I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.
The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
That is a terrifying argument.
I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!).
I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either.
Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.
So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss.
But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)
This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.
I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.
The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.
A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.
It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.
This might work if you leave the system undisturbed, but there are other forces involved in this process your model doesn't account for.
It's the equivalent of buying out EC2 instances for an hour or so and "recalibrating" your P2P mesh. And it wouldn't fix itself.
If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!
But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.
And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.
It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly.
We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.
This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".
But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities.
The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism.
These systems can work without removing anonymity.
And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.
Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
[1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".
I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.
I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.
Private sector actors cannot do that.
But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.
Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.
>Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
In my mind, the correct response to the rise of FAKE NEWS (aka: yellow journalism, sensationalism, propaganda, public relations, advertisement) is to focus on teaching critical thinking skills, not to have a censor that says 'You can say this thing but not that thing'.
Will bad people have harmful, self serving opinions? Yes, they will. That's part and parcel of living in a free society.
Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.
Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set?
Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's criminal after someone takes action on it.
Quoting Justice Brandeis from Whitney v. California:
>Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. [...] If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
I can’t imagine the flack that would come when some robot labels trans people’s gender identity as NOT TRUE based on biological grounds.
I think that any group labeling things TRUE and NOT TRUE will only make things worse.
If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.
We got fed up of people being murdered because they're black, Jewish, gay, trans, female, etc etc.
You want to cut out the only escape hatch people have. You think we have it all figured out... what is right and wrong. That we are able as a society to correctly label what speech should be allowed, and what shouldn't. But we aren't. We need free speech in order to figure out right-from-wrong. To hash things out verbally and in written form so that we DONT act out horrible ideas.