Many people held up this story as a justification for the "right to be forgotten", but if it turns out that even a respected news agency can't figure out whether censorship was justified in this case, I think it rather supports the case against censorship.
Besides being a one-sided story, it's also obvious PR for Ervine's new company, which is dutifully linked at the end of the story.
Secondly, the story presents Ervine as the heroic protagonist. An interesting choice for someone that turned in his middle-eastern clients to the FBI because they took a cab and didn't talk like typical rich people. Ervine's response to this is to hand over all of his client's private information to the FBI, without a warrant, after which his client is jailed and deported.
So he suspected someone was breaking the law and reported them to the appropriate authorities? Or are citizens supposed to always cover for criminals unless and until the government gets a warrant?
He ended up being correct, but that’s posthoc justification.
The private citizens rights to seize property, turn it over to LEOs, report someone, conduct a search, do not change if they have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. So, if I'm your boss and can legally read your emails, I can just turn them over to the law enforcement agencies no question asked – they're "my" emails after all.
EDIT: /s It ended up he was right, but maybe he had no reason to actually know they were cons. We don't have the full story, which is exactly why it has been retracted.
I dare you to call the FBI the next time you have a business disagreement. You won't even get past the phone bank.
Mostly, though, search your recollection: have you ever heard of anyone who isn't really wealthy doing what Ervine is reported to have done?
I have a friend of humble means who, in response to an incident, filed a police report, sent copies to the public e-mail addresses of our state's responsible regulators and then packaged that correspondence and sent it to a field office's public mailing address. The response was quick, courteous and effective.
You're launching baseless conjecture.
It sounds like they tried to get the other side of the story and got nowhere. Makes sense given that, if the NPR story is even generally accurate, it is not in the other side's interest to corroborate it (they are accused of slander). And given that the other side is geographically pretty far away from the US, it could be hard to get anything solid.
> someone who said he was representing the person NPR had identified as the "author" [of the purportedly slanderous website]
and then they retracted it. (https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2018/04/12/601650762/...)
My hope is to persuade others that the initial idea is false and/or harmful, not to prevent others from hearing the bad idea.
If I succeed, the bad idea still exists, but others can understand why the idea is bad and recognize similarly bad ideas in the future.
If you simply censor the bad idea, at least two bad things happen as a consequence: 1) the bad idea is not refuted, and so is likely to be reintroduced later with fewer people who understand why it is a bad idea; and 2) the person who originated the bad idea does not have any reason to change their mind, but rather is more likely to resent being censored and so hold that bad idea more tenaciously and attempt to spread it more surreptitiously.
I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society. Based on my understanding of history, it is, in fact, a precursor to totalitarian society.
Specifically, under the condition where the debate actually matters, your compulsion can be exploited by putting out any number of variedly wrong ideas, for which you pay an asymmetrically higher cost to refute, and an opportunity cost of not being able to present ideas of your own.
The debate can this way be framed to either never reach "consensus", or to do so at the counterparty's favored position.
The widespread use of this strategy is a reason why society is falling back on censorship as opposed to reason.
So instead you'd prefer if they had kept the original article but added after each sentence "except it probably didn't happen that way"?
>I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society.
There's nothing recent about that, it's as old as humanity itself. Every culture has its taboos and its sacred cows. I don't think there's any society where you could say absolutely anything you want and stay out of trouble. The USA is extremely permissive but there's still slander, libel and hate speech at the very least. In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.
I was responding to the statement that bad ideas should be censored, not to the actions taken by NPR. I actually agree that NPR did the right thing by retracting the false information. That is a very different thing from censoring bad ideas. So yes, the thread derailed off into the swamp and here we sit on the wreckage.
> In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.
Yes, I know. I studied Nazism in depth during my undergrad years while earning a history degree. I still recall being nauseated for an entire semester because of the material in one particular course, in fact. The downside of restricting political thought is that those who create the restrictions generally become tyrants themselves.
So making censorship acceptable is pretty dangerous. It just favours whoever is currently in a position of power.
And I tend to think it's counterproductive to censor ideas. You can't stop people from believing them, and trying to censor them can increase divisions between groups. Argument and education seem better approaches in general.
If you think that NPR shouldn't have made the original story unavailable I see your point but I really fail to see how that's censorship, especially when they pinpoint precisely why they did it and how exceptional it is.
...this is a retraction?