if they got duped that’s on them. But IMO that’s a depressing view of the world, and tends toward something like mutually assured social destruction in the limit. We need to protect our shared narrative.
Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying. Democracy is not built into nature. It has to be proactively maintained and refreshed.
I'm sick of hearing that it's up to "people" to be fed the right information so they behave the way that works for the Government and large corporations.
Why should I trust the WHO? Why should I trust the FDA? Why would I trust Johnson and Johnson? Why should I trust Pfizer? Why doesn't the Government fund an emergency trial on Ivermectin?
Do you know that these pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued if there is a problem with my health related to the COVID-19 vaccines? Why would I trust a system like that? Why wouldn't I be skeptical and why wouldn't fringe theories appear?
I don't want information to be hidden from me to influence my beliefs, I want all the information made possible to me so I can make up my own mind.
As Edward Snowden says, the worse conspiracies are in plain sight. I'm starting to think he might be right.
Because there's no evidence that it would work? Nobody has explained how it's supposed to act on COVID-19, when it's a nerve poison for invertebrates.
There's not infinite time and effort available for patiently trying every theory with no sound basis, and the worst thing is that there have been small trials with poor or inconclusive results which people ignore. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydro...
That's quite a silly view. In silico evidence shows that ivermectin can bind to spike protein, main viral protease, and replication proteins:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/
Calling ivermectin the same as HCQ is a strawman approach.
Actually, this is the perfect example, as the main compound in HCQ has been proven in several studies unrelated to COVID19, to specifically prevent the 'jelly-lungs' that people with severe critical-case COVID19 died from in high numbers.
Which is a very fitting observation in this thread on the continuing stupidification of societal debate.
Only perhaps not in the way you intended.
Preliminary Evidence demonstrates Ivermectin does improve outcomes with those infected with COVID-19.
Skepticism is exactly what makes democracy working. Blind trust is what allows bad actors to transform a democracy into a dictatorship.
You speak as if past dictators were not democratically elected or journalists never uncovered corruption in government and institutions.
there needs to be a middle of control and freedom without the bullshit.
As somebody from a Western country that has gone from democracy -> dictatorship -> democracy within the last 100 years, I couldn't agree more (I'm German). Democracy is fragile and has been under increasing threat for the last 15 years or so, unfortunately partly accelerated by social media.
If we can't agree that democracy is the foundation for freedom of speech, and that there are actors (foreign and domestic) using misinformation to erode trust in democracy, I'm bearish for the future of democracy (at least in the US).
We won't because freedom of speech is the foundation for a healthy democracy, not the other way round. Socrates was executed at the behest of a tyrannical democracy - the original democracy - for his speech.
Firstly, free speech is not a synonym for democracy, we can clearly see there are democracies with differing levels of free speech, some with very low levels.
Secondly, most of the other systems of political organisation are antithetical to free speech. That does not mean, however, that democracy is a necessary pre-requisite for free speech. I can imagine other systems - as have others - but that they do not exist is either because they cannot or because the conditions for them to hold are not there yet.
Finally
> Or do you believe free speech exists by itself in nature, prior to any system?
I'm not a student and this is not a student debating society, please make your points in a way that an adult and professional would expect and can respect. I don't know you, it's far too early for you to take the piss. Try and get into a conversation first, at the very least.
No, parent is saying freedom of speech is a consequence of democracy, not that one wouldn't exist without the other or that they are synonymous.
One can, as you have, construct and imagine all kinds of political systems where one exists without the other (e.g. Greece 400 BC, benevolent dictator etc). This leads to rather contrived arguments that miss the point at hand: Freedom of speech has almost always been a consequence of modern democracy.
Your flippant response in the last paragraph makes me believe you aren't convinced in your argumentation either.
Then you'll need to explain these questions:
> What prior-to-democracy system would lead toward that free speech? Or do you believe free speech exists by itself in nature, prior to any system?
Without them I might agree. With them, the inference is impossible to ignore.
> Freedom of speech has almost always been a consequence of modern democracy.
No one was saying anything else. It's starting to look like you aren't going to shine a light on what I've missed but what you've missed.
> Your flippant response in the last paragraph makes me believe you aren't convinced in your argumentation either.
Flippancy is a manifestation of doubt, now there's a claim I've not heard before. The world is indeed full of wonder and mystery!
No it didn't.
Do you have examples of democracies before the printing press besides Athens and arguably the late Roman Republic? Those happened nearly two millenniums before the press and didn't last that long. "Thriving"?
Nothing is more dangerous than someone being striped of power they considered rightfully theirs.
There isn't really. You're adopting, I assume, J.S. Mill's view, that the cure for bad speech is more speech, which he famously published in 1859.
However, since then it's been widely accepted that when speech reaches a certain level of harm then the greater good is to prevent/punish it. You can't incite violence under the guise of free speech. You can't advertise that something is safe when it's not. This is because more speech can't undo violence and death after it occurs.
And when it comes to misinformation with regards to provable and intentional lies about voting procedures, election results, etc. that falsely harm the country's institutions and legitimacy, it's entirely consistent for that to fall under the widely-accepted prohibition of speech that rises to a certain threshold of harm. It directly leads to mobs, riots, and revolution based on lies, not based on actual injustices.
This doesn't mean any harmful speech is prohibited -- that's ridiculous. You're generally allowed to insult people, tell lies, etc. But there's a threshold of harm that gets established.
I have very few friends “in tech” and this is the view that basically all of them hold, this is the view that most of my family hold. Across the 100-150 people that spans the full (European) political spectrum and many different backgrounds and life experiences from growing up extremely wealthy, finding wealth through hard work (and luck) and success and borderline surviving - do not “SV tech circles”.
Basically it’s a view point that is able to accept nuance and grey. People who work in absolutes dominate headlines so it’s all we hear, in reality the majourity of people live in the middle.
It's not widely accepted at all, except maybe in the small circle of Silicon Valley elites whose ideas align with yours politically.
What kind of horrible friend group are you part of that believes people should be thrown in jail for telling lies or insulting people?
The Silicon Valley elite are dinosaurs who came to this realization too damn late.
They, argued about free speech too long.
The elite are out of touch.
The greatest hold they have on speech isn’t shutting or removing misinformation.
The hold they have on society is that the data needed to make these decisions intelligently is behind an NDA.
Every scientist who worked on this with data, is employed by These forms.
That is where the silence is deafening. And the success of it is that people are still arguing yesterday’s battles while the front has moved away.
The united states is basically unique in the strength of it's speech protection, and even that is only the government. I'd challenge you to name a social group, any social group, that wouldn't ostracize you for saying certain things.
If someone is ostracised that is an example of the listener exercising their free speech rights, not a violation of them.
Some use this as an example of why companies like Twitter and Facebook may remove someone from their platform, but I would argue firstly that they are a monopoly exercising monopoly power, hence violating one's rights to free speech, and that they are not platforms any more because of their interventionism in the speech of others (and currently have too much protection under law to do this). The monopoly power is the most important thing to challenge, in my view.
And it absolutely is widely accepted if you look at democratically produced law across the world. Restrictions on harmful speech exist literally everywhere in democracies. It's what people vote for. It's absolutely widely accepted.
Widely believed would be a better phrasing, as you may compare anywhere with low to no support for free speech and they will be more oppressive and violent than anywhere in say Europe or North America that has greater support for free speech, the correlation will be huge.
Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech. I doubt you'll be able to produce strong enough evidence for your position to then claim it as widely accepted over widely believed or just advocated for by parties that benefit from less freedom of speech.
Maybe you can, but I'd need to see it first.
Europe is one place with more limitations on "free" speech, and pretty much no parties or political grass-roots movements here are campaigning for any radical changes towards an American-style legislation. (Right-wing populist parties and movements in several countries are complaining about hate-speech legislation going too far -- and may even have a point -- but AIUI not even that means they're against the main idea that it's right to ban harmful speech; they just disagree on the definition and limits of what's "harmful" with regards to the kind of speech they want to indulge in.)
> Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech.
Crazy American lies freely spread under the guise of "Free speech!" gave you January 6.
See e.g. [1] for an overview or [2] specifically for hate speech.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
It's clear that a handful of genocides were caused in large part by hate speech, such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.
What's not clear to me (although I'm open either way) is whether strict hate speech laws would've reduced the odds of these happening. Do we have reason to think that to be true?
The first order effect is to chill that kind of speech. But is there a second order effect of making these people into martyrs and fostering resentment towards the protected group that does more harm than good?
My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?
https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...
Would love to see an example. The vast majority of revolutions in human history were results of hunger.
Two out of three.
But that isn't at all what is happening here. Google has decided that they don't want to enable people to distribute certain data using their platform. They're not being crowned the omnipotent oracle of good and bad.
> you are talking about creating super powerful entities just because they agree with you.
This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is? I vote to create "super powerful entities that agree with me" every 4 years. Those entities possess the power to destroy all life on earth. Google is not anywhere near as powerful as those entities, and while it is not (directly) democratically accountable, it does derive its power from its users.
No information will be permanently erased just because Google does not spend money and time making it available on Drive.
My argument is very humble. Everyone gets to talk, whoever is most convincing gets listened to most. I don't need a paternalistic company protecting me from bad thoughts.
> This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is?
A system with an intentional freedom to allow dissent?
You're talking now, and this isn't (AFAIK) on Google Drive.
You want Drive to be a democratically guaranteed national resource, nationalize Google.
An entity that gets to tell millions exactly how to vote and which nuke-wielding bodyguard to hire is surely more powerful than said bodyguard.
Tell that to the Gandhis. And several Cæsars.
The government already has that power. See that bit about saying rat poison is medicine or incitement laws.
Are you scared that we support such behaviour from the government?
Well, no, the first article of amendment (usually abbreviated “first amendment”) is the eighth article of the Constitution, following the seven original articles. “Amendment” is revision/change.
This is a false equivalency - “telling Pfizer they can’t claim their drug cures AIDS is no different than suppressing the Covid lab leak theory”.
Yeah, it’s massively different.
Just that the government already has the power to judge good/bad speech - and people are not revolting against that.
Why doesn't the government's ability to judge good/bad speech give you the heebie-jeebies, but that specific instance does?
No, you can’t incite violence with speech. Everyone is responsible for the actions they take, even if misinformed.
Google is not the government. It's a private company owned by private citizens who also have the same constitutional rights. You're not being 'censored'. It's not a violation of your free speech. You're free to petition the government and you're free to just host your files someplace other than Google Drive. Access to Google Drive is not a 'right'. Quit trying to conflate the two. It's a disingenuous argument meant to confuse the issue and push a personal narrative.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
> It's a private company owned by private citizens who also have the same constitutional rights.
The scale at which Google operates today, anything short of defining some of its popular products as public utilities would be disingenuous.
> Access to Google Drive is not a 'right'
Except this is not a Google drive (the product) access issue. It is an access to information issue, if you look at it fundamentally.
Look at that from the perspective of a startup founder. You've made a thing. Spent decades working on it. It became popular because many people found it useful. So useful in fact, that they've decided that it would be nice if you didn't own it anymore, and they owned it instead.
Laws should be the same for everyone. If you're not okay with other people deciding that they own your stuff, don't tell others what to do with the things they've created.
There's an argument that private corporations that are involved in dissemination of information (search engines and social media) should respect principles of freedom of speech as a democratic principle, regardless of constitutional mandate.
Suppose the government outsources welfare eligibility decision-making to a private company. Does this mean traditional notions of fairness we would expect from such an decision-maker do not apply, because they are a private company?
Google is not hosting your public content on behalf of any government.
The point is, you look at the substance of what is being done or controlled, not the status of the actor as a private or public entity. That is what the analogy is used to explain.
The substance of what is being done, here, is regulation of communication between individuals over a communication platform. Downplaying it as 'not hosting public content' is inaccurate or at least of no moment. What's public content mean anyway?
If a significant amount of private communication goes through privately owned channels, it is reasonable that the private companies operating those channels respect democratic norms. It's unreasonable to dismiss any criticism as 'they are a private company', as that's beside the point.
I think that line becomes a bit more blurry if you're a student using your school-issued Google account.
It’s the difference between not allowing the government to say what you can publish and requiring a company to publish whatever you want.
This is the same logic that prevents me from saying that in this meeting hall, gay people are not allowed entry.
Ownership implies responsibility.
The actual case seems to be that anyone can paint anything except certain banned things. But any person can still paint other unbanned things.
That's different than banning particular people. In other words, if the republicans are allowed to discuss everything except vaccine conspiracies, you aren't discriminating against republicans, so this analogy about banning individuals doesn't work. And of course you might ban a particular individual from the premises for repeatedly breaking those rules.
All of this seems perfectly reasonable, and indeed I know real-world spaces that operate more or less like this.
Yes, I stand by this. If it's legal to have porn on your house wall, it should be legal for people to paint porn on your communal wall.
Again, the solution to this should be a city ordnance. The problem to me is not restrictions but accountability.
> The actual case seems to be that anyone can paint anything except certain banned things. But any person can still paint other unbanned things.
This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
Why? Why is it that if I allow people to paint things, I lose the right to moderate those things? Like it's still my property, right? What causes me to forfeit my property rights?
Or to ask a perhaps different question, could I close the venue entirely?
What if I later reopened it with a list of allowed people and you could only enter if you were on the list? Do I still forfeit those rights? How big does the list have to be for it to be suitably public again?
> This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
You're going to have to explain this better. Because in practice banning gay men from marrying men prevents them from getting married at all. Preventing anyone from painting porn doesn't prevent an artist from painting not-porn. I might be more willing to agree if, for example, it was the government blanket banning porn. But we're not talking about that, were talking about one dude with one popular artists venue banning pornographic art being painted. It's not different than if I disallowed the sale of pornography in my art gallery.
Keep in mind, today, in the united states no priest is compelled to officiate a same sex wedding. The state recognizes them, but you or I don't have to.
Good question! In my view, the deciding factor is "universality". I think there is a fundamental difference in nature between a friendgroup and a customer base. When you offer a service to your friends, you may pick and choose how you like on any basis. When you offer a service to the general public, you are in a sense attempting to provide a "plug-in" service to society as a whole, and so the terms of that service should be negotiated with society as a whole, including such things as civil rights. This is exactly where you cross the boundary between being "a private citizen" and " part of the state".
> Or to ask a perhaps different question, could I close the venue entirely?
Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
> What if I later reopened it with a list of allowed people and you could only enter if you were on the list? Do I still forfeit those rights? How big does the list have to be for it to be suitably public again?
I think this is a sliding scale. The specific cutoff would always be kind of arbitrary.
> > This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
> You're going to have to explain this better. Because in practice banning gay men from marrying men prevents them from getting married at all.
No it does not; it merely prevents them from getting married in the way that they like, which is a different way than the societal norm. The right to hetero marriage, as practiced in theocratic societies, inherently normalizes hetero relations and excludes gay relations. However, there is nothing inherently wrong - in the erroneous sense, not the moral sense! - about such a choice. This demonstrates that the constraints you apply to a service, even if they only pertain to the nature of the service and not the persons the service is extended to, can still be discriminatory.
> Keep in mind, today, in the united states no priest is compelled to officiate a same sex wedding.
Likewise, inasmuch as weddings have societal relevance, I think they should be compelled to - or else not officiate any weddings at all.
Does this apply to all businesses that offer services? Keep in mind here that the first amendment, in addition to protecting our right to speech, protects our right to association. That is, our right to associate with the people, and only the people, we want to is a civil right that our constitution protects just as much as speech.
If I open a store and let people purchase things, I'm offering a service to the general public. But I'm certainly not "part of the state". One of the primary concerns about the state is that it (usually) has a monopoly on the things that it does, so that if it provides a service, it's the only provider of that service.
But "speech" isn't a service that one can monopolize. Preventing speech can be done via force, but "facilitating speech" isn't monopolizable. If someone won't let you do it, you can do it yourself or find it somewhere else.
> Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
But you are compelling me to offer a service! I want to offer the service to paint anything except X. And you say no no! You are additionally compelled to offer the service to paint X. This by the way, gets far more complicated if, for example, my service is...baking cakes. If I offer a universal cake baking service, when can I refuse to bake a cake? Can I refuse all wedding cakes? Can I refuse all cakes above a certain size? Can I refuse all cakes in red? Can I only bake chocolate cakes? Can I refuse to bake cakes for people who have previously given me bad reviews?
> No it does not; it merely prevents them from getting married in the way that they like, which is a different way than the societal norm.
So let's make this concrete. Let's say I ban painting my name. I don't want people to paint it in my house. People can paint anything else, but not my name.
With the marriage example, we generally assume that people are attracted to a particular gender, and aren't really able to change that. Are you suggesting that, similarly, there are people who cannot find happiness without painting my name on my wall?
I mean if that's the case, why is it moral for me to ban them as long as I ban everyone else too? These particular people can't be happy either way.
With marriage, the issue is that you're essentially preventing some group from being able to openly mutually associate in the way that they want to. We can quibble on exactly how much of a freedom to associate or a human right that is, but it sure sounds like a lot more of one than your ability to write my name on my wall.
There's another argument by the way, which is that marriage is a service provided to two individuals, and that providing only heterosexual marriages discriminates based on attributes of those individuals, in exactly the same way as only marrying white people would be discriminatory. This same argument doesn't work for the example of banning speech.
(Neither does the US, when it comes to discrimination on protected categories.)
> If I open a store and let people purchase things, I'm offering a service to the general public. But I'm certainly not "part of the state". One of the primary concerns about the state is that it (usually) has a monopoly on the things that it does, so that if it provides a service, it's the only provider of that service.
> But "speech" isn't a service that one can monopolize. Preventing speech can be done via force, but "facilitating speech" isn't monopolizable.
Sure it is, by controlling the platform. In any case, I have a much more expansive view of monopoly as a spectrum. Network effects, for instance, can also contribute to a monopolizing service. In any case, I believe the primary reason why monopoly is a moral risk is because a monopoly prevents you from switching providers to escape a restrictive corporate environment. My approach is instead to outlaw restrictive corporate environments.
> > Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
> But you are compelling me to offer a service!
No, you always have the choice to not offer the service at all. I am not compelling you to offer any specific service, I am preventing you from offering a service with certain restrictive parameters.
> And you say no no! You are additionally compelled to offer the service to paint X.
No, you are compelled to offer the service to paint X, contingent on your decision to offer the service at all. You always have the option to cease offering the service entirely. And you could, I guess, close your company whenever someone requests a service you don't like. However considering fees, that may be impractical.
> I mean if that's the case, why is it moral for me to ban them as long as I ban everyone else too? These particular people can't be happy either way.
I don't have an opinion on the morality of the matter. Or rather, I don't think my morality should affect the decision. That's why I have focused this conversation specifically on the mechanism by which the morality is arbitrated, which should be the same mechanism by which state decisions are arbitrated, ie. civil rights, representative democracy etc, inasmuch as the service is of the class of "service offering to the general public" shared with some state services.
Civil rights are always in conflict, and which ones you prioritize and how is a moral decision. You can't abdicate that responsibility.
Put another way, why does it violate civil rights to offer a service conditionally, but not to refuse to offer the service at all?
Or in the reverse, why is the government able to regulate my offering of a service conditionally, even though you seem to believe that them compelling me to offer the service in general is a violation of my rights?
Or yet another way: why do you believe that the right of association is less important than the right of speech?
Those are all ultimately moral or ethical questions.
That is, the more individuals your organization serves, the more it becomes a "thing whose arbitration between individuals is of societal import". I believe that issues of societal import should be decided by democratic means, whereas issues of individual import are decided by personal choice. Between the two is a sliding scale.
Come to think of it, why would it be bad if a government censors speech?
Because government has a monopoly on violence.
Its a step in the wrong direction. The next step is to forbid asking that question. Step 3 is war to get our rights back. 2 and 3 may take time. Say 6 years for 2 and 1000 years for 3.
1000 years of blaming the witches, the socialists, the unionists, the jew, the Muslim, the Chinese, the Russians and of course you!
If you were defending the governments right to censor speech you were useful in installing it. When the censorship is accepted by the masses you become someone known to publicly share an opinion about a forbidden topic. Presenting the question for others to answer the way you just did is much worse than having your own opinion.
If we allow people like that, before we know it, we have people questioning everything!
Then lets not ignore the fact that most countries had to make laws specifically to protect working parents. There are most likely entire warehouses filled with court cases over a business owner realizing that statistically hiring a non married replacement for the recently married employee will be better.
They wont do it out of racism, they wont do it out of religious fervor. However they will do whatever they can to make more money.
Huh?!? It's perfectly ordinary and contemporary English.
And that other place won't censor me?
captain pedantic, you meant to say it's not a violation of the first amendment.
censorship is a violation of free speech
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
An early tidbit that may have been lost with deplatforming was that Euro leaders also disagreed, citing that only the state could be trusted with that power. However, the US Constitution mostly prohibits that route and it's left to private companies to make up their own minds about what content they want to host.
You could also elect me as your benevolent dictator, I'll be happy to bring the misinformation to an end, but the lie I'd tackle first would be that this has anything to do with democracy.
Treat the propaganda campaign like the war it is - and arrest those who are serving as foreign actors for treason.
The earlier people are finally willing to admit Russia and China are waging a war against the whole Western world, the better.
The big multipliers - #45, Alex Jones, Fox News, Newsmax, OANN - are publicly known, as are most of the people spreading the stuff on FB, and can be taken down. No need to resolve to a surveillance state, just public information is enough.
To what end? What is their motivation? They’re evil cartoon villains and hate our freedom? What’s their gain?
For Russia? Being able to rebuild the Soviet Union. Just look at Crimea, or read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics which is essentially a playbook of what Putin has done.
For China? World domination for Han Chinese, nothing less. They are taking over entire countries by "debt relief" aka loan sharking, and leaders who don't want their "investments" simply have their assets taken away by force like the Philippines.
Both can only follow through with their plans if there is no united opposition against them. Europe is falling apart on a national level with nationalist, often Russia-backed anti-democrats spreading discontent and hate, and the US is collapsing in ethnic and class war.
Hasn't the USA been aggressively exporting its values and memes (ie. Engaging in cultural warfare) for almost a century now?
I mean you want the “public” to be able to “challenge” the misinformation.
But fundamentally the public has N number of compute units per day and the attackers have N^N compute units.
This is throwing unarmed citizens directly into an army trained to crush unarmed citizens.
The attackers are DESIGNED with the awareness that people will be having this argument on hackernews.
Which one? Plenty of candidates depending on which part of the political space your views lie in.
Is it the misinformation campaign that Trump won the last election? The one that says third world immigration is good? The one that says Democracy is good? The one that says COVID is harmless?
If there were some Oracle that could tell us what is true or false then this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
If I can't explore new ideas, evaluate information and make up my own mind, no matter how much bullshit exists, I'm not living in a democratic free society anymore. I'm living in a technological dystopia, and authoritarian state.
I'm afraid, skepticism is part of a healthy democracy...no matter how much the government want me to get a jab.
When did Google feel the need to be the world police?
Dear god people - we know how to create malformed content.
To assume you are immune is like assuming you are immortal or that your computer is unhackable.
Modern Misinformation is malformed code, being done at scale.
It’s cluster bombing civilians who can never muster the resources to defend against it.
It’s not about you. It’s about the attacker.
Yes - and No.
To fairly answer your question, there’s different levels of sophistication to misinformation.
It ranges from vaccines will grow you another arm, to the Gates foundation is using this to impoverish nations. (I’m loosely using current examples)
So yes - experts can and will be able to avoid many of the misinformation attempts out there. The ones which they fall victim to - in their own area of expertise, are likely unavoidable.
For google to remove healthcare misinformation, they will be targeting the obvious content that has been flagged and likely supported by govts orgs.
I feel that many people are arguing about the case where the gatekeepers are wrong - which was an issue in a world where traffic through the gates was more orderly and the gatekeepers had historically been mistaken in stopping traffic.
Right now, even if I don’t like gatekeepers, I have no choice.
Someone has figured out to how to mass produce obviously and subtly malicious traffic.
The issue at this juncture in time is the lack of effective filtering.
Since we don’t have a better solution, we get forced to use gatekeeping.
What do you mean by “your brain is mapped?”
We know how brains operate and process information. We know that it’s not going to treat information in an unbiased manner.
It processes identity information, threats, statistics and out group information differently - among a whole world of idiosyncrasies.
Attackers sadly also know enough how to create content that subverts that processing in precise manners.
It’s content designed simply to propagate and defeat logical or rational scrutiny.
Its filled with the kinds of logical fallacies that maybe YOU would defeat, but are so broadly spread that it will always find victims.
Those victims are then set up for the next round of content and then the next round.
Eventually this content dominates the discourse. It’s like suddenly everyone knows that the yeti was an astronaut.
Google misses more misinformation than it finds - and this is even if we discuss only America or the English speaking world.
Smaller nations aren’t even coveted, and rare languages or regions don’t even have automated analysis
Why is it so hard to believe that people will simply be foolish and create garbage on their own?
But that doesn’t mean attackers don’t exist, or that they happily co opt those communities to seed and propagate their content as well.
And most of that content stays up. It takes a lot for any of the tech cos to act right now.
So to me this is at least nuanced. Insisting on completely unchecked speech, however unscientific and destructive, is not a reasonable position.
You aren't censored if you can't generate a link to Bits on a google server.
You cannot have true democracy if people cannot disagree with their governments, they must be able to disagree with any truth or opinion such a government might consider self-evident, just on the off chance they're right.
I should at this point note that Google doesn't directly claim to go quite that far in preventing misinformation, they mostly claim to disallow things that could harm the democractic process (e.g. telling people to vote at the wrong place, their candidate has died, etc.). At least that kind of information is usually agreed upon (if not there are bigger problems than mere misinformation), though they seem to try to include claims of voter-fraud, which is a bit dangerous.