The swift death of the White House’s disinformation board is a good thing | Hacker News Reader

The swift death of the White House’s disinformation board is a good thing

nymag.com

I'm going to have to disagree. USA style freedom of speech has a hole in it - bad faith liars get to spread their lies and smears. Further, the USA seems to have given people the idea that they're being censored if a platform doesn't broadcast their ideas to everyone, even those who have zero interest in those ideas, even if that speech is clearly not topical. Personally, I think a lot of this "I'm being censored!" is said in bad faith: even the assertions of being censored are lies.

I really don't know if a "disinformation board" is a good idea, but the USA clearly has a problem.

While the problem has been around for some time, the current manifestation can be traced to the Powell memo of 1971.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Mem...

The issue isn't that speech is too free, it's that people have split into warring factions which use public debate as a battleground. Thanks to free speech, we can publish and read the truth, however inconvenient it is for other people. Many choose not to, and that's a catastrophic, but entirely separate problem, not solved by reducing free expression.

(I don't know how to solve it: my best advice is "everybody just chill the fuck out, please," which tells you why I'm not in a leadership position.)

The issue with controlling free speech is that, once you've done it, you have to make sure to remain in control of it at all costs. Your party cannot be allowed to lose power, and you have to make sure your enemies don't have a voice, because if they're allowed to get in control, they'll do the same thing to you. And now we've got an even bigger problem than we started with.

So the USA will just go the route we've gone with the 4th amendment (secure in person and papers against search and seizure) where we shave it so thin that in practice it doesn't exist.

Even the current SCOTUS wouldn't dare to futz with 1st Amendment, but what if criticizing religions was ruled "not free speech"? What if a Republican House and Senate "open up" libel laws, where truth of some utterance or printed material isn't a valid defense, or where a highly public person doesn't have to prove actual malice? Those 2 things would be a good start towards thinly-shaved, narrowly-construed "free speech".

Absolute freedom to carry any firearm your heart desires without training or responsibility, but put a lot of topics off-limits to criticism, and make it so people can be "held accountable" very easily. I like this!

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