Regulating Online Platforms: By Whom, and for Whom?
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Example: Administration A makes anti-hate speech laws 10 years later Administration B comes along, nobody likes them, they complain about it. Gets slapped with "hate speech" has to prove a negative that their speech isn't hate, from jail.....
Power corrupts that's why we try to limit the power of government, or any orginization, because government and corporations are made of people and people are fallible and greedy etc
The only thing you can do is simply allow pure freedom of expression, good or bad. Any given individual simply listens to what they want to listen to and ignores what they don't. That is the only practical way forward.
If you claim to support "freedom of speech, but . . ." then you don't support freedom of speech.
Do I not support freedom of speech?
Compare this with the censorship imposed by many governments. Blasphemy, a pure speech act, is a victimless crime. Anyone who supports laws against it does not support free speech.
Obviously (but apparently not so obvious): Explicit threats of physical violence are not freedom of speech.
And that's the line.
A: Not "Free speech": I am going to kill you.
B: "Free Speech": I hope that you die.
A is an explicit threat.
B is merely offensive and an expression of ill will.
Is this speech:
Investigative reporter finds major issue with all major news outlets in a country
Reports it on social media
All news channels ignore it, they instead cover other material and bury it
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People create incendiary whatsapp messages
they are refined and designed to be absorbed immediately by people
People form mobs and kill women and men over 50 times in separate incidents because they believe the targets are "child abductors".
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There are riots.
People start spreading false information
Enemy Nation states intervene and spike the narrative.
The riots turn into a coup.
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The internet is evolving the way people deal with speech itself.
The old lines in the sand are for people who remember them. But the vast majority of people just dont know, dont care.
The truly malicious are using speech to cause harm at scale we have not seen before.
They have a way to now target human systems that could not be harmed, and which have no native protections that can deal with this problem at the rate/scales of today.
Case in point- Fake news and propaganda. And by fake news, the original meaning - IE random people in Romania creating websites which look like news sites to farm clicks and make money.
Those fake news sites are a perfectly legitimate exercise of free speech.
Did they lie? Is it an issue if someone lies?
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My point is simply this - the old rules are going to end, pretty damn fucking quick.
Governments are not going to sit around letting a Cambridge Analytica scenario unfold, or a Brexit unfold ever again.
This means that they will ALL look to becoming China lite variants very soon.
Speech = thought = ideas - which are now being put to the test with industrialized propaganda.
You dont need to drop leaflets over enemy lines when you can advertize through facebook. Or send whatsapp messages via sleeper cells.
You dont need to indoctrinate only those people who come to your centers, you can polarize swathes of people - and the Internet and content generators will HELP you, because outrage = engagement.
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The writing is written boldly on the wall.
The gist of your point is that when people hear ideas (that you imply they shouldn't hear) then they can make decisions that you or the government doesn't want.
My point: Let me hear things and I'll make my own decisions using my brain.
Your point?: People are dumb and what they hear should be curated so they can decide "good" things and not "bad" things. I guess you or the govt gets to decide what's good and bad, and which ideas are "weaponized" or not.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
As an early millennial, I'm astounded to see this distinction is being lost on the current generation. One regimes hate speech becomes the next administrations purge list.
But today regulation IS coming. And many of those old beards will be on the side of regulation - because there are huge issues with the way the internet is currently working out.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be regulated if they are found to exercise a license working to the public injury. It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social- betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence. Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.