This constant pushing of stories about Fake News and Misinformation makes it really feel like there's a concerted effort to alter public opinion on censorship and free speech.
I would say it has, and I consider only reasonable that there is a desire to understand the mechanisms behind it. I would consider the effects net negative. No need to a concerted effort.
This way, you don't get reports that, "x helps you be healthier!" when the study is really just showing that x culture has better marks on something OR a mouse study was showing promise, without reminding folks that most mouse studies don't work for humans (or that some mice are bred to make studies easier). I suppose the more damaging rhetoric would be presenting information that makes immigrants seem like criminals, when really, the crime rate is lower and the examples were isolated incidents.
I'd extend this to places that people expect as much truth as is reasonable - for example, vitamins and supplements. We know that "supports..." or "may reduce..." is taken as fact.
Ideally, you'd get your news from more than one source and if one source is almost always different from the others, you'd no longer use it as fact - but people aren't going to go through this process all that often if at all.
No, but how do we jump to conclusion that government, government-controlled or government-aligned entity should be allowed to control the information we receive?
There is a dilemma. Should we report and amplify their voice or should we shut up about an "increasing" problem?
Some problems do disappear when you ignore them.
Hell, a few years ago my bartender tried to sell me on their nonsensical ideas.
I think the easiness with which algorithms + human psychology helps the propagation of fake news are well documented and widely understood.
Our justice system tries to resolve this through an adversarial system. It’s not perfect but I can’t imagine allowing any single entity to determine what the truth is.
I thought the marketplace of ideas was a popular concept in the US.
"But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.
Unless you are a small child or truly have the mentality of what, I will not speak down to you like that.
I will repeat your quote though:
> "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
That quote is clearly an observation, not a call to action in itself. It is an observation that the US's notion of free speech is not at all universal, and can be confounding even to people with some quality ("sophistication", perhaps "worldliness" or other terms would be more helpful descriptors) that the author wouldn't expect it to confound.
You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways).
Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it. How hard is that to do? Learn how to construct and present arguments in ways that actually have a chance to persuade instead of making statements that verge on non sequiturs.
Here, I'll help you: Link to the actual opinion piece [0]. It's clear from that that he's arguing in favor of hate speech laws (which is a slippery slope, I'm pretty sure a few "Christians" I know would like hate speech laws so they could stop me from calling them anti-Christians), and thinks there's already precedent for such laws.
> The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted.
You didn't present that part though, I only stumbled on it because someone else linked to it in this thread.
TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
> You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways). Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it.
I was attributing the context to the quote. I hadn't really considered that people were unaware of the context, because I had read the quote in context. Context being an editorial titled "Why America needs a hate speech law"
> TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.
Thanks for the reply.
Stengel wrote last year in a Washington Post op-ed that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “It would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.”
He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.”
One side of the political aisle rallies against social media for censoring their posts while the other side says social media don't censor enough. I feel there is a simmering battle over a lot of our constitutionally protected rights which is about to reach a crescendo depending on what the Biden administration does in the next few years.
But your suspicioun that Scientific American is in the know of a coming push for censorship and is tayloring propaganda on that basis makes absolutely no sense to me.
Someone needs to update Herman's propaganda model to include how social media works.
The filters are the same, of course.
But the balance of power has shifted. eg Aggregators are now much more powerful than Advertisers.
The update should also reflect how Twitter (for example) is now exploited to shape narratives. There's always been astroturf, but now it's much more effective. What Phillip Howard (Lie Machines) calls "computational propaganda".
I think it's media hacking another vulnerable parts of human beings. I see attempts to censor and attempts to fake being censored in order to hijack different vulnerabilities.
Trump, as he so often does, co-opted the attack and used it offensively. The same media that was fretting about fake news was suddenly being called fake news, which was when they decided they no longer liked the term.
The Washington Post made this public and explicit, saying the media should no longer use the term they had popularized just months prior:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r...