Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills. None of those is true of Americans en masse.
None of those is true for people en masse.
Agree in general, but where does it stop? What about articles? Web searches? Websites hosted on Google Cloud?
What about documented (albeit very limited) cases of voter fraud in favor of Biden?
What about documented (albeit very limited) cases of voter fraud in favor of Trump?
>It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills
This could always be true in reverse, and pretty un-recognizable no? Does not your statement itself reflect some assumption in the ability of people to be rational actors to determine which debate is and isn't true, artificial, astro turfed, propagandized etc.
Think of for example the Iraq war push, and evidence provided for it. There are always unknown unknowns, and so your "first principles" cannot be assumed to be true
https://commoncog.com/blog/how-first-principles-thinking-fai...
Propaganda wasn't born yesterday, neither were people in the past more rational than today.
However, that doesn't excuse conspiratorialism. We still have a responsibility to find reliable trust channels and to sift through evidence, and when it becomes apparent that we're incorrect (e.g., when evidence is presented that weakens or invalidates our claims), we ought to admit our error and critically evaluate our sources who led us astray.
To put a fine point on it, the media should have to answer for its sins, but those sins don't license the rest of us to behave badly.
So ultimately you prioritize what might be described as "collective health" over generalized notions of freedom. Is that "pretty anti censorship", as this question of negative externalities is always the point of contention for censoring anything is it not?
I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health. I think it means simple frameworks of censorship, free speech, and facts cannot be generalized or universalized, as ultimately many of these will run into value judgments that aren't easily answered by questions of objective truth.
>I'm not remotely convinced that there's any kind of evidence
And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence. Or which debates or opinions are healthy or which are off limits. We see this with COVID where it's hard enough to assess the specific health risks while balancing the trade-offs of other health risks and economic impacts of lock-downs etc. "true" is too broad to encompass all the variables.
I'm not falling hard on this. I'm presently living in the tension between free speech ideals and collective political health, and I don't purport to have any great answers.
> I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health.
Agree, I think this is completely valid and I think we see a lot of this already in the cancel culture movement--lots of perfectly reasonable, healthy debate is suppressed as "possibly harmful". It's a real concern.
> And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence.
I don't buy this. I think even conspiratorialists are perfectly capable of reasoning (reasonably) well when it doesn't conflict with their political allegiance. In my opinion, the issue is that some people know full well that they're being dishonest, but they simply don't care--they value the truth less than they value their political tribe. And please note that I think there are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle who put party above truth--this isn't me punching at Republicans or conservatives or whomever while pretending that my ideological compatriots are perfectly behaved (that would make me quite the hypocrite!)--although it wouldn't be appropriate to litigate that here.
“election fraud conspiratorialists” seem to have a case in court. It’s up to Supreme Court to decide whether something is true or not, not youtube.
About them being loud, how can they be “loud” when none of the media is representing their case?
This act of censorship is showcasing very grim future where absolute minority gets to decide what tune whole generations are playing to.
I like ideas that I don't agree with when debate is healthy. I don't like when people who hold those ideas just keep shouting the same thing over and over without actually engaging with the rebuttals presented--frankly I find that behavior reprehensible. I have sympathy for people who want to suppress that sort of behavior, which is what you're picking up on from my previous comment, but I'm far from convinced that it's a viable solution.
Mostly though, this conspiratorial content is so obviously damaging and in bad-faith, etc that I don't care so much about imperfections with respect to free speech ideals, just like I'm not very worked up that Germany bans holocaust denialism.
> About them being loud, how can they be “loud” when none of the media is representing their case?
Because social media exists, and because the POTUS is using his enormous platform to the same end?
> This act of censorship is showcasing very grim future where absolute minority gets to decide what tune whole generations are playing to
This has always been the case. Traditional media is exactly this model.
You seem to have misread my comment. I'm not arguing that there is zero fraud. I didn't even say in my post that there was no conspiracy (though I'll say here that there wasn't). I only said the conspiratorialists aren't arguing constructively. I'm probably pretty aligned with you--I wouldn't be surprised if there were a handful of fraudulent ballots on either side, but there's certainly no evidence for a conspiracy.
Every semi reputable editor (even Fox!) has put the brakes on this disinformation campaign, but it seems that doing so just makes the people believing it move on to even less credible feeds. Ultimately I think the hallucination can only die down on its own, but on the timescale of several years. Meanwhile the damage is being done right now. I just hope it's all just so Trump can continue grifting and developing political capital to try avoiding jail, rather than some larger plan like deliberately inciting a civil war.
Previously if one ventured into Internet conspiracy theory land, their new belief would be tempered by their social circle. Now whatever wild thing manages to get enough attention also creates its own social proof. We're essentially dealing with a violent mixture of the old and the new where digital non-natives are tuning into raw memetic noise while giving it the trust of the 1990's evening news.
I would be curious to see how this played out in a parallel universe where section 230 had never existed, the MITM business never gained popularity, new media ("tech") companies had to editorialize more like old media, and the anti-establishment action stayed on p2p nets with a higher barrier to entry.
The issue, is that the concerns are not being evaluated, both sides are not being interviewed, etc. We really need a trial. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet, in almost any of these "hearings". The lawsuits are dismissed due to "standing" or procedural issues, not on the merits.
Maybe they should hire lawyers who actually have a single clue what they hell they're doing and not Rudy Giuliani, who hasn't been in a court room since 1992 and doesn't know literally the first week of constitutional law.
They have literally been going to court and not won a single time. These are not partisan judges. These are not Democrat secretary of states. These are Republicans.
They are throwing out every lawsuit so far. None have been substantiated, zero.
Stop repeating lies.
To start with, it seems Galileo didn’t say « Pero se mueve ». If you pull the string from there, he can’t possibly have been incarcerated for saying that the Earth wasn’t the center of universe, because Kepler more or less said the same before and wasn’t incarcerated. All of that, which I had been taught in school, is false. The king of France was guillotined because he wanted to organize a referendum for him, which he was confident to win, not because he was unpopular. And so it goes on to XXth century, and the to XXIth century, with the feminism and racism narratives. When you notice the ILO’s universal treaty of 1928 against slavery of every human on Earth...
...didn’t include males from 18 to 49. Who had to wait until the UN treaty of 1957 against forced labour, if I remember, to be included.
I’m praying every night for the world to pop out of this censorship of reality. But praying is less efficient than censorship.
That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1]
January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2]
January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3]
Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West.
Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.ht...
[4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.)
[5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.
If Alex moves to another platform wouldn't part of his following move to this platform? Wouldn't that grow others in that new platform.
Isn't deplatforming just replatforming. With every deplatform doesn't it leak more users to the new platform.
If they deplatform them one day it could be you.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I said I did not need "perfect evidence." I cited evidence, albeit imperfect. Whether it's strong enough to change someone's beliefs is between them and their epistemology. That's all I have to say on this subject.
But you need one to change hearts and minds.
The problem was giving him access to a much broader public, to sow paranoia and FUD among tens or hundreds of millions of people who actually play important roles in society and don't have time to spend debunking everything they hear.
Also consider that he's lost a lot of his ability to grow his audience, which is no small thing.
Banning on platforms for whatever reason reduces the platforms reach and raises the platform the party moves too.
We use to separate people by race now we do it by idea. Now sure martin luther king or lennon would agree.
I'm sure we can trust our censors to never do something like that! They have our best interests at heart, right? Nothing like this could ever go wrong, there's no examples from history or fiction about anything like that. Nope, it's always Wonderful Good People that only ban things that Bad Evil People would like, and reality is totally black-and-white, and only Bad Evil People would think otherwise.
Social media is engaging in censorship, which means our society is screwed.
Social media _has_ to engage in this type of censorship because if they _don't_, society is screwed.
I think both views are probably correct.
But if we're going to screw up our society, I'd at least like to be on the side that's acting in good faith. Maybe we can stave off the inevitable a little longer.
Yes. Absolutely it has. It's naive to think that censorship, propaganda and such never work. They're not absolutes, certainly. But thinking of these as impotent and doomed is a dangerous naivety.
Chris Hitchens had a great piece about banned literature like Orwell in Czechoslovakia: More people seemed to have read it than in the west. There are plenty of examples where censorship fails.
That said, thinking that it always fails is dangerous. There's a reason censorship exists by default unless it's explicitly banned. There's a reason why strong censorship (heresy bans) exists in all monotheistic religions. Not only have they had an effect, but it's a defining feature of the religion and (IMO) the reason why these have taken over the whole world.
It matters what the top papers print, top channels run, and what appears (or does not) on social media. It may not be a predictable and mechanical effect, but censorship is not inert.
That said, we tend to overuse the word "censorship." The difference between an editor and a censor is reach. If the editor of newspaper X edits all newspapers, they are a censor. Youtube is wading into the murky gray area of this dichotomy.
For example, there HAS been voter fraud uncovered this election, because there is voter fraud EVERY election. The question is one of magnitude. Has the Trump administration been able to provide evidence sufficient to actually change the result of the election? No. Most conservative pundits I have seen are extremely clear about this distinction. But is this going to ban them discussing it, or discussing new evidence that is being brought forward?
As other users have mentioned, this country went through 3 years of hearing about Russian collusion during an investigation that ultimately provided no evidence of that having been an issue capable of unseating the president or delegitimizing that election. Throughout that period, I didn't hear any arguments saying that discussion of that topic should have been censored, and that is a good thing.
To me, the issue of how to effectively reach a general consensus in these matters is even more important than who is right or wrong. It is my personal opinion that this can only be achieved through transparency and openness, but, as always, I am my own harshest critic, so I entertain that I might be wrong.
I was sympathetic to the ideas floating around in early November, that the issue would go away once we let all the legal processes play out. But they have played out, the votes are all certified, and nothing's changed.
The FN (yeah yeah they changed names, who cares) still spews its hatred behind closed doors, our police forces are amongst the worst offenders of any developed countries when it comes to racism and systemic issues (and consistently proving that even the police unions are a bunch of thugs), we have people like Zemmour on TV spewing hateful nonsense that even Fox News would probably frown at by now, and our own current government has been trying to get a law in place to prevent freedom of press so significantly that the UN and most of the world looking at those pieces of news have actually been ringing the alarms in every possible way.
While on a personal and biased level I certainly don't mind that daddy Le Pen was fined multiple times throughout the years for calling the Holocaust "a detail of history", we don't really have any proof that it does anything more than make people who dislike him (like me) happy to see him fined, and unfortunately give reasons for supporters of his bullshit to feel vindicated (i.e. rise of the extreme right everywhere with a very salient point regarding being "silenced", which crystallizes to the extreme in stuff coming from the US like Qanon).
Youtube is having a tough time because they're almost always pointed at first and foremost for being THE rabbit hole of misinformation/radicalization and other things, but they're stepping into a minefield by touching on one such hot subject without having a broader policy (extending beyond whatever the current US issue is at any moment), backed by an army of lawyers.
(I've stopped following the battles of up and downvotes on this message instead of any actual reply.. I'm only left to wonder how many of either are emotional responses over valuing the argument itself, and on this subject even HN isn't proving to be very different from reddit today)
Berkeley had to spend $600k in security to allow Ben Shapiro to speak, because "anti fascists" were accusing him of white supremacy, and being a fascist, and violently attempting to prevent him from speaking. And this was after they had successfully prevented him from speaking earlier in the year. Similar "anti fascists" pulled the fire alarm on Janice Fiamengo for speaking about men's issues. Warren Farrel had a similar experience, with people absolutely berating the attendants of one of his lectures for their support of fascism.
In France fascism is not illegal. There is only one thing that is really taboo, and it's badmouthing jews. Herve Ryssen, a French writer and film maker, is sleeping in jail right now because the contents of his books and documentaries was considered to be hateful.
Similarly, the only few websites that are censored by the French government are far-right websites that typically have antisemitic content (a prominent case is Democratie Participative, the French equivalent of the Daily Stormer).
That's for institutional censorship. In practice, there is an even stronger form of de-facto censorship in France (assassination) for people who draw or show caricatures of the prophet of Islam (Charlie Hebdo, and more recently a history teacher who has been beheaded; quite a few more people live under 24/7 police protection for similar reasons).
It's a pretty grim situation overall.
Most people have absolutely zero idea what Fascism is/was; they have a Hollywood confabulation in their head, perhaps mixed images of Star Wars and Harry Potter bad guys, anyone in a uniform, etc. Zero historical understanding of what Italy was all about in the early 20th century, no understanding of the modernizations and cleanups Mussolini brought to his country. I would hardly defend his every act, but the idea of nationalism combined with an aesthetic informed by history and myth has proven to be a very powerful one for galvanizing a society into action.
Evola's "Critique of Fascism from the Right" is one very good place to get an understanding of what the underlying ideology of "real fascism" is, separate from the inevitably-flawed implementation. (We don't need to pretend that perfect implementations of anything are possible, of course, and we similarly forgive communists their lack of a proper implementation of their own idea, which at its heart still has the same impetus of improving the state of mankind by changing the structure of civilization.)
Nobody is bringing that back. In a young and multi-cultural country like the USA, the founding mythos is neither powerful enough, aesthetic enough, or common enough to be a driving force for change any longer. There may be small pockets of adherents, but numerically they are insignificant, non-violent, and not worth worrying about in comparison to other drivers of change.
Instead of that specific and mostly-dead political ideology, the word "fascism" has become a standing for "authoritarianism" of any kind - whether it's left-wing, right-wing, or even what I think is more properly labelled as Totalitarian Liberalism, which is the era we are heading into now.
Remember that term: Totalitarian Liberalism. It is only under this system that you're ostensibly free, except everything is controlled by corporations, and people who pretend to be left-wing and "of the people" will defend the rights of billion-dollar corporations to restrict freedoms that were enshrined in law hundreds of years ago.
This action by Youtube is a perfect example of this. Each precedent they set is met by a legion of comments on sites like HN and Reddit that defend their actions, because of course it's only Fake News badthinking idiots that are kicked off. Nobody seems to notice that the scope of control increases each time, slowly but continually restricting free speech on the platform, in concert with efforts to make it more difficult to host things elsewhere, more difficult for locked-down walled-garden devices to be able to access unapproved content, etc.
It takes a real fool to think that this will never be used to suppress something legitimate.
Yes! This is amazing. There is absolutely nothing fascist about Trump - from his complete lack of anything aesthetic, his terrible diction, his lackluster speeches (despite the big rallies, which show people are hungry for something better in this direction.)
> Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production.
Whereas under fascism the exact opposite was in effect: new regulations, new control, and an early effort toward environmentalism was evident.
Or they did in the last presidential election.
Falsely calling someone a rapist is libelous and slanderous -- both crimes.
Not all types of lies need to fall under free speech.
Reducing an entire movement with complex beliefs to a single talking point is not valid in the least.
I've noted your request!
I suppose that depends on if that dissonance was based in factual accounts of reality. If so, then yeah censorship probably wouldn't work. That's because opinions based in fact are consistent with the rest of the world and that tends to keep them in circulation. On the other hand, completely false and baseless lies don't last long without someone pouring energy into them. That's because they're in conflict with details that are readily observed. They might catch people's attention as a kind of entertainment. But, beyond that, they don't provide much practical value. When they're squelched, they'll just fall out of fashion like a cancelled Netflix series.
So, banning Salman Rushdie and any cartoon of Muhammad?
Say this is true. How would you recommend measuring this?
So, for introspection, and I know it is not a perfect analogy, but imagine you are at a scientific presentation, and you're gut feeling tells you there is a flaw in the arguments presented. So you pose a question but instead of receiving an answer that might lay to rest your misgivings, the speaker just says "That question is not allowed. Next.". How likely is it that that response changed your mind in favor of the theories presented?
(examples: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-f... )
If those videos are not as present on youtube to begin with, perhaps fewer people end up down these rabbit holes. Of course it won't do anything to convince people who are already falling down the hole.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211
[2] https://mark-ledwich.medium.com/youtube-radicalization-an-au...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/not-youtubes-algorithm-radicaliz...
The real truth stands up to all scrutiny, and that scrutiny is an essential part in arriving at the truth.
Unless...they’re a publication in which case they need to be regulated and taxed accordingly.