How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? We know at this point that incendiary content tends to spread faster than the often-boring truth. Turning a blind eye is a race to the bottom that encourages political parties and those with an agenda to create more of this misleading content.
They give a list so you have some guidelines. Ultimately, you can argue with the guidelines and generally agreed-upon facts, and I'm sure many will.
The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point. Wearing masks was misinformation at one point.
The problem with censorship is that no man is fit to play the censor.
So? We know more about it now, so the earlier wild claims without evidence or proof were definitely misinformation at the time, intended to deflect blame from the ineptness of the politicians in power in feb 2020.
Little has changed since then aside from Trump being voted out which then freed up the political left to consider this possibility in its discourse.
Seriously?!? If the lab leak discussion had been suppressed just a little bit more, would we even be talking about it today?
Wrong ideas have always existed and always been part of life. From a pile of wrong ideas, a few right ones emerge.
I'm old enough to remember well the plethora of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Some of them were quite offensive to the people who suffered and died on that day. But I never called for suppression of free speech because of it.
1A proponents need to understand that there's a grey area between outright incitement to violence and otherwise. Within that grey area lies conspiracy theories and hate speech which can motivate actual harmful and illegal activity downstream if these ideas become sufficiently widespread. It's plausible that the unmoderated hate speech on 8chan motivated numerous lone wolf shooters, given how many manifestos have been posted there.
While we may want this speech to be legal (I largely do), we should not want to voluntarily assist in the spreading of this speech above and beyond the legal requirements of 1A. Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left and that sentiment isn't totally invalid if we zoom into specific examples of speech motivating heinous outcomes. So nipping a real problem in the bud with private self-regulation seems to be the least slippery slopey outcome of them all.
That statement, if you stop to think about what it means for all other freedoms, should genuinely scare you. Freedom only matters if it includes the right to offend others. Anything less isn't freedom at all.
If you genuinely believe in the principles of freedom, you will trust that the free exchange of all ideas - good and bad, right and wrong - is the best and only way to bring out the truth.
All of this hearkens back to dark ideas in which one class of people exercise power over another. Remember what they say about power.
I don't believe this to be true. I only think the 1A is a good idea because it's too easy for an authoritarian government to co-opt speech restrictions. The free exchange in itself isn't what I care about.
People on the whole are pretty stupid, tribal and irrational creatures. I see no reason why a free exchange of ideas can't sometimes lead to a fascist or communist state if certain ideas get enough social contagion.
That's a fair observation, and making freedom a right comes with a host of risk and peril. But isn't that where the criticality of learning from history comes into play? Furthermore, name one dictator or authoritarian regime whose rise to power wasn't predicated on the necessity of government intervention and rule to protect the people. Everyone from Nero to Boneparte to Hitler to Chavez all claimed the mantle of necessity and greater good, and look where they all led.
The back-and-forth balance between freedom and containment of bad ideas can be tricky, but if you think you'll solve the problem of future authoritarianism through present-day authoritarianism, I don't know what to say.
You probably already agree that person A shouldn't be allowed to incite direct violence against person B. The thing is, hate speech laws for example aren't categorically different, since hate speech by A can lead to violence against B downstream. It's purely a difference in degree, difficulty to get right, and slippery slope risk.
I've thought about the case of Hitler and am unsold either way. On the one hand, the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws, and so in this N=1 they weren't effective at preventing the outcome they were supposed to prevent. On the other hand, it could be argued that such laws were merely too lenient. Hitler was genuinely popular and got 43 percent of the vote through mostly unfettered speech. He convinced people that his regime was a good idea. So this is a demonstration to me that unfettered speech can actually lead to the kind of outcomes that anti-1A people fear. Overall I just don't know enough about that history to say.
They are only pro speech when it comes to misinformation and fake news that their side falls victim too, much more than the left.
If no one was defending the takedowns, then that means people generally weren't in favor of them
Regardless, if you read the GP's post, they're saying 'words' should never be banned. So I don't see the making an exception for even the kind of violent speech that you stated. Where were these free speech absolutists back then when their personal misinformation and racist speech wasn't being affected, but others' was?
Makes me doubt their principles.
I'll readily agree that we often argue about principles when it's our own content or people involved, and I see hypocrisy on both the left and the right.
But I have to give it to libertarians when it comes to consistent application of principles, even and especially when the specifics of a situation make them unpopular among the left or right. Conservatives find offense in the libertarian position on drug policy and media censorship of sex and violence. Leftists find offense in the libertarian position on economic policy, welfare, and immigration. Both sides find things to be offended about in their views on foreign policy. You know you're doing something right when you offend both ends of the political spectrum at the same time.
Is that really the side you want to root for?
Freedom of speech - not only as a legal value but an ethical one - is the only basis on which we can avoid letting a dominant voice shut out unloved truths.
If you want me to ask a similarly misleading line of questioning based only on trying to draw false equivalence from principles: Currently Youtube is self-censoring porn. Is the side of "youtube should become a porn site" really the side you want to root for?
> False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning.
Are you suggesting Youtube, a media company, and Hollywood, a collection of media companies, are somehow not comparable?
I would rather ten true facts be censored than let one piece of misinformation go free.
/s
It's not up to youtube to define what is Misinformation, if they even have a little tiny pretense of being a platform and not a publisher.
We've already seen how devastating misinformation can be; however, I still tend to err on the side of freedom of speech.
I don't want widespread misinformation, but who gets to decide what that is?
Misinformation can cause people to not get vaccinated or storm the capital building...
As much as we'd like to think people are "deciding" anything, it's simply not the case. They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy.
No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong?
These are very serious questions which need to be answered before I can support any effort to filter out misinformation.
And to go back to the bomb-on-a-plane comparison, there is one key difference between that and something like election conspiracies. The person who yelled "bomb" is only penalized if they were knowingly wrong - something that's generally pretty easy to prove when it comes to bombs and fires. They aren't prevented from saying "bomb" in the first place and they aren't reprimanded until it's known that they were lying.
I agree, this is exactly my hesitation I pointed out in my original post.
So life is just a harm reduction optimization problem that governments and/or megacorps need to solve? In that case install a king that takes away all freedom in exchange for drastically improved harm reduction.
The potential harm caused by this solution is enormous, but many people are content with it simply because that harm hasn't been realized yet and it makes their lives a little less uncomfortable in the short term. If we're lucky, someone will implement a better solution before this blows up on us.