Comment by taraharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taraharris | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Just last night I listened to this podcast which Steven Pinker recommended on Twitter:

"Episode 39 of Jacob Mchangama's podcast history of free speech. How Weimar Germany, ambivalent about free speech and vulnerable to censorship, quickly gave way to Nazi tyranny."

I can't recommend this highly enough, because Warren's proposal seems to be making the exact same mistake as the one made by the social democrats of Weimar Germany.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/freespeechhistory/Episode_39_-_The...

EDIT: Warren constraining it to just voting doesn't do much to address the lesson here: if the government is put in charge of determining what is true and false, that makes it easier for a fascist government to consolidate its power. This is exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s. This is all covered in the podcast linked immediately above.

Downvoting me won't stop history from repeating itself. Please listen!

There are huge Twitter meltdowns happening over this right now because CNBC put out a tweet without the "voting" disqualifier in the headline -- i.e. making it seem like Warren wants to criminalize all posting of info which is deemed "disinformation."

I agree that would be Orwellian, but what Warren has proposed is much more narrow: she wants to make it illegal specifically to post disinformation about voting. So, for instance, it would be illegal to tweet "Go vote in Iowa on February 4!" when the vote is actually scheduled for February 3.

No. Warren did not narrow it to only about voting.

Here is her own website: https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/fighting-digital-disinform...

Edit: after read through the webpage, I realized that although the webpage talks about lots of things, but she did only propose to criminalize disinformation about voting. But this still feels dangerous. It's really like a tactic from authoritarian governments. They would talk about "disinformation" as a broad concept, and propose to criminalize the worst ones, and then expand the scope of regulation under the same concept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com