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dj_mc_merlin

I'm not going to comment on the author's credibility or overall quality of his arguments.

However, I think he brings up a very important point: who gets to decide what's misinformation?

* Private organizations are run by fallible humans, chasing money and reduced liability

* Governments lie. If you don't believe me, read any history book

* Scientists are not a spherical mass floating in a vacuum with a unified opinion, nor are they correct by default

Furthermore, only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.

So, who gets to decide? Who gets the power of saying what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good? Is it someone you agree with? What if it changes to someone you don't?

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Most evil in the world is perpetrated not by evil people, but by people with good intentions who believe they know what is best for others, and believe that justifies forcing it on those others.

> So, who gets to decide?

Each individual gets to decide for themselves.

I disagree: we live in societies and can vote. In my country we decided that trading, joking, lauding, repeating anything nazi can be prosecuted: so we do prosecute it, a judge decides, according to past judgment and his opinion of the law, and done.

No need to give everyone the job to be clever - we can actually blacklist any opinion we dont want to see circulated and vote on it.

Some societies have limits on these votes as a means to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

In the U.S. the Bill of Rights outlines specific rights that cannot be infringed, including the freedom of speech. Now, this amendment could technically be repealed but that is a very high bar since it’s considered a fundamental right by which the others are derived.

Edit: downvotes are fine but at least add to the discussion. I would be interested in hearing what parts you think I’m not interpreting correctly

I've come to conclude that the right to free speech is the most important right in the Constitution.

The reason is straightforward - without free speech, nobody would know if/when the government is abusing any of your other rights.

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Hermann argue that the American system of propaganda is more effective than the Soviet one, precisely because there is no commissar explicitly telling you what you can and can't say or any other kind of overt and explicit censorship, making people blind to the possibility that they could possibly be being manipulated.

Freedom of speech is a natural right that just so happens to be enshrined in the constitution. It's very disturbing to see how modern discourse ignores the existence of natural rights. I don't see how the 1st amendment is a tenable position anymore when the government is now actively censoring by proxy. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/563547-hypocritical-...

Well, probably the first time these were flagrantly violated was with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

The problem is that you're not conceiving the boundaries of the system properly. It's best, when creating an authoritarian provision to remove liberty, to assume that the control of such an mechanism is under the control of a faction you're least aligned with. This is why the US is liberal before it's a democracy. It has meta code defining the boundaries of the democracy, and in the case of speech, asserts that the liberty to speak supersedes any democratic authority.

Obviously people looking for an expedient authoritarian mandate to limit speech within the boundaries of what they consider to be acceptable see the existence of free speech as the allowance of that which is outside their boundaries, but they don't actually understand the purpose. The purpose is a hedge against tyranny with a trade-off. People get to say horrible, stupid, counterproductive things, but your political enemies don't get to constrain your ability to express yourself.

I also don't understand why the rest of the world is so eager to see this right stripped in America...I would feel extremely claustrophobic if there was no place on earth in which free communication wasn't enshrined in law. Even if Europeans want to mandate their own speech, they still benefit from the hedge against tyranny by such a place as America existing.

> we live in societies and can vote

A vote is simply not the same thing as a choice.

How would you feel if 51% of the people voted to force you to become a Druid?

I think his point was that you don't always get to decide for yourself, and voting was an example. Whether it be a majority, a dictator, or a corporation, someone, to a degree, has the power to tell you what's right and wrong, what's real and not.

What a scary place to live.

I’d hate to live in a place where a joke can get you jailed.

Yeah it sounds like something the Nazis would do...

That includes most of the world

I think you’re right in your assessment of “evil” but pragmatically wrong (or maybe just oversimplifying) the solution.

When there are large asymmetries (for example, in information or risk) regulation can be warranted. For example, most people feel regulating fissile material is prudent because the risk of it coming into the wrong hands is too high to just let unchecked freedom ring when it comes to owning it or not.

The problem with fissile material is the potential for hurting others. Stopping hurt of others is a reasonable function of government.

Legal adults, however, have a fundamental right to hurt themselves.

Yes, I know there are grey areas.

There U.S. Constitution enumerates other powers for the government, including the power to tax and regulate commerce.

Sometimes I think people confuse what they wish/think the government role should be with what is explicitly defined within the social contract between the government and the governed.

If anti-vaxxers just hurt themselves, there wouldn't be nearly as much animosity around these issues. They pose a legitimate risk to other people. Not just through direct infection of other people, but by offering themselves up as a breeding ground for more effective versions of the virus.

Are you saying the vaccine only becomes effective if everyone has it? What good is it then, since we will never reach 100% vaccination?

The claim that unvaccinated people are a breeding ground for more effective versions of the virus sounds like a Big Pharma talking point, rather than something with solid science behind it. My understanding is that environmental pressure results in mutated variants becoming widespread. Couldn't vaccines themselves cause this? The virus hardly mutated for a whole year, but then once inoculations became available it seems that more infectious variants are popping up left and right.

Vaccines are most effective when they enable you to reach herd immunity which extends protection to those who cannot be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised to one degree or another. We don’t need 100%. We need something like 85% for Covid. You’re right that it will never happen because conservatives have weaponized stupidity and selfishness.

Every chance to breed is a chance to mutate. This isn't a binary factor its a continuum. 1% of the population is likely insufficient breeding ground and the virus population would collapse exponentially. 70% vaccinated large in contiguous regions may be sufficient to keep the pandemic going continuously if they successive variants emerge that are sufficiently effective at evading existing immunity.

1 person has no meaningful effect but collectively their actions are capable of doing great harm to the rest of us even if we all collectively act in our own best interests by getting vaccinated and participating in other public health measures.

If your freedom to act irrationally allows you to cause my untimely death I don't understand how my inability to go on living wouldn't represent a net decrease in freedom vs forcing you to vaccinate.

If you look at the break down of anti vaxxer sentiment only 9% are dead set against vaccination under any circumstances. These people's perception of their freedom isn't worth hurting everyone.

All evidence shows it to be the other way around, the vaccinated are far more dangerous to the unvaccinated than vice versa, it isn't even close. Leaky vaccines create more virulent and deadlier viruses in the unvaccinated.

This is incorrect. A vaccine is not an antibiotic; the presence of one does not cause virulent strains. Vaccinations trigger the body's immune response to the virus; nothing else. They provide for a more effective response faster, but do not otherwise provide any forcing function.

Mutations and variants occur all the time as the virus reproduces. Variants are not a response to any vaccine; they have appeared primarily (entirely? I haven't been following all of them) in regions where the vaccine is not yet widely available because that is where the virus is able to multiply (and thus mutate) the fastest.

The general theory is that a virus avoids evolving in a way that is too dangerous to its host because the sooner the host dies the less potential the virus has to spread. As the vaccinated have a weaker response to the virus there is no longer as strong evolutionary pressure against the virus becoming more lethal.

A real life/modern example of this can be found in Marek's disease in chickens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention

The counter claim seems to be that because vaccination reduces the abundance of the virus there is a lower chance of mutations. It's hard to say which effect is stronger and it probably varies greatly by virus and by vaccine!

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, just an armchair enthusiast.

I think it's too soon to say yet if the vaccines encourage mutation. But my understanding is quite a few of the significant variants come from places where there was significant vaccine testing: - Brazil (Gamma) - South Africa (Beta) - India (Delta) - Alpha (UK)

The causation may be backwards here. You need a decent enough medical system both to run clinical trials, and to detect variants.

Interesting theory though, I don't think it's true right now, but potentially there may be evidence I'm not aware of.

What is a leaky vaccine?

I’m not qualified to really discuss, but here’s a study I recently heard brought up. It would be interesting to hear an unbiased opinion of someone with a medical background

“Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

This is exactly why I disagree with everyone who argues it’s an issue of personal freedom.

You may have the personal freedom to get drunk—that doesn’t give you the freedom to drive around while under the influence and you endanger everyone else on the road.

The choice to be vaccinated or not is not a choice that affects merely the individual; its consequences affect communities. Regardless of whether it is valid or not to refuse vaccination, it is not solely within the realm of personal freedom and should not be treated that way.

Getting vaccinated doesn't stop you from spreading the virus to other people. If it did, your point would have far greater validity.

> They pose a legitimate risk to other people.

This is not true, any more than it is for vaccinated people.

Viruses will still spread through a fully-vaccinated population, and they will still mutate in a fully-vaccinated population.

The CDC released a report [1] showing proportional numbers of cases coming from fully vaccinated people (74% of cases against 69% of the population fully vaccinated).

Treating people who are not getting the vaccine as enemies is not going to convince us. In fact, this whole thing has made me, in particular, suspicious of other vaccines that I will research and make decisions for myself about.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7031e2-H.pdf

The CDC study gives some credence to your theory but your conclusion is by all evidence wrong. It shows nothing about the transmissibility of vaccinated people who test positive. It also disregards previous evidence before the delta variant that vaccinations widely prevented positive tests. So there is SOME effect there. Taking a study that says “there’s definitely some chance of transmission” and making the conclusion “there’s no difference” only happens due to your predetermined conclusion. A real look at the actual body of evidence on vaccines necessarily draws different conclusions.

One need only look at the overlay of cases and vaccination rates across different US states to show you’re just flat out wrong.

Most of what you say is correct, but saying absolutely that unvaccinated people are endangering other people and vaccinated people are not is also false.

Making an irrelevant but true statement about vaccinated people doesn't make the antivaxx stance correct.

Similar manner to drink driving, sober people can also hurt others when driving.

This is about where we draw the line. When it comes to drink driving and antivaxxers they both endanger others to an unacceptably high level.

Don't get me started on how I'm a better driver when tipsy than the average 80 year old that still has their license...

The tongue in cheek point I'm trying to make is that too much of the conversation focuses on relative risk. Relative risk obsession has people not taking more risky, but still incredibly safe (at least in the short term) vaccines here in Australia. Absolute risk (or its delta) tends to be a much more salient number to the victim.

It does help the antivaxx crowd in some circuitous arguments however, as the chance of an unvaccinated person killing a vaccinated person is low if vaccines work!

You cannot say that unvaccinated people endanger others to an unacceptably high level when we don't even know what that level is!

Also, calling people unvaccinated agency COVID anti-vaxxers, when most are not, is likely to lead to some becoming that.

Do you feel the same animosity towards the bats and/or pangolins which originally produced SARS-CoV-2? Because they're still out there and still incubating new variants as well. Eventually some of those will inevitably jump to humans.

>Most evil in the world is perpetrated not by evil people, but by people with good intentions who believe they know what is best for others, and believe that justifies forcing it on those others.

Other way around. Evil would convince you that leaded gasoline is fine, and that "good intentions" of regulating lead out of gas are evil because government power.

The architects of the really big atrocities, the holocausts, genocides and purges, argued them necessary for the greater good.

That's the excuse given, not the reason. It's like saying "evil starts with science papers" because some scientists affiliated with the nazi party published artificial information that made racism look scientific and correct.

The bigger justices, like the U.S. bill of rights - that's for the greater good. Having laws and order. That's for the greater good too. As are judges, police, government, etc. All the greater good that requires people to comply.

Private companies justify their abuse by playing the "greater good" line too. From "we're gonna change the world" slogan that was the in every 2010s startup's marketing copy, through spinning "disruption" as something good, all the way to the usual corporate talk about creating jobs and innovation.

Each individual deciding for themselves causes the tragedy of the commons.

Until recently I thought we already settled this:

-People you believe are saying true things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying false things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying nice things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying mean things get to speak.

Everyone gets to speak. Individuals get to decide.

This is not what is currently up for debate. The current conflict is over control of private forums.

Its not a cut and dry issue either. If you were to own a site, anyone forcing you to post things to your site you don't believe is also an infringement of your rights. It cuts both ways.

In my eyes the major issue is the consolidation of discourse onto a few private forums, not whether or not those forums should be able to police themselves.

That was until we collectively decided harm reduction is a greater cause than freedom preservation. Now any and all freedoms we previously had can be temporarily, permanently, or conditionally suspended in the name of harm reduction (saved lives, fewer offended, etc.)

It’s not some recent idea that freedoms need to be balanced against the harm they can cause others. The harm principle has been around at least as long as On Liberty (1859), and it wasn’t really a new idea then.

While this is great in principle, some people's voice is much louder, and their words can devastate the lives of individuals, the economy and our society. Should there not be something in place to prevent people from spreading falsehoods that can lead to harming others? The solution is not as easy as what you've stated. In fact, I don't think there is a solution, only a continual rebalancing.

> who gets to decide what's misinformation?

Whoever wants to. and then people can compare the competing arbiters and decide who would earn their trust. That used to work with mass media until the internet came along. Now we no longer have multiple newspapers, but "The Newspaper" , "The TV" and "The telegraph" (Twitter?), like 2-3 news sources in total which are basically politically aligned. The name of the game changed from "popularity and copy sales" to "the network effect". I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet, but perhaps at some point people will realize that the network effect is evil and it will get a bad name.

> I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet,

The internet, centralising… what went wrong?

I found this to be a novel perspective on your question: https://samoburja.com/the-centralized-internet-is-inevitable...

wrong or right? The internet was designed to be "decentralized" in the sense of robust communications, but ultimately the goal was to convey the commands of one, centralized US army

The packet switching network was designed to be decentralized. That's layers 2-4 of the ISO/OSI model. Layer 7, the application level, is and always was a force of centralization.

Who gets to decide who goes to jail? All of the same fallibility arguments apply.

Yes, I agree. My arguments extend to the law too. Previously, you could've gone to jail for being black or having a beer. Women got to vote in 1920.

I personally follow the law so I don't go to jail, since historically it has been made by idiots.

I think the better answer is not “whom” but “what process”.

People will always be fallible. Processes, however, can layer checks and balances in a way that people often can’t. Processes are also easier to change than people in my experience.

Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”

I like this idea. Perhaps I'm committing the same fallacy that the Romans did around the fall of the Republic. The prevailing idea was that their problems were caused by a "failure of Roman morals", rather than by a failure of their system, even as they realized the inevitability of their situation and tried to enact changes.

> Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”

Agreed. My use of the past was to illustrate a basic truth: given the big (colossal) failures of the past, is it more likely we have largely found the truth, or that we are still very far away from it? It's impossible to know of course. That said, the amount of people who will claim their truth is ultimate and all of who do not see it their way must be idiots is staggering. It's human nature though, I literally did that one comment above.

Ideally? A jury of your peers supported by a system that at least purports to provide checks and balances against the system being dominated by any single person or groups' judgement.

If factual veracity faced a similar system that tries to balance the needs and desires of all participants, then censoring misinformation would be a lot more palatable (and would still, like our justice system, often be wrong.) The current system of supressing misinformation has none of the check and balances contained in the legal system and adding those in would do a great deal to facilitate trust in that system.

You're getting mixed up. Good and bad isn't the same as misinformation. The intent is important. Bad faith arguments and presenting misleading conclusions to further an agenda is misinformation.

Yes, sometimes it is hard to distinguish between extremely dumb and dishonest behavior. Like, a few years ago in my native language someone made a news piece about some women that were working for Google suing the company for unfair wages (according to them, they were making less for the same work) and whoever edited the piece decided to include that according to glossdoor women in tech make less than men, but completely forgot that the same glossdoor said that google was a exemption (based on the information they got).

I think it's a good point, but... what information do we use to determine intent? And aren't they subject to the errors of normal information in addition to possible ill-intended misinformation?

If you are judging a single action from someone it is impossible to distinguish between "dishonest behavior" and "stupid behavior" (that's assuming you disagree with what they did), so more offen than not you need to dig deeper and compare what they said prior to the incident and what they have to gain with a change. But to make it clear: it doesn't mean that you are wrong (if what they said align with what you believe, it just means that some people are trying to get the same thing you want for other reasons).

Tactics used is a place to start. Leading questions, things like "you can draw your own conclusions", blatantly uncredible sources. Taking quotes out of context. A history of being caught being misleading. There's patterns used in frequent misinformation spreaders i think.

If the government enacts a law to ban misinformation, I am sure there will also be a ministry of truth by that government, which will decide what information is truthful and what information is not.

OK, but, we already have social/legal/cultural norms for deciding what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good. Here are some things I can't do via Mailchimp for either legal or cultural reasons (see also https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/):

- Advertise pornography

- Plan attacks against the United States government

- Advertise medical cures that the government doesn't approve of

- Sell counterfeit products

- Pump and dump a stock

- Reveal the identities of CIA operatives

All of these are thoughts, just as much as advocating against vaccines or for alternative cures or what-have-you are thoughts.

Who gets to decide any of the above?

Would it be a good idea to set up society such that all of the above thoughts are protected speech?

They are not thoughts as sibling mentioned.

If you think any of these things in your own mind but don't take any action on it that is perfectly ok and carries no legal risk.

But this article isn't complaining about Mailchimp shutting people down for thinking things in their own mind, it's complaining about Mailchimp shutting people down for publishing and advocating those thoughts.

What is the argument that saying "Ivermectin is being suppressed by Big Pharma, anyone who takes it will get cured of covid" is simply a thought whose publication is worthy of both social and legal protection, but saying "Contoso has a groundbreaking product they're going to reveal next week, anyone who buys the stock now is sure to make a profit" is illegal securities fraud? How do you distinguish those cases?

Other than advertising (legal) pornography, all of those are actual violations of the law, at least in the United States.

Clearly MailChimp (or any other service) can't knowingly allow their platform to be used to violate the law, or they would be held accountable.

The comment I'm replying to is asking where, if at all, society should be structured to prevent people from spreading bad thoughts, and it's clearly leaning towards the angle that nothing should prevent people from spreading bad thoughts, and listeners should be free to make up their own minds.

If certain types of bad thoughts are illegal to spread, the argument, I would think, is they should stop being illegal.

(On a more practical note, Mailchimp's legal department is not a court of law. If freedom of speech / of thought-spreading is important enough to your society that you want to place legal obligations on private companies' platforms not to interfere with it, as TFA advocates, I think a natural consequence is that private companies should not decide what crosses the line and what doesn't, and probably that private companies should not be liable for what's said on their platform. In fact, that's more or less what Section 230 gives us! In a world with strong free-speech protections, it seems to me that Mailchimp should say that you can send whatever you want through their service, and should be encouraged by the government to take that approach, and that if you send something illegal, that liability is on you alone, after due process of law.)

> Advertise medical cures that the government doesn't approve of

There is nothing wrong with advertising the truth that certain medical treatments exist which are not government approved in the US, or, legal in the US, but are defintely viable, and are actively used in other parts of the world, or, could be by physicians for off-label use.

domperidone [1] is a drug that is used for a few indications overseas. There is an active discussion around it on a number of social media sites, but the FDA warns against importing it, for violating an FDA Act. It is possible to get an exception for one indication in the US, potentially...... But, many women want it because it helps with lactation, and for a woman with a hungry infant, this is a big issue. You get a screaming baby that wants 8 oz more of milk a day, and lemme tell you, can't negotiate with a screaming baby! Off Label uses of medications also, is common among Physicians. Viagra is one drug that has a number of utilities in off-label use.

BigTech squelching the conversation around Domperidone is fairly similar to BigTech squelching the standard COVID treatment protocols [2], from Zelenko [3] & McCullough [4], which will likely become standard of care fairly shortly, and are now in evidence on CDC websites too [5], but significantly trailing the most updated protocols. But they don't squelch Domperidone talk, and the reason is simple. Pushing vaxxes are a big priority for the govt, while going after the discussion of secrets for increasing breastmilk outputs would probably be bad optics.

> actual violations of the law, at least in the United States.

Covid protocols have nothing to do with actual violations of Law, and, they will be standard of care shortly, as the CDC website writing [5] is on the wall.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30000430/

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/stop-ignoring-the-evidence-on-co...

[3] https://vladimirzelenkomd.com/zelenko-prophylaxis-protocol/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...

They're not just thoughts but also actions. Actions are typically what's regulated by governments, not thought. Maybe by "thoughts" you meant "ideas".

> only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.

Was this really necessary? How many engineers do you know, and how many of them actually ascribe to this belief?

It's a playful jab at a category of people I am part of too, although I do not share that belief. The statement I made is wrong on purpose regardless (for light comedic effect): not only engineers hold that belief, nor are they the only ones who do.

There is a significant overlap (higher than a random person's picked from the population) between engineers and what I would call "fundamentalist rationalists". That is, people who believe in reason and science to the point they wrap the speedometer back around to religious belief again. Those people become unable to think outside that framework and consider nuanced solutions. Not everything worth solving has measurable or falsifiable solutions. The world can be very uncertain and work against all common sense at times. This doesn't mean one shouldn't attempt to make sense of it obviously, but science does not a god make. It may, hopefully, but pretending it is that way now is no good.

I'd honestly consider your take as lacking nuance. Or lacking a dimension.

Accepting uncertainty doesn't mean abandoning objectivity. On the contrary - difficulties in objectively measuring things or falsifying hypotheses are best handled with mathematical tools, which absolutely can work with uncertain quantities (that's what probability theory is for). Throwing hands in the air and saying "it's too difficult therefore there's no objectivity", or "it can go whichever way, so it may as well go the way I like", is not the solution.

I don't disagree with that notion actually. I personally do not believe in objective truth, philosophically speaking. I do believe in creating ever more useful incarnations of a relative truth, and that so far the methods which you mentioned have been the most useful.

There is no golden hammer however. To give a concrete example, I believe our understanding of mental issues using a scientific framework is woefully inadequate. In the future, we may posses enough information to be able to apply scientific principles. In the present, we have managed to control some mental illnesses to a degree using pharmaceutics.

Talking with various people who have had the misfortune of being born with troublesome minds and experiencing my own mind has led me to believe that a large amount of mental illnesses, especially depression and anxiety, are misidentified due to our infatuation to treat the mental plane as analog to the physical body, so as to be able to apply our scientific knowledge to it. The body is hardware, hard and physical, the mind is software, it is changeable. Many are born into this world however without the necessary tools or aptitude to actually go through this process of change and heal their mind when it gets into a broken state. Their frustrations pile up, making them ever more ineffective, all while they are blind to the fact that they could wake up the next day and.. feel completely fine.

It is none of their own fault in a way, as these skills are barely ever taught, and not too many people seem even aware that it's something just as possible as moving your arm. They treat it as if the only way they can "get fixed" is external, as if their car broke down.

Humanity did and still has ways of undergoing these processes. Rituals of progression from one stage of life to another, as well as yearly/monthly etc. rituals affirming one's position in life were more important than they are nowadays. As much as "they do nothing", the mental effect was most definitely not nothing. The human brain always seeks meaning, and lack of stimulus is its greatest enemy.

That is not to suggest that the world was an idyllic paradise full of meaning before. Unlikely. But it's hard to deny God did die somehow.

> Furthermore, only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.

No true engineer believes that. All engineers must make compromises. Anyone that uses black and white thinking simply cannot engineer (unless you are using the term in a strictly legal sense).

I'm not sure that the other end of the rationality axis is "nuanced".

The answer to this question is obvious - it's an exercise of pure power. Any time you hear anything about "misinformation" the real thing they are talking is power. Whoever has the power can censor those that do not have it and deny them chance to express their views. The guise under which it is done is immaterial - today it's health, tomorrow it's climate change, next day it's electoral politics or terrorism or vegetarianism or gender issues or bee colony collapse. Anything can be used as a basis for censorship, once you have the power and the will to censor. And the power to define what "misinformation" is and the power to censor is one and the same. It's not about seeking the truth, it's about seeking control and domination.

Once, in America, it was universally acceptable that censoring speech is not the power somebody should get. Neither the government, nor anybody else. Of course, as with every ideal, the reality sometimes came short of it - there are many infamous examples of censorship, both governmental and otherwise, that happened in America. But those ultimately were realized as conflicting with the ideal - and ultimately, the ideal won and they have lost.

Today, this ideal is increasingly being abandoned - for the large parts of the Left, have already completely been abandoned - for the ideas of "safety" and narrow partisan political considerations. The nation - and the whole culture we call "Western culture" - will suffer a lot and regret a lot if we don't find a way to stop it.

"Misinformation" is one of the most brilliant propaganda coups of my life time.

It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

There is only misinformation according to some party.

"Google is going to remove misinformation from YouTube." sounds incredible laudable to the modern ear.

"Google is going to remove things that are misinformation according to Google corporate policy." is much less compelling.

A challenge for anyone reading this: From now on, whenever you read the word "misinformation", fill out the "according to ..." yourself. I've been doing it for a while now. It really improves your perspective.

(I do believe in objective truth. However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Whatever the objective truth may be, I seriously doubt "according to the corporate policy of X" is it.)

> It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

I'm sorry, but this is complete BS. If someone makes statements that they know are false, then they are a liar and are spreading misinformation. If someone makes statements for which they have incontrovertible proof, this is absolutely not misinformation.

Just because the gradients between those two are complex, doesn't mean that misinformation doesn't exist, just that the definition of "misinformation" is fuzzy (like so many other words.)

(I don't believe in objective truth or meaning. I do believe that communication is impossible without mutually shared subjective truths and meanings.)

Edit: The reality is that there is a significant amount of misinformation put out by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. Some of it (e.g. some press releases) is widely recognized but also generally tolerated. Some of it is partisan. Some of it is widely accepted as truth by almost everyone.

I was, perhaps, unclear. Of course objective falsehoods exist. However, it's a motte & bailey argument to talk about how objective falsehoods exist, but then as soon as we're talking about policy to pretend that we've got some kind of objective way of determining what they are.

My point is that "misinformation" should always come attached with an "according to X". Some Xs are more reliable than others.

However, as I said and will certainly stand by, "according to Google corporate policy" or "according to Facebook corporate policy" is not one of the more reliable of them. Google and Facebook corporate policy is not in a position to be making that determination, and whatever metrics they are using it is certainly not any definition of truth I recognize.

There's also going to be quite a lot of disagreement about which of those Xs are reliable and how much. This disagreement is not suddenly resolved by stripping away the provenance of statements and letting the word "misinformation" float free without worrying about provenance. It is absolutely valid to discuss how much to trust a given source, but the propaganda word "misinformation" is like the passive voice of propaganda... it isn't misinformation according to X or according to Y, it's just... "misinformation", floating free and objectively determinable. It's a pretty serious step back in philosophical sophistication.

I also think there's a lot of people accepting "misinformation according to our global elite" who, if they thought about it a bit more clearly, would wonder why they're accepting that definition so easily and thoroughly.

> My point is that "misinformation" should always come attached with an "according to X". Some Xs are more reliable than others.

The value of specifying epistemic sources is as important when putting forward information as it is when labeling misinformation. Yet most people are generally pretty lax at including and verifying epistemic justifications (especially for claims they are inclined to agree with.)

It is true that the act of labeling things as misinformation can itself be a form of misinformation.

The issue, as I see it, is that we have accepted the practice of deliberate misinformation as long as it is "for a good cause". We don't place as much value in people trying accurately convey information and nuance as we place on the function that information is serving.

I see this everywhere: in the statements about masks that were made early in the pandemic to make sure healthcare workers had supplies. You see this is narratives about the last election. You see this is in a lot of the reporting about Russiagate. There are little to no consequences or reprobation from people who agree with the end goals.

The incentives are all wrong and I don't know how they get fixed, but the problem is much bigger than just "Big Tech", "Social Media" or a bunch of stupid people on the otherside of the partisan divide.

> It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

Talk about highschool level sophistry. "Nah bro, there are no facts, everything is meaningless, the truth is a lie and all lies are true, man!"

Please.

> I do believe in objective truth.

Oh good, I'm glad you took the time to contradict yourself.

> However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon

So misinformation exists but we'll never be able to identify it?

I repeat: please.

The world is not flat. The anunaki don't exist. COVID vaccines don't contain microchips.

This isn't even a little bit hard.

Does it get hard in the muddy middle? Sure. But your claim that 'There is no such thing as "misinformation"' is pure bunk.

And this isn't even limited to the hypothetical. Just in the last year we've had completely egregious examples of abuse of misinformation classifications. An article about Hunter Biden's laptop, posted by the oldest newspaper in the country, the New York Post, weeks before the election, got them banned from Twitter and Facebook. Any mention of Hunter Biden's laptop would get the post flagged as misinformation and banned.

Now, I don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop. What I do care about is that this was absolutely not misinformation. And then the same happened again for the lab-leak hypothesis. Given pants-on-fire dismissal and declared "debunked," when it wasn't then, and has been shown to very clearly not be now.

So, yes, the abuse of the authority is obvious in the hypothetical, but the relegation to the abstract isn't even necessary to condemn the legitimacy of these self-proclaimed institutions.

There is objective truth. Trump did not win the last election if you look at it in the right light. The absolute truth is, he lost. That isn’t misinformation. That can be applied to a myriad of other things. The earth is not flat. The vaccine does not contain microchips. Masks do prevent the spread of airborne disease. Jan 6th was an insurrection by the Republicans and not a tourist trip.

That last one is a choice of descriptive words, not an objective truth.

Personally, my bar for 'insurrection' involves at least one gunshot. You can differ! But it's not objective.

Insurrection defined:

a violent uprising against an authority or government.

They violently forced their way into our capital with the idea of intimidating the government to prevent them from handling the lawful business succession insofar as counting and acknowledging the lawfully cast electoral votes.

This isn't subjective its the simple literal dictionary definition of the word.

It's an editorialization of the word. Any riot involving a fight with cops would qualify if you stretch it that far.

The peaceful transfer of power based on democratic elections is at the very heart of democracy and they gathered to obstruct it by force in order to substitute their will backed by violence for the will of the people.

They didn't fight with the cops they beat and murdered cops in order to destroy democracy itself.

There was a gunshot. A woman died!

Why only a gun? What about the police officers that were beaten?

A gunshot by the alleged insurrection. Getting shot does not make one an organized rebellion attempt.

In a nation with as many guns as America, especially in the right wing demographic, I'd expect some shooting and a lot more organization before I upgrade from 'riot'. Insurrection is just political spin. Look at that picture with the goofball holding the speaker's podium and tell me these people were serious.

That goofball who is currently in prison awaiting trial and will end up in federal prison for a long time to come? We must have different definitions of serious.

So insurrections were only possible after the invention of firearms? That's weird.

And I'm assuming you mean one gunshot "from the aggressors" as one of the Capitol Police officers did fire their weapon in defense of the Capitol.

What would you call a group of armed people who forcibly enter a building in order to disrupt the work of a government and install an unelected leader to a position of power?

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