this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.
You often can. Let's try some exercises:
1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'
2) COVID-19 is a hoax
3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other
4) 9/11 never happened
5) Asbestos causes cancer
6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree
7) Disinformation is harmful
And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.
Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.
Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.
Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.
I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace
All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong
Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.
There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.
If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).
A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?
> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.
That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?
It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.
For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.
https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...
trailing slash gives a 404
As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.
The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.
I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them
EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.
What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?
8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.
Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.
The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.
Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.
But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.
Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity
not
Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity
Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.
- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.
- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer
- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces
Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?
This will not age well.
These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.
Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.
This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.