Re:Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM I...
by phtrivier on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @06:32AM
(#35885652)
This.
They are very few (read: "none as far as I know it") people jailed in the EU for having said that vaccines were "dangerous / ineffective / a plot by the governement to inject 5G chip / insert theory here" - neither for writing it on social media, nor for telling it on broadcast radio / TV.
However, and sorry for the cliché, there seems to be some places where you can get in jail for calling a "special operation" a cat.
The "sway" that social media platforms have over public discourse is often vastly overstated for political ends, certainly compared to that of governments.
And the real problem is, if you consider the ability of social media platforms to moderate content to be harmful, the only solution is to have government limit the free speech of those platforms and those who participate on them by coercing them into publishing speech they don't want to, which cedes power to a potentially even worse entity. People are so terrified of the power social media has now - as an extension of the general social panic against "the left" - that they're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Facebook can ban me from their platform but at least they can't send goons to my house and ban me from life.