But whoever has the power to decide what the powerful are and aren't allowed to say probably has too much power.

Free speech is a trade off between being able to criticize the powerful and allowing room for demagogues, racism, lies, falsehoods and misinformation. I wish more people would understand that.

All of the things you consider truth were once labeled misinformation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

If you have to go back hundreds of years to find an example, something tells me it's not really all that relevant.

But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.

Considering the "COVID lab-leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory" discourse was literally a conspiracy by Nature and China to prevent criticism and on a month-by-month basis more evidence of it is coming out I'm very skeptical of blindly trusting scientific institutions to accurately label misinformation from the politically-inconvenient truths.

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...

This is not going against science. Where are the peer-reviewed papers? What experiments were made? This is criticising authorities, which is the flipside of the trade off I wrote about before. Free speech working as intended. Note that no-one benefited from spreading the lab-theory, so odds are higher it should be at least allowed to enter the public discourse.

How can you have peer-reviewed papers about classified information? China allowed a small team to analyze a glimpse of data while leaks show that team constantly referencing the Nature editorial and "China" not allowing dissent from a natural origin conclusion. Even after the paper was published the team was scared for their careers because at any moment a whistleblower could come out.

The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label.

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-mu...

Edit: writing in a hurry, have to read the link more carefully.

Ok, so the case is a pretty decent edge case. However, I wrote "deliberately going against science", which I don't see happening here. Here, people did more science disagreeing with other science (if you can call it that). In this case the first "research" seems to have an agenda and should indeed warrant criticism. And the criticism is good with data to back it up.

The same does not happen with climate denialists for example - just plain old misinformation with an agenda. They are free to publish papers, yet don't seem to be able to, at least with convincing results.

A distilled version of the strongest points of this discussion is in this post (in my opinion).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171#36948005

Sorry, I updated my reply after thinking a bit more carefully.

To put my point in short: I don't think we should call something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation in the context of this discussion. Regardless how it's labelled by authorities.

>something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation

It's hard to infer people's intention. Maybe I'm being naive but I think even flat earthers have the earnest intention of getting to the truth and use data and observations.

My algorithm to deal with untruth is engaging with everyone and asking for clarification/evidence. To me creating a blanket label for "people you should never listen to" is dangerous.

And yet, despite that, Jewish space lasers don't actually cause forest fires.

Probably because you're cherry picking the most absurd example.

No, I'm picking an obvious example. I could pick many more less obvious examples, particularly around COVID or politics, but most other conspiracies or systems of disinformation have enough adherents here that it would only cause unnecessary rancor. Simply opposing the common narrative that all censorship is evil and truth does not exist is controversial enough.

The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. Obviously this is untrue, because actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases.

>it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases

How? What do you say of the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID?

There is no "lab leak hypothesis" for COVID. There are a number of different theories, ranging from "Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab" to "it was accidentally released," from it being entirely natural to a bioweapon, that all get lumped together under that banner, all treated as equally credible, only having an aggressive opposition to the mainstream narrative in common. I won't say more because I'm aware of the motivated reasoning behind bringing it up.

Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet.

Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."

The WHO spokesperson not being allowed to utter the word Taiwan is an interesting case that I think was instrumental in making a lot of hairs on a lot of necks stand up at the beginning of COVID, alerting people with good demagoguery radar that the flow of lies was top down.

I would not expect PRC to conform to any notion of freedom, so it's not terribly surprising or relevant to the discussion.

The WHO spokesperson was not a PRC national.

"...If, back during the rise of the third reich..."

Before the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic, which did have vigorous suppression of speech:

'As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”'

'A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.'

'Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.' [0]

[0] From: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

Yes if there has been a platform where his views could have been freely countered, like Elon’s Twitter / X, that would have been great and probably would have nipped him in the bud.

So your fears are exactly backward. It’s the suppression, not the expression, that is the problem.

You don’t think that’s a bit naive? We don’t have any “countering” of views today. There’s no back and forth or debate. It’s one man amplifying the xenophobia of the most ignorant sector of our populace and as far as they’re concerned, everyone who doesn’t agree with them are the “enemy”.

I see this view a lot from people who have opted to refrain from gathering facts for themselves. Speaking from actual observation there is plenty of countering and debate happening on that platform. And we can see a healthy cohort of anti-Trump Republicans have emerged there for example. Not that this makes them right on any issues, but it’s a start.