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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate.

Why must fight all censorship. Because once you allow "a thing" to be censored, it becomes possible to censor "any thing".

Things in the past which were labeled misinformation and would have been suppressed for even longer (or forever) under current social attitudes of censoring anything that might make us feel bad.

  - Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the country.
  - Tobacco is addicting and gives you cancer.
  - Agent Orange caused US military health problems.
  - PTSD is a mental health issue (denied since at least WWI).

Remember all the power/leeway you give to the "left" (or right) will also be misused when the "right" (or left) take power again.

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> Things in the past which were labeled misinformation

I know that item-level thinking like this is necessary to gain emotional traction with people, but this issue is just so obvious at a systems-level.

the idea that we, right now the instant youre reading this, have discovered 100% of what there is to learn and 0% of what we know is wrong is so painfully, horrifically, obviously stupid (we've had computers for thirty years now, we're probably good for ETERNITY, right?). we both WANT and NEED a mechanism for dissenters and disinformation. misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles.

to say anything but this is to make the existential case that people are not to be trusted with their own free will.

> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen?

The saying goes something like "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."

I have heard this expression rephrased as "Logic is useless against those who reject it".

However, in my experience, both sides are logical, they just start from different axioms.

This is my experience as well, but I've also noticed that both sides do not adhere to their base axioms with the same tenacity, and the issues can be a spectrum of adherence to their claimed base beliefs.

It basically doesn’t matter if you get the other side to listen or not. Open and free discussion is out there for those who want to partake. There will always be zealots who choose not to.

Censoring opposition in order to be heard more loudly doesn’t work. In an IRL discussion, if you start talking over someone forcing them to stop talking, they’re going to shut down and never listen to anything you have to say.

It matters very much when that other side has the control of your government.

Luckily that changes every 4 or 8 years.

> How do you get the other side to listen?

Pretend you think like them, and make arguments that go against that thinking. Unfortunately, the way the media exists today this never happens, and both sides just attack strawmen in ways that get people to click their headlines and listen to their talking heads.

I think it's disingenuous to paint the entire "other side" as unreasonable, but I may be misinterpreting what you mean by "other side" here. There will always be unreasonable people, and I don't have a solution for them. However, I think _a lot_ of people are very tired of being demonized for disagreeing. Not every republican is a rabid tea partier, and not every democrat supports antifa.

> I think it's disingenuous to paint the entire "other side" as unreasonable, but I may be misinterpreting what you mean by "other side" here. There will always be unreasonable people, and I don't have a solution for them. However, I think _a lot_ of people are very tired of being demonized for disagreeing. Not every republican is a rabid tea partier, and not every democrat supports antifa.

There's a lot of fundamental issues that are just not limited to "rabid tea partiers", global warming and the pandemic/masks just to pick two.

> Pretend you think like them, and make arguments that go against that thinking.

Both sides have attacked the trustworthiness of the other. You can't convince someone of something when they think you're lying, or will lie and dissemble to get what you want, and nothing you say can be taken at face value because it's all a con to get some other goal which you claim to not want.

There has been such a concerted effort to so malign the other side that's it's less about clear communication than it is trust. It's got more in common with soldiers inpast wars being encouraged to use terms like krauts, gooks and chinks and those being used as stereotypes to explain the behavior and motivations of the other side than anything else, IMO.

The purpose isn’t to get “the other side to listen.” Its to get moderate to listen, and to make sure the other side feels heard. That procedural aspect of free speech is at least as important, if not more so, than the truth-finding aspect of free speech.

> I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen?

Re-education camps seem to be the go-to solution for many totalitarian regimes.

I’m not being a smart-ass... the desire some have for others to agree with them can itself be a pernicious thing.

Maybe "agreement" isn't what I meant as the goal - only progress. Fair point to address that they're not equal.

Assume good intentions, respect them as individuals, and listen to what they have to say even if you disagree.

These are basic tenants of productive debate.

Sometimes. I know people who only care to maximize for themselves and their immediate tribe, and could not care less what happens to others not useful for them.

It is naive to play the game as if others aren't interested in capturing an outsized share of the winnings. And obviously they're not going to officially state their motives.

I'm not convinced any other strategy of discourse is a winning one. Competing disinformation campaigns are a race to the bottom where everyone looses. Also, sometimes people simply want different things.

I completely agree with these points - but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying what do you do when your partner in debate completely ignores all of those things, but has equal say in the outcomes?

Agree to disagree, vote on it, and sometimes loose. Part of being in a democracy is that sometimes you dont get what you want, even when you are sure you are right.

Change can be slow, even for good ideas. If you have faith in humanity and democracy, then you believe good ideas will prevail in the end. There were US abolitionists in 1770 and the civil rights movement ended in 1970.

And when the problems require solutions in decades and not centuries to be agreed on? What then?

I used to have a lot more faith in our democracy but I can't help but feel lately like something has fundamentally changed, and the system is just catching up to that. What changed? I have no idea, but something feels _different_ from before.

I think that is a tough question. If the pace of democratic change is too slow, there aren't a lot of options. Essentially strip people of their voting rights and install a undemocratic government.

I hear your concern, but I think that the biggest change is that people have become accustomed to immediate change and more cynical overall. Democracies don't make sense unless you believe that people are good and correct ideas will ultimately prevail.

> I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen?

The only way is to stop preaching and listen to them. Really listen. This is how Daryl Davis converted the KKK according to his own accounts?

There is also a problem with approaching this type of dialog as one side vs. the other. People are all over the spectrum with their opinions on various issues. You might have a disagreement on one particular issue, but it's likely that you also have some common ground on other things. Use that to relate to people and try to influence their thinking to your point of view. It's not a war where you are trying to destroy "the other side".

For me, a good start would be to provide evidence that people have had their minds changed because information gets discussed more. E.g. you could demonstrate that the qanon phenomenon became less popular, not more, after it began getting wide media attention. (Unfortunately in this instance the opposite is the case. You have an uphill battle ahead trying to demonstrate your position empirically.)

Q is a really interesting conspiracy theory to bring up. It seems to be at the other end of the "valley" of conspiracy theories - it's almost like the most brazenly unbelievable ones are the ones that somehow gain the most traction.

It combined several long running conspiracy theories into one. Because they had been around for so long individually, combining them somehow made them more believable. Connecting seemingly disparate dots together added credibility because it explained everything conspiracy theorists believed.

>> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

> I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen?

I don’t think there’s any winning some people over.

My mother had a very problematic stat about police violence and racism last summer. I was able prove it wrong by getting the real stat in five seconds with a Google search. The source is well known and reputable. She refused to stop clinging to her source.

> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

The problem with that idea is that it takes more effort to debunk a lie than to tell one. It also takes more effort to absorb a debunking than a lie. That's why disinformation works.

Here's an example: JFK ate babies occasionally, and the media hushed it up. Oswald was actually a secret high-level CIA operative, and was so outraged by this that he assassinated JFK for it.

It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would it take you to debunk it?

It's just not practical to put all the burden of combating misinformation on each individual's shoulders. It's also necessary to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn't need to be done by a central authority, but people who've been convinced by a lie will perceive that as "censorship" by one.

> scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles.

Scientific consensus is also not arrived at by publishing literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it couldn't function without it. "More discussion" is saved for cases where those mechanisms failed.

Your example actually tells something. Nobody would believe your JFK baby eating story. It is easy to write a fake story, but it is not easy to have lots of people believe your fake story. "Misinformation" can spread because they seem plausible to enough people, not because they are "bullshit" like your example.

The problem with your calling this example out, is that people will believe this stuff if down the rabbit hole enough.

Jan 20th Biden and Harris were supposed to be arrested and their pedo evidence was suppose to be shown to all, along with evidence of election fraud.

The next one is what March 7th?

A lot of people think an ancient all powerful being will re-appear and lift up adherents on high, and punish "bad" non believers.

> It is easy to write a fake story, but it is not easy to have lots of people believe your fake story.

I thought so too before Pizzagate, Q-Anon....

Perhaps a better example: Jewish people are telling you the earth is round so that way they can distract you from the fact they're kidnapping children and drinking their blood.

A fantastic video on the topic of difficult to debunk, but easy to produce content https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44.

I wish you were right, but you are not. It is very easy to have lots of people believe a fake story.

QAnon conspiracy theories are incoherent and absurd yet are embraced by thousands and cause needless harm to many.

> "Misinformation" can spread because they seem plausible to enough people

Conspiracy theories are only believed by those who already mistrust the target. If there's a lot of conspiracies revolving around something/someone, you have a trust problem.

How about Jewish space lasers?

> Scientific consensus also not arrived at by publishing literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it couldn't function without it.

What counts as a "crackpot idea?" We don't have to dabble in hypotheticals about JFK eating babies. We have real examples from current political events that show we're not talking about "slippery slopes" here. We have rolled down the slope with stunning speed.

In March 2020, the Surgeon General suggested that wearing masks was effective to prevent spread of COVID was a crackpot idea: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/485332-surgeon-general... ("Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus[.]").

10 months later, the Surgeon General is calling that same assertion a "myth": https://twitter.com/surgeon_general/status/13189727242078986... ("There is a currently circulating MYTH suggesting masks don’t work to prevent spread of COVID-19.").

I have a degree in aerospace engineering--I totally get that scientific understanding evolves. But it doesn't evolve like that. The truth is that the Surgeon General's March 2020 statement was ill-advised and overly-certain, and so was the October 2020 statement. Whether masks are effective at limiting the spread of COVID is quite uncertain. Mask-wearing rates vary quite dramatically between countries with similar COVID death rates: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-off.... By June 2020, the U.S. had mask-wearing rates of 75%. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were under 20%. Out of those, Sweden and the U.S. have death rates (per population) 5-10 times higher than Denmark and Norway.

Despite that uncertainty, I think most people worried about "misinformation" would use mask-denialism as a motivating example for why restrictions are needed. So what are the restrictionists really advocating for here?

> The issue is actually pretty uncertain, and government bodies are making categorical statements for political reasons

I think it's more complicated than just politics, as I was saying elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26139732), public health officials advised against mask-wearing for general public initially for a very particular reason (possible shortages for medical frontline workers). As far as public healthy policy is concerned, where you cannot pass a certain threshold of complexity in communicating best practices to grandmas around the nation, masks work is a good enough message and it stands on pretty solid science: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.31.20166116v...

And it was damned foolish to say "masks don't work" if what they wanted the public to understand was "please leave surgical and N95 masks for healthcare workers. We are exploring the effectiveness of cloth masks".

THAT would have been honesty, it would have explained the reason they didn't want the general public using masks, and it would have hinted at an alternative while not directly confirming masks work (or don't work).

NOT TO MENTION that the CDC probably could have asked South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or any other country where mask usage was common, "How well do masks work?" and been pointed at a few relevant studies, right? But no, they make a very fishy statement to the public claiming masks don't work for normal people.

/rant Sorry. You hit a nerve. Pretty frustrated that the CDC would throw away its credibility like that.

> It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would it take you to debunk it?

How long would it take you to establish enough credibility to be able to make an accusation like that and have people actually take your word for it? There might be a few nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything negative about him, but most people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully question such an outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.

Dishonest people retain credibility when their supporters are trapped in echo chambers designed to keep the truth out. Censorship is a powerful tool for establishing and maintaining echo chambers. We need to fight echo chambers, not promote censorship.

> How long would it take you to establish enough credibility to be able to make an accusation like that and have people actually take your word for it?

Keep this in mind: Q is literally some dude on 4chan/8chan with a tripcode.

> There might be a few nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything negative about him, but most people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully question such an outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.

I make no claim that my example lie is a good example of misinformation/disinformation. It was only meant to show the asymmetry of effort implicit in "more discussion."

The key thing about getting a lie to stick is to hitting the right emotional buttons with it. And it's so easy broadcast lies nowadays that you can even discover those buttons stochastically, by just throwing random lies out there and seeing what sticks.

Furthermore, if your goal is not to convince anyone of anything in particular, but to just to gum up a society (which is the goal of disinformation, properly understood), you don't event need to find particular lies with a broad appeal across society. You just need enough lies that enough people fall for one or two.

I believe it is reasonable to speculate that QAnon members are generally trapped in extreme, right-wing echo chambers. Echo chambers enable people to retain undeserved credibility.

> I believe it is reasonable to speculate that QAnon members are generally trapped in extreme, right-wing echo chambers. Echo chambers enable people to retain undeserved credibility.

That's not true, for instance:

https://www.startribune.com/conspiracy-theories-of-qanon-fin...

> Conspiracy theories of QAnon find fertile ground in an unexpected place – the yoga world

> QAnon's conspiracy theories have taken root among yogis and other adherents of natural medicine.

I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are not generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are yoga practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?

> I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are not generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are yoga practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?

I suppose a significant number of yoga teachers/influencers could be secret dittoheads, but the idea kind of beggars belief.

One of the interesting things about QAnon is that it offered on-ramps to groups outside the stereotype of people would go for such a theory (e.g. "save the children"). People in right-wing echo chambers were definitely more susceptible, but it's a mistake to be reassured by that.

Also, particular echo chambers aren't some kind of primordial entity. They start all the time and they often grow. So even if something like QAnon requires one, that just means there's one more step.

Are yoga practitioners usually liberal? Is that a thing? My perception has always been that yoga communities tend to attract those interested in "alternative medicine", a group which certainly has its own share of echo chambers. Given the apparent ideologically-insular nature of both groups, I'm not surprised that there would be overlap between the them.

Echo chambers are not a new phenomena, but they have certainly become more powerful with the rise of the internet. Never before have we been so easily able to surround ourselves with groups of like-minded individuals. But what I find even more concerning are algorithmically-driven content feeds which are tailored to suite the preferences of each individual user.

Algorithmically-driven, tailored content feeds basically automate the creation of echo chambers. It all sounds well and good to the user - after all, they get access to more of the type of content they prefer. However, those feeds almost inevitably learn to always provide the user exclusively with content that reinforces their preexisting ideas and opinions. They'll eagerly spread things like QAnon if it results in increased user engagement.

I don't think there's anything particularly special about QAnon compared to any other politically-charged conspiracy group. I think they just got lucky and once they passed a certain threshold of popularity, the algorithms did what they do best.

So you'd like to make lying illegal...? I have an amendment to show you, it's actually the very first one!

Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.

>Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people

You disagree with letting censorship be decided on democratically?

The thing about democracy is that there are so many levels of government - and quite literally any decision made by a democratically elected government can be condemned as undemocratic (Because some other layer of government - or better yet, a Joe on the street - does not agree with it.)

This is how you get people shouting about how a democratically elected president, who was given, by a democratically elected congress, powers to operate a regulatory department, is acting undemocratic-ally [1], when he appoints someone those people don't like to head that department.

What those people forget is that in a democracy, you can't in good faith cherrypick outcomes as 'undemocratic'. You can only ensure that the process for making changes is democratic. If the people you elect decided to turn your country into a police state, well, that sucks, but that's a democratic decision that they've made - and as long as you can vote them out, it can be democratically reversed. Prohibition was reversed, after all, communist witch hunts eventually ended, it's no longer illegal to ride in a train car while black, people in the US are no longer jailed for writing pro-German newspaper articles, and we no longer round up entire ethnic groups, and concentrate them in a camp (Which are all hallmarks of a police state. They are no longer present in our society, thanks in part to a democratic process. Other hallmarks still are, but if enough people care, we'll eventually get around to them.)

[1] Despite neither the constitution, the law that brought that department into existence, the judiciary, nor years of precedent requiring that the department must be ran by an elected official, or that the department's every decision [2] must be voted on by Congress.

[2] As it turns out, it's quite democratic for an elected official to defer decision-making to an un-elected underling. That's fine. What makes this democratic, is that you can punish the elected official, if the underling behaves poorly, by voting them out. As long as all power flows from an elected office, this thing works. What is not fine is if the un-elected underling is not appointed, or fire-able by an elected office, or by an agent of an elected office. That's where the difference between democratic, and undemocratic lies.

> democracy

> democratically elected president

That's not really what I was talking about.

Incorrect. We can __prosecute__ against those who break the law. We __must not__ censor, because that is the slippery slope; all the more so when it is done without judicial oversight in an adversarial review system.

That is a distinction without a difference. You are talking about the mechanics of censorship.

It isn't. There are two differences.

The first is that prosecutions are retrospective. If something is true and you can't stop anyone from saying it, only punish them after, then people who are willing to sacrifice their freedom for the truth can't be silenced. There is also less incentive to punish them because the cat is already out of the bag, and people are more willing to push back against a prosecution for speaking a truth that they've seen survive an adversarial public debate.

The second is that prosecutions happen in courts bound (in the US) by the First Amendment, and the prosecution fails if the defendant was engaged in protected speech. Facebook or Comcast/MSNBC (note: the same company) deciding what constitutes "misinformation" with no accountability for over-censoring is not that.

If I understand correctly, you're claiming that we __must not__ censor child pornography? Isn't prosecution a form of censorship anyways? I think what you're saying is a textbook example of a slippery slope fallacy.

Following the law is a slippery slope? I’m pretty sure the parent is saying that because child pornography is explicitly illegal, it can (and should) be censored.

I believe this is the same logic being used to sensor covid deniers, false cures, and fraudulent election crackpots like our last president.

The latter type of lie incites people to insurrection and riles up violence, the other two cause people to do things that may kill themselves or others.

Last time I checked no court of law had convicted the former President of any criminal offense. So, no, I don’t see how that logic was used to censor him.

Same for false cures to diseases, nobody imprisons pseudoscience witch doctors for recommending vitamins to cure cancer. (Maybe if they claimed to be a medical doctor?) If that were so, I know of a half dozen people in Boulder that would’ve been in jail by now. Certainly no court had convicted any of these people of a crime prior to censorship.

So, as far as I can tell, these people had been censored without having committed (or at least convicted of) a crime.

He got off on a technicality. Even many of those that voted not to convict said that they thought he was guilty. They just didn't think they could convict a non-sitting president.

False cures for diseases, yes, people absolutely go to jail or receive massive fines. Sometimes on charges of fraud, sometimes on charges of endangerment. If your fake cure doesn't actually do harm (and is just useless) then you can usually get away with it. A quick google search will show you multiple stories about criminal charges for fake covid cures.

Agreed. If something is explicitly illegal, then that’s grounds for censorship. If something isn’t explicitly illegal, then it shouldn’t be censored. The First Amendment in the US provides for nearly limitless free speech, with very few exceptions. That’s how we should police speech online.

> child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn

None of these things are misinformation.

Technically true, but try building a bomb from one of those tutorials

I have as a teenager made acetone peroxide and ammonium nitrate pipe bombs from instructions printed at the library. They worked ;)

See, even these descriptions which you presumably think are clear distinctions are not objective categories of information.

Do drawings count? How about deepfakes? Pyrotechnic display textbooks?

You're going to need a judge, and that judge is going to wield power.

For all of those, they passed a law which has to stand up to judicial scrutiny.

Leaning on a company to eliminate speech is censorship without review.

edit: removed extra word

Except the items you cite are done on a fringe. Almost half of America is conservative, hardly some fringe.

Can you explain this a bit more? At least for the first two, that information was disseminated by government bans or government-mandated labeling. I am not as familiar with Agent Orange but it was first studied by the New Jersey Agent Orange Commission in 1980 and found to be toxic — it helped lead to the Agent Orange Act. PTSD was first recognized by the APA in 1980 as well. These are all positions of authority making these decisions and claims.

I guess I am just confused what your point is here. Can you explain how the voices of the people were involved in the above examples?

I believe the OP's point was that those things (Agent orange, tobacco <> cancer, etc) which our society almost universally agree upon were once, themselves, targeted by dis/misinformation campaigns.

And that if we are to allow censorship, we are allowing the potential for disinformation campaigns.

IMO, the flaws in this argument are that it assumes a disinformation campaign is something the censor entity is controlling (specifically the US military, in the Agent Orange example). It also assumes disinformation is the only tactic available to a bad actor to manipulate the public.

To the spirit of the OP's point, though, I think we need to be wary of any corporation pledging to make the world a safer place by monitoring our communications.

Of course the situation is not binary; there are things that should be censored. I would like our law enforcement to use any tool at their disposal to stop human trafficking. Murder is not cool, AT&T should help LE look into those as well. Politician Y is trolling the internet with lies; we actually have a toolset for that and it's called journalism. Understanding that journalism/media is actually part of the problem here doesn't mean AT&T can do a better job.

I agree with this:

> Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate.

But I'm not sure about this:

> Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people.

It's definitely a very difficult problem. I like to think that I personally can distinguish decently well between information and mis/dis-information, but I look around and see plenty of people who simply cannot. And I could also be wrong about myself. The pandemic itself has at least had the effect of showing me that I can't always figure out what's true by intuition.

So I guess I believe that people in general are not good at making the distinction. We're too emotional. I'm inclined to say that a digital solution has the best chance of defeating this digital problem. A computer for President, I guess.

People certainly aren't perfect about judging the validity of information, but the danger is just too great to have a corporation and especially a government decide what's valid information.

I am in complete agreement.

If you don't trust your fellow citizens to discern misinformation from truth, you don't trust them to vote.

I don't, do you? It's the slipperiest slope around, however. For instance:

In my state there was an executive order from the governor allowing mask mandates, but polling places were specifically excluded, because you simply cannot disallow people from voting.

Another very difficult problem. How can you enforce voter education without enabling voter suppression? I don't have an answer. I'm mainly here to point out that problems are hard.

That doesn't follow.

I would still rather have voting citizens trying to discern the truth (and hope for some wisdom of the crowds), rather than have the agents of misinformation permanently in charge.

"The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws.

Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" is sick and wrong.

Yes but we have made the judiciary the judge of what goes further than free speech, not the legislative.

And that is key.

PREEMPTIVE censorship is always a mistake because it only relies on power ideologies.

Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable. Allowing misinformation to spread serves that goal nicely and all they have to do is sit back and do nothing.

Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because experts hurt their feelings (e.g. the Conservative reaction to the 1619 Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Commission).

> Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable.

Which is kind of a weird whiplash, because it was not all that long ago that that was the standard attack of the Right against the “postmodern” Left.

This is a strikingly illiberal stance. Attacking free speech is precisely the opposite of what civil liberties has traditionally all been about.

Why is it worth protecting speech that is knowingly false and inflammatory? Think about the paradox of tolerance. True free speech is under threat by the torrent of misinformation and from the constant assault on the very idea of expertise. We as a society have to be active agents to counter misinformation, we can't just sit by and hope it works itself out in "the marketplace of ideas" because that's not how misinformation functions. This is not a new problem, but the internet gives it a new scale which we have yet to reckon with.

>Why is it worth protecting speech that is knowingly false and inflammatory?

Because absurd opinion like "the earth goes round the sun" and "there's nothing wrong with being gay" were once "knowingly false and inflammatory" according to the overwhelming majority of people.

>Because absurd opinion like "the earth goes round the sun" and "there's nothing wrong with being gay" were once "knowingly false and inflammatory" according to the overwhelming majority of people.

... therefore we need to keep protecting the speech of people who still believe the world is flat and that homosexuality is an affront to God just in case?

No, I'm sorry, that's an appeal to emotion disguised as rationality. We don't need to keep knowingly false, disproven and regressive ideas around any more than we need to keep arguing the merits of miasma theory, phrenology or the luminiferous aether. To say otherwise is to claim that truth cannot exist, merit cannot be measured and all ideas are equally valid... a premise already discredited by the value judgement made by your argument.

Who is 'we'? I don't wish to be included in 'we' and I prefer that the group of 'we' not be in charge of much of anything.

Does the concept of a collective confuse you?

As long as someone can adequately explain who the collective is, and what they perceive legitimizes their ability to make decisions for others.

Isn't this venturing into Borg territory?

Ironically, you were censored (flagged) in following posts while arguing for censorship. Further, in your example, the people are clearly the problem. They need to learn how to fact check and educate themselves. Victim blaming is OKAY when people make themselves the victim by their inaction.

> The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws.

This is exactly what conservatives said in response to people promoting liberal ideas. Violent left-wing events in the 1970s (e.g. courthouse shootings) could easily have been used as a pretext for massive speech suppression. 9/11 and cries about the radicalization of Muslims through jihadist materials online could have been used the same way. Luckily none of that happened.

Exactly! It is a powerful tool that works and conservatives wield it well while the cringing libs are all "But if we use effective techniques doesn't that make us as bad as them?" No, it doesn't - it just them the pathetic failures they are.

Good and wise people don't bring knives to gunfights.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Solution is real simple: share your data, cite your sources, sign your name.

Without provenance, accountability, transparency, it doesn't matter who is judging.

The problem is there's a non-trivial amount of people who consider their ignorance equal to your research, your facts, your studies, your anything.

That isn't a problem unless you're discussing something where anonymity is key - or it wouldn't be if the internet didn't make anonymity the rule by default. Anonymity is really great for private citizens, but people trying to spread information need to be held to a higher standard since their words shouldn't be preemptively censored but must be held to account after the fact.

Oh also, taking away anonymity is quite dangerous as well - there isn't an easy answer here.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that taking away anonymity fixes the problem. We have very prominent politicians who are driving entire political campaigns around this strategy of ignoring all fact.

I honestly think that prominent politicians wouldn't have any willingness to adopt this insane level of misinformation if there wasn't such a general societal acceptance of it.

The people in congress that believe in jewish space lasers didn't get elected because everyone around them thought they were crazy conspiracy theorists.

Adding the option of authentic speech merely broadens the Marketplace of Ideas. No one could curtail inauthentic speech; no point in even trying.

aka Authentic speech. Anything less is gossip, or worse.

One can only guess at the motives of Freedom Speeches™ partisans who conflate trolls, bots and sockpuppets with IRL people.

Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate.

The government is the people, no? In any case, by the time the country elects a majority federal politicians who are all unified in spreading the same misinformation, we were in trouble long before that...

Also, if you think these letters represent censorship, I think you should take a look at the definition of that word. At best, you're crying wolf and at worst, you're spreading misinformation yourself.

"Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the [world]." FTFY

Lets of course also not forget the biggest one, COVID.

COVID was fake news, until it wasn't. Previous weeks (months?) were spent suppressing warnings about it.

I specifically remember being banned for saying that people should wear face coverings. In February I tried saying that people should think twice before taking the subway or going to Lunar New Year.

January 2020, there was overwhelming evidence that something bad was coming, even though independent and citizen journalists didn't know the exact scope of it.

But their narrative was that COVID may exist but it isn't dangerous, and wearing a mask is alarmist and probably sinophobic racist Russian propaganda; continue having public gatherings and stop asking questions.

Within 48 hours, big tech decided that the truth is that we had always been at war with Eurasia and that anyone who had any doubts about lockdown strategy was basically a white supremacist and needed to be censored with extreme prejudice.

In my mind, that should have been it. After so many lives lost, that is when we should have decided that corporate america should not set up a de-facto ministry of truth, but I guess most people don't agree with me.

To be fair, that wasn’t “corporate America”, that was the Minister of Unhealth, usually called the Surgeon General:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-1...

The tweet made no sense: if you’re a member of the public, COVID cleverly renders masks ineffective, so leave them for healthcare providers where COVID magically can’t bypass the masks?

The only things more annoying than pretending COVID could discriminate by profession were (a) the additional six to nine months of pretending it wasn’t airborne, and (b) company annoyance with remote work and individual boredom with staying home overriding caution even as the spread hits rates not seen since March/April 2020.

And this is where Corporate America comes in — they are by and large refusing to acknowledge the revision in guidance around it being airborne, since this would require more investment to make safe the butts-in-seats management preferred by non-practitioners in middle and senior levels of firms.

> I specifically remember being banned for saying that people should wear face coverings.

May I ask: what was the venue? HN?

I generally agree with your overall point here.

We either allow foreign influence to undo our democracy or we allow current and future governments to suppress our democracy.

We should isolate western internet lines from russia/china/israel and any cooperating countries that are apart of these significant bot campaigns that generate fake news targeting our elections.

We're still at war, and information is the weapons of that war. We are currently allowing fascist governments to take advantage of the inherent flaws to democracy - belief and choice.

Eliminate the foreign influence, and you will still have a corrupt system filled with fascist information. At the same time you will have undermined American companies since every other country will wonder when they're next.

I know it's easy to blame the other, but democracy rots from within.

It's so far been in the hands of the courts, and like you said, they don't determine what's free speech based on whether something makes us feel bad.

Per bhupy, their specific criteria is whether the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech.

> If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech.

The legal standard for "inciting or producing imminent lawless action" is given by Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case, which upheld speech openly advocating for violence against specific groups to be protected speech. It overturned an Ohio law that had been directed against communists who "advocated the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform." Brandenburg was a 9-0 Warren court decision.

Courts will not uphold anything that has been said about the election as outside the boundaries of free speech, under Brandenburg.

It is, but I'm not certain the courts will interpret it the same way when applied to a large media corporation making many statements over a long period of time.

Like rayiner said, the courts have been protective of media corporation's free speech, but those were cases involving defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress, not an insurrection with the intent to detain and possibly murder elected officials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

Both of those cases were unanimous decisions upholding free speech. Moreover, they were civil, not criminal cases.

They were, and they addressed parody and defamation, which I'm guessing wouldn't apply to a case, civil or criminal, about whether media corporations incited an insurrection.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...

> If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection

The courts will not consider it to be incitement. If you think the courts even might, you are woefully deficient in your understanding of case law. A key word in the Brandenburg standard is "imminent", and that makes the Brandenburg bar very high. Taking a crowd of antisemites to a Jewish neighborhood and telling them antisemitic creeds and how all Jews need to die doesn't meet that bar--but pointing to a Jew and saying "there's a Jew, get him" does.

Thinking SCOTUS might take a narrower view of free speech than its established precedent holds is not a winning bet. I'm not aware of a single case in my lifetime where SCOTUS ruled for more government restriction of speech rather than less, and this approach means taking a broader view of free speech than perhaps most people are willing to stomach (e.g., Citizens United).

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