> We've given up on protecting our freedoms...
Wow, putting it like that makes me realize it's just part of the larger societal trend toward authoritarianism. I guess this is one of those 'Stallman was right' moments.
Wow, putting it like that makes me realize it's just part of the larger societal trend toward authoritarianism. I guess this is one of those 'Stallman was right' moments.
RE the wider trend toward authoritarianism, I'm not yet sure I see it clearly, at least outside the privacy space. But I do feel trends towards taking away end-user control and turning everything into a service, which are very much market-driven, though perhaps they also are a subset of authoritarianism.
I came of age during a time when we on the left believed fiercely in personal freedoms, especially freedom of speech. We would blast music that would say things like, "F--k you I won't do what you tell me." [1]
Now the same left I loved can't erupt in protest fast enough when social media aren't censoring idiots. We used to all know that censoring of anybody was wrong, but also that it didn't work. Censoring was what corporations and authoritarian states did to people, and we hated it.
That's just one example of the change people have gone through.
[1] https://genius.com/Rage-against-the-machine-killing-in-the-n...
And also, step back a bit and look at the state of digitally distributed disinformation. We've elected politicians that look like characters from an absurdist satire, loony conspiracy theories are going mainstream, climate change isn't real, the pandemic is a lie, a significant percentage of the US population thinks the presidental election was completely fraudulent... and so on.
Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society. I'd love to think that if you let people figure things out for themselves they'll eventually manage it. That they'll eventually stop believing wild claims based on no evidence.
But we don't have time to test that theory.
Should the big platforms have the power over the digital public square that they do? Definitely not. But they do have it. Pressuring them to deal with misinformation is something I completely support.
The alternative is tech illiterate legislation because the misinformation problem isn't going to go away on it's own.
I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.
The people creating propaganda are also interested in enforcing censorship if they are in the position to do so.
Propaganda and censorship work far better together than individually for groups that want to brainwash society into certain beliefs.
But since you go on about advertising, that is a way for groups that want it, is to be able to force people to listen to their message. This robs people of their agency to listen to what they choose to. Censorship also doesn't allow people to listen to what they choose to. This makes advertising and censorship very alike. They both result in a persons loss of freedom to choose what information they get.
The trick is simply keeping people like that out of power.
Allowing the lunatics to spread their message via effective platforms that are designed to promote your brand of bullshit to the people most likely to be vulnerable to it does NOT stop it from festering it actually maximizes the spread of the cancer. If it spreads fast enough you wont have a society to inform anymore because fascists only believe in free speech when its their speech if they gain enough power they will quickly take yours from you.
I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good faith" argument would win.
I think our problem is that, as you know, humans are subject to a ton of logical fallacies and 'hack vectors' of rhetoric (see also Shopenhauer's 38 strategems). If we, participating in or viewing an argument, fight to overcome these, we're able to have debates of rhetoric - the "truth" wins out in a debate.
But it's a lot worse than a situation where some number of people didn't learn this in school, or can't be bothered to cut through the logical fallacies. Rather, the problem is that these particular kind of lies have a seductive capacity - they 'feel right', because they operate in the part of human speech and human logic that's driven by our instinct, rather than driven by learned behavior. People aren't neutral, and evenly likely to pick the lies versus the truth - they're overwhelmingly more likely to pick the lies, unless they've both deliberately trained themselves not to, and also personally value objective truth over feeling good. Most people don't - even scientists struggle with this.
Not all lies are seductive like this - but the kind that slot into "tricks of debate" absolutely are. They're the bread and butter of con men.
This is why every formal "forum of debate" - in the sciences or academia et al, has it as just a basic rule that they can just get shown the door immediately if they're caught lying. If you just straight-up-lie on a paper getting submitted to i.e. Nature, it can ruin your career. It's why perjury is a crime - because lies of that type just have far stronger evolutionary fitness compared to truth. It's because the rule-setters in these fields care more about reaching the objective truth than they do about feeling good - and they know how dangerous this is, so they treat it with a scorched earth policy.
---
I believe we've been able to get away with free speech because - thus far - most of our media wasn't censored, so much as it was mandated to be "true". You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was plausibly true - people fudged stuff all the time but it generally couldn't be bald-faced lies. As long as that was enforced, then what you said about "good speech being the antidote to bad speech" could work.
But for a few decades, we've had no such enforcement of truth in lots of our media, especially the internet, and I believe the number of people believing outright falsehoods has gotten an awful lot worse. Dangerously so.
That said, you seem to have presupposed that the people doing the censoring are always (or mostly) right. Why? Because they happen to be in power?
Twitter (and I think Facebook) censored the New York Post, even disabling their account, over a major news story that turned out to be true. It went against thev censor's preconceived ideas of how the world is, and they smashed that button as fast as they could.
What makes you think the people doing the censoring are somehow unbiased righteous purveyors of truth, absent their own instinctive biases that mislead then into censoring unfairly? Surely history has shown that to rarely if ever be the case.
I totally agree with your analysis of the problem, but I follow it to a much different conclusion: humans can't be trusted to wield power of speech over others. They are too subject to their own instinctive and emotional reactions to information they don't like.
This idea, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it. In fact, surely we're owed some justification for the principle - does exposing widespread misinformation correct the bad effects before it was exposed? Some harm has already been done, and I'm not sure how that is justified by the principle.
I think that principle is lacking in empirical evidence, and theoretical justification for the harms it allows, which seem to be based on a shaky idea of the greater good.
The most egregious I can think of is the Russian government after the Bolshevik revolution. It had the death penalty for being in possession of certain books. In the end these censorship loving people (for other people, not them) killed tens of millions of people they governed (gulags, deliberate starvation of masses of people for instance), yet it is hardly talked about.
These bad effects of not censoring that people talk about seem so pitiful and small compared to what has happened when people willing to censor other people have got into power. Seriously, people stating things like 'sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it' are promoting things that totalitarian groups are very pleased to have, and despite asking for evidence, they provide no evidence that what they are trying to push is not far worse than what they are purportedly against. Along with the destruction of freedom that censorship brings to all the people that it applies to. Those that promote censorship can not be hypocritical and start with themselves first, but they won't, I'm sure they will scream loudest about how horrible censorship is if some other group got the power to censor what they may want to say.
The internet has made outcomes immediate. The internet has also removed the human element of social interaction. I think these two mix in a terrible way. I have no idea what can or should be done about it though.
The recent push to censor and silence dissent isn't an anomaly: the several hundreds years post enlightenment that gave us the ideas of individual rights and freedoms were the anomaly.
I also do not believe anyone advocating the censoring of others has been themselves censored, or put in a minority position where they were afraid to express dissent. Because if you have that experience, it tends to give one a dim view of censorship.
[citation needed]
The problem with your statement isn't the claim that tribal behaviours are a natural tendency in humans. Of course they are. The problem is your claim that they are somehow primary. There are many other tendencies of comparable weight, and how strongly they are expressed relative to each other depends very much on the individual.
Not to mention that when it comes to tribal instincts, there's a huge difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be. Their nuclear family? Their town/state/country? Their profession? Participants in their hobby? Their "race"? All of humanity?
Pretty much the whole of human history? There's no shortage of examples. To the contrary, it's more difficult to find examples that do not demonstrate tribalism.
> difference between individuals as to what they perceive their tribe to be
This is a recent luxury that hasn't existed for more than a century. Other than a few cultures here and there that encouraged blended demographics (usually as a consequence of conquest, think Rome).
It's not perfect there but most of the world is currently functioning.
Now what we are seeing with social media platforms (and I ould argue it started already earlier with the raise of fox news) at the moment is that we see that there are elements of society who found that facts and truth don't matter and freedom of speech doesn't matter if you have big enough pockets and use the right psychological strategies. Essentially the way society and particulary social media is set up is, that the richest voice gets heard (at least by some people) and the truth of what is being said is not important anymore. In other words the platform are used for controlling us (not by the government, but vested interests) and destroying society, freedom of speech is not helping against this if anything it's a hindrance because it assumes all speech is equal, which it isn't.
I don't have a solution and I would like a way to defend us without destroying freedom of speech, but I don't have a good solution.
Also these platforms have been "censoring" for a long time, nobody was batting an eyelid when Isis accounts and videos were removed. In fact many of the outlets who are now screaming about censorship were shouting that twitter et al. were not doing enough. That tells you a lot about howmuch they care about freedom of speech.
Some of them have taken the cues and actually committed such murders. The problem is there is money and importance to be earned by trivial to construct lies that a functioning marketplace of ideas would trivially discard but it turns out ours really doesn't work so well and freedom without responsibility is a clusterfuck.
We let the liars run wild and ended up with a reality TV star killing hundreds of thousands of people with his incompetence and working hard to start a war that would kill hundreds of thousands more in the last days of his regime. Perhaps visualize every one of those corpses stacked one in a reeking pile and realize that censorship may be the lesser of two evils.
They also suspended an account of a sitting state senator in Pennsylvania who was holding a hearing on alleged election fraud: https://www.ntd.com/twitter-suspends-account-of-state-senato...
There is no valid theory of morality which allows one to simply disregard predicable consequences of ones actions in preference for purely theoretical considerations.
This is why many other publications refused to run with this story because merely presenting "both sides" would not in fact be morally neutral it would have been wrong.
In the same vein Sen. Doug Mastriano was not presenting legitimate concerns about election fraud. There isn't any evidence for such it is literally a smokescreen for a desired takeover of the American government by a hostile minority.
The nypost and Mastriano are traitors in the old and simple constitutional sense of conspirators against the legitimate form of government on which all other freedoms hinge. It isn't that they are attacking Biden he like all leaders will be a transitory feature in our system of government here today and gone tomorrow. What they are attacking is a democratic form of government by polluting the essential contest by which we choose our leaders with lies about candidates and lies about the process in order to undermine the whole thing.
The fact that such actions aren't sufficiently clear cut to rise to prosecutable crimes doesn't mean we ought to forget their betrayal. It is OK if twitter doesn't lend its microphone to Mastriano or the nypost. Let them rent their own website if they prefer. Ntd.com is incidentally a laughable source that nobody ought to credit. For gods sake the story you linked is actually them reporting on a story from the epoch times. For the record the real and complete story is that twitter NEVER suspended the senators government account and says that it suspended the personal account because someone reported it for impersonating the senator and it was reinstated.
Presumably a more reliable source would have included the entire story.