Leaked documents outline DHS’s plans to police disinformation

I can think of two recent examples where it failed, bitterly dividing the country:

1. in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop, a media organization was censored based on false allegations of “misinformation”; and,

2. during COVID, people who said authoritarian policies were a bad idea were censored — including medical professionals; resulting in devastating but only marginally effective authoritarian policies.

How, specifically, do you only censor “wrong” speech — without in practice just giving special government powers to the people who manipulate speech in the pursuit of personal power, eg Fauci?

I don’t see what is so hard to understand here. We already have the legal clarity , they just needs to be implemented diligently.

Is it? Are there more assaults in countries with more freedom of expression?

I just don't see any practical solution that doesn't involve some type of restriction on disinformation.

Censorious actions are, to my eye, attacks on individuals; especially when power is transferred/controlled/manipulated under the guise of "positive" group think.

Many cliches apply, sweeping under the rug, kicking the can down the road, turning a blind eye.

Well-intentioned good faith conversations about integrity, accountability and forthrightness are in vogue :)

If they're that influential, then what chance do laws limiting free speech have at curtailing their efforts? The solution seems to be pass laws that only effect the average citizen and ignore the obvious differences in scale with these flagged "problem cases."

> the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures

Is there actual evidence of that? I mean, which exact "influential figures" lead to this crime? What writing of theirs were the most provocative to this individual? What should we be considering when examining this situation? Is there anything other than vague accusations?

> So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech.

It seems to me that's exactly what you're doing.. and you've not made the connection between free speech and generalized harm in anything but a casual way. This makes people exceptionally uneasy, you're suggesting that a defined right should be curtailed simply because there's an implication in one particular notable situation.

And why is this _one_ newsworthy situation being used to spark this debate? Doesn't this raise questions of inappropriate "influence" itself? Again, we know nothing about this individual, yet all kinds of motivations are being ascribed to his actions all in service of suggesting that "a little too much free speech" might be responsible here.

This entire line of thinking makes my uneasy.

I do believe that free speech is so incredibly beneficial that it's always worth having, even if that means accepting cults, celebrities, politicians etc preying on the weak.

If the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of a drunk driver should alcohol be banned? What if the person injured isn't related to a politician?

Would religion be policed for making unproven claims? Would there be any allies of political favorables who could correct the record with their version of the truth? Is inconvenient information disinformation, as in, will they define disinformation as any information disruptive to the status quo as able to be proven without revealing state secrets, classified information, or restricted media like the "collateral damage" video, whether true or false?

Despite CNN and MSNBC being broadcast in Russia and China, their news is all but forbidden in the US. How damaged and fragile is the US mindset that it can't exist in the presence of other ideas?

Why didn’t we have that conversation after the Dallas police shooting shortly after Obama talking about police violence? Or the mass riots spurred on by democrat politicians? Or the Jan 6th riots following trumps speech (actually, he got deplatformed everywhere following that). Or the congressional baseball shooting following Bernie Sander’s calling Republicans hateful for not passing healthcare bills?

Obviously this attack is unacceptable, but if these other instances didn’t move people to curtail speech, the fact that this relatively minor event does tells me this is more about pushing an agenda and putting politicians ahead of freedoms.

As far as I’m concerned in the conversation about the limits of free speech, Pelosi is nobody special. Would we curtail speech because some random person in Ohio got assaulted for saying mean words? Of course not, so why would we do it for some powerful politician, who’s used speech in just as inciting ways as well no less?

To put it plainly: should we curtail freedoms because somebody attacked Pelosi? The answer to that is the same as the answer to “should we curtail freedoms because speech makes people mad sometimes”. The way we’ve answered that as a society in all other instances is “no”, so the answer remains the same.

How is that any different from violence inspired by correct facts?

Following the logic you're laying out, I don't think it's the defense of truth you're advocating for; it's social harmony and stability. Basically the ideals favored in the Chinese model -- which censors true things and false things equally, depending on their social impact.

If you are interested in accurate and correct information, it is procedurally discovered in a competitive information environment with multiple interested actors; not decreed by the President and his employees.

Would you be so kind as to elaborate which speech and which figures you believe are at fault?

This also happens because if there's an explicit or implicit ban on addressing those topics and retaining a place in polite society, then only people crazy enough to disregard polite society will address those topics.

Conspiracy is already illegal, despite going against free speech, so making updates to conspiracy laws to handle these cases is the best path forward

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited.

But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.

I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.

Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.

Linux is not a cult. It's a holy war spreading across the Universe like unquenchable fire.

Agreed that's unacceptable, but maybe we could criminalize aggravated assault instead? https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

People can speak up, but it turns out that there's now too much noise and nobody can distinguish the source of the speech, the context of the speech, the trustworthiness of the speech, and the occurrence of the speech (how many people are saying the same thing versus parroting what they were told).

Not only that, but the cost to speak is so low now, that bad actors have a field day, and I include bad faith people looking to just amass political fame, power, following, etc.

Mix that in with our new shortened attention span, and people no longer engage with the speech, instead it becomes like advertisement, if you've seen the same message a lot you'll subconsciously have taken it as a truth. It becomes which opinion have you seen most becomes your opinion, and everyone does this, so the truth becomes a matter of who can parrot their message as often, as loudly and to as many people.

This also means that catchy speech will win over non-catchy speech, because everything is more like a marketing game. Appealing to emotions is attention grabbing, controversy is attention grabbing, so all speech of that form becomes the winning speech in terms of getting viewed and heard.

That's why I think all reasonable people are doomed here, this mechanism of social conversation lends itself automatically to destabilizing opinions winning over stable reasonable but boring and not attention grabbing perspectives.

Before the internet, there were more filtering happening in a layered approach, publications and journalist were there to filter out the noise, the low quality, the unsubstantiated, the agenda driven, and all those.

Speaking up about injustices involved having to physically mobilize yourself to a public square, which takes a lot of effort from the speaker, again allowing a filtering out of bad actors and bad faith individual since the effort demanded had a cost, only people really motivated by great injustice would have the will to go through with protesting.

I don't think it was ideal before either, as publications as a filter had their own bias to what they'd filter out. But at least even what they let through, since there wasn't an abundance of it, the listeners could have a deeper think about it, and didn't believe it to be true just because they keep hearing about it over and over.

Hopefully we can find a way to improve on both. I think we need to put more contextualizing and filters over the internet speech, nothing that removes or bans speech, but allows to manage all the noise.

Algorithms are already in place doing this, except they filter based on corporate profit making, which often involves around engagement and attention grabbing. Again this is extra counterproductive, worse than a simple unfiltered approach with everything chronological.

I'm not sure how best to implement improvements, but I feel strongly it is needed, because even I can no longer make sense of all the noise on the internet, and it feels more and more like I actually can't tell what's real or not anymore, even though I'm in an ocean of information.

Now, I am also a believer in your first point. The cure _must not_ be worse than the poison. And I don't know what the right solution is. But we need one because we are not equipped to deal with this. Just a couple days ago a single individual bought one of the biggest speech platforms in the world and proceeded to post a defamatory conspiracy theory from a "fake news" outlet about a political target. The way the world is set up right now I think things can really go sideways. And while I am sure most people here prides themselves on their ability to discern the truth, remember that the electorate is not comprised of hacker news users. Thanks

This sort of thing assumes that bad actors don't exist and will never get into power... only it turns out bad actors do exist and... gasp, they already control many of the reins of power, why would you support ceding more control?

The solution to the misinformation is education, critical thinking, and depolarization; not criminalization. It's a slower process but it's the right one. The more a government gives up on educating and trusting the people it represents, and tends towards instead treating them like little children who can't possibly make decisions on their own, the more that population will be become just that— incapable of making decisions on their own. We don't want that to be the case; that's dangerous.

And this would include those currently in power, no? Who want to further their ability to put their narrative of choice forward - regardless of how truthful - while suppressing any counter-narratives, even if true.

More speech.

As with all other laws, my personal preference is the maximum possible liberty that doesn't allow people the liberty to remove other people's liberty.

Unfortunately, that's a soundbite and not a well-defined policy position, and I don't know how to generate the latter from the former.

The USFCS (United States Fact Checking Service) has flagged this as malinformation, and limited your ability to comment for the next 72 hours.

If you believe this is in error, please win the next election, so that you gain control of the censorship bureau and show us how to do it right.

At a fundamental level, one must ask why people are attacking 5G towers, storming the Capitol, and calling for violence against politicians: they believe their voices are not being heard. Censorship and banishment to alt-tech platforms only reinforces that belief.

To use the words of Scalia in "R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul", I believe the government "has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire" [2].

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/18/colin-powell...

[2] - [PDF] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/377/case.pdf

I don't believe a motive has been established in the Paul Pelosi case?

This person was mentally unstable/disturbed. I'm not sure we should frame our world, an freedoms, around the craziest of us all, otherwise our society will eventually look no different than an insane asylum.

I do believe there are memetic "contagions", but I also believe that a better solution is proper mental healthcare for those in need, like this person was.

Why do people cling to this notion of censorship being a good thing? I feel like it's an attempt at a power grab with "won't someone please think of the children!" as the justification to the masses.

Even if the actual enforcers of speech law were honest, they would never be allowed to enforce the law where it is most needed, namely government itself. Wars are usually supported with lies. [1] [2] Will speech laws be used to punish government officials who lie the country into war? I think not. Instead, such laws will be used to protect powerful people, especially people in government. For example, in Citizen's United, a case that Democrats still criticize, the government was prosecuting the members of a small non-profit with felonies for publishing a 90-minute documentary critical of then Senator Hillary Clinton. [3]

[1] https://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/07/15/damned-lies-nine-w... [2] https://www.europereloaded.com/false-flags-and-the-american-... [3] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205

There is nothing exceptional about social media except that it has taken so long to apply the sane principles of civil society. People who threatened the founding fathers with physical violence probably earned themselves a horsewhipping or a duel.

People who resent society must find a way to express their resentment by democratic action, not through threats and violence.

The founding fathers were not senseless followers of written words. They did not relinquish critical thinking by signing a constitution. The constitution was not a declaration of the end of critical thinking, education, and progress.

Violence is a destructive cultural anti-pattern.

It seems likely that there is more to the story than is represented in this summary. Truly "new" news is rarely completely accurate and accurately complete.

For one, stop making up stuff like the above. Are you in the attackers head? No? Then be responsible and make a claim like that. Otherwise, I’m glad there’s no fact gestapo to stop you from running your fingers; keep typing; be as irresponsible as you’d like; make the mistakes everyone makes; eventually realize people are and must be responsible for their own actions no matter what people say (in both senses).

That’s exactly it - the cost of free speech.

And why should we pay that cost? Because the alternative is far worse.

The problem everyone ignored is who decides what speech is “ok” and which is not? Clearly someone would have to. And when that someone uses that power to silence “disinformation” that is in reality legitimate opposition? Well now you’re screwed.

I’ve lived in countries where speech is highly regulated and it’s basically used to control political opposition. Posting the wrong thing on Facebook can get you jail time.

> On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.

Terrible things, but I wonder how someone can come to the conclusion that it is a better solution to police the information than actually strengthen people's ability to detect arbitrary BS by themselves. Policing disinformation does not scale (Brandolini's law), while teaching people to think does. Why aren't logical fallacies a part of every school's curriculum? Is it because the "official" disinformation would suffer from that too?

Before we start to police disinformation, don't we need a court-proof definition of the term disinformation? I tried to look up the definition of truth, only to learn that there is no commonly accepted philosohical definition of that. So most likely, any definition of disinformation that is used to depress certain information will be BS too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

Free speech has reasonable limits. Slander/Libel is necessary. Death threats, bomb threats, incitement to suicide or genocide. All completely reasonable exceptions nobody will argue against. All of these are IRL physical damages or at least threat of.

So do you go further to amoleriate or prevent psychological damage? This is really the biggest part of the controversy.

So what happens when you create hate speech laws? If you define what isn't allowed to be said. For example N-word isn't allowed tobe said. You actually are going to receive the opposite effect. In order to hurt, people now know what to say; if they don't want to break the law but still hurt you invent new words.

Civilized people who aren't looking to hurt don't care, they simply avoid those words without the law. So you end up with a cat and mouse game where you say you cant use the N word but I sure can invent the same destructive word which isn't the n word. The law is utterly pointless.

So you don't define the words. You just say 'anything that offends' or "anything which incites hatred"

But now even the civilized people are at a loss here. What the law ends up being is a direct method to silence your political opponents. E-word used to be the term for the inuit up in the north. It's now considered a slur. Why? Because it is similar to words that mean snow in other languages that dont matter? But what happened was the inuit used this 'slur' to silence their political opponents. It was orchestrated by the same people who wrote this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/dear-qallunaat-white-pe...

To anyone you can see the problem with hate speech but better yet that isnt the whole story. We now have compelled speech. Hate speech avoids words, but compelled speech... that's next level. The government under force of law are telling you what you must say. This is to avoid offending people. It's remarkable how bad this has been.

The primary battlefield has been a bunch of overworked doctors have been getting fired from our public healthcare and going into private clinics for more money and less work. All because they were accused of not using the right pronoun. No wonder they don't really try to defend themselves. So what happened? You break your arm or whatever emergency. You'll be in the ER for >15 hours and very likely not be able to see a doctor.

The real argument for free speech is that policing speech is not practical.

Oooh you really lost me here. It feels like you’ve fallen hook line and sinker for the news emotional storyline.

Deranged individuals exist regardless of current rhetoric. Never give up free speech in an attempt to cure society of deranged individuals. It won’t work.

Also, “the facts of reality”. You believe this exists in the political realm?

IMO, the solution is to teach and reward critical thinking and questioning authority instead of blind obedience and defering to others who know best.

All policing disinformation does is make people afraid of questioning what they are told - and that will still hold true once the authority they follow changes to one you disaprove of.

If you cultivate a strong culture of ultimate responsibility, people will learn to think twice.

If everyone took ultimate responsibility for their own actions, then the cult leader / dictator / influencer would just be a person shouting in a room.

Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content.

There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.

Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.

So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections.

If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.

Now it remains to be seen if there's anybody bold enough to sell the dream of democracy without increasing material benefits.

Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.

It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well.

And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with.

And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account.

In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.

The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war.

People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that.

Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy.

By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).

This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has)

I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government

What are these basic facts that people used to agree on, but now don't agree on anymore?

There was no golden age where everyone agreed on the same basic set of facts.

Intellectual self defence.

Problem is, it's the worst possible answer for those in power.

Because if we the people can defend ourselves against foreign state actors trying to rip up our democracy, we might conceivably start defending against threats closer to home.

I am sorry, but that makes no sense.

The critical question is this: how can we preserve an open internet without opening the door for foreign governments to wage psychological warfare?

I felt this too: it didn't just start with covid. There was a characteristic shift in around 2017-2018

"Mis" is wrong. "Dis" is intentionally wrong. "Mal" is using real information for bad purpose (to lead you to a wrong conclusion by giving you out of context info, or to injure with information, like with doxxing).

Roko's Basilisk is the perfect toy example. But on a global level the possibility of nuclear arms is a more real world example.

There are many kinds of dangerous true information.

In liberal societies we accept these risks and counter them with harm reduction while relying on trust in individual autonomy, not on policing.

Incidentally, this is a great example of why Twitter is so useful. This person definitely qualifies as "elite", if she gets to sit on this committee, and Twitter is giving me an insider's view into how she sees the world, and it's a very specific, curated narrative that is basically the consensus opinion from The Economist, plus unquestioning repetition of whatever the Intelligence Community says.

Absolutely bananas that people don't have a problem with this.

By "diversity", they mean every characteristic except independent thought. Be of a different race, religion, gender? Sure, that's great. Think different? You're terrible/evil/anathema.

There is no moral compass left in people I feel. We haven't got a north star that we used to. Subjectivism has occupied us all. The only way to move forward is to anchor your beliefs with sound fundamentals, no matter what others are doing around you.

I still remember vividly when the left used to believe in net-neutrality or in free-speech.

Edit: Those downvoting this, can you explain why this wouldn't be true? Can you try to imagine what would have heppened to this story in 2019? I understand you might not agree with my take, then please respond below.

Same goes for print media, it just has a much lower throughput. This is the side effect of a lot of trends (internet, globalization, urbanization) that has destroyed local communities. It wasn't that long ago that events on the other side of the world truly had 0 impact on your life.

The right to use your own megaphone is different from banning my right to also have a megaphone.

> misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent)

Disinformation can, as the others, be used as propaganda.

The US does this more than any other country on earth, and has covert intelligence services with bigger budgets than the entirety of the budgets of many countries.

> much as the SU did

It's not 1987, and I think the US might have also done a little bit of propaganda about the Soviet Union. It may have declared war on its own citizens to stamp out any indication of Soviet sympathies for decades, even.

Bernays almost 100 years ago. The solution is more propaganda.

Will they understand it all? It's much more complex to explain how we landed on the moon then to say we didn't.

Will people let a bias affect them when processing information?

I love the irony of this statement. You are such an advocate of free speech that you believe suggesting alterations to free speech should be punishable by prison time. Free speech is so important that we must restrict speech to protect free speech.

I'll post this as a guess, and hopefully someone will come along and correct.

(I read about the case on NPR.)

Also, every 20 years, one of the agencies is disbanded entirely and replaced with a new one.

More money for defense contractors?

The TSA (division of the DHS) exists to condition Americans to having their 4th amendment rights violated:

The fourth Amendment:

>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Every single search conducted of a person in the US travelling without a warrant is a violation of the 4th amendment because it is absolutely unreasonable to search every single person from 80 year old grandmas travelling to see family and children going on vacation.

No one is unbiased. The order and depth to which you present facts can itself be biased. Also, the extent to which you leave out or don’t throughly investigate “unimportant” facts can be biased.

For example, some networks and politicians try to “flood the zone”, with more information than can reasonably be covered. Even without bad intentions, it’s impossible to know all the facts about the war in Ukraine, let alone trying to also make time to learn facts about the economy, classified documents and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

We now have this divide in America where the difference between the journalist class and wide swaths of America are as wide as the gap between the Soviets and cold-war era journalists. So we have this strong bias whereby don't want to report anything that in any way legitimizes the viewpoints of the 'bad people' (e.g., anyone with viewpoints deemed to be 'populist), even if, particularly if those viewpoints are actually popular.

The problem is if they make up fairy tales about how the Taliban are a bunch of sweethearts and freedom fighters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, how would US citizens of the 1980s know? On the other hand, if they massage the truth about something that happened down the street, citizens are bound to notice and naturally, lose all faith in their reporting.

Why when the US does something evil is it always China or Russia's fault?

> [Those] who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society[1]

> [Any] ideology that considers capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive[2]

We'll see what this means for the free speech everyone says we have or the extend that "wrongthink" will be punished.

1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Nation...

2. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrori...

Well, presumably the US government's argument would be that China can influence content to harm the United States, whereas the US government would only influence content to help the United States (pinky swear!).

I do agree with you that the ability of a government to censor at a large scale is likely to be bad for the people under that government's jurisdiction and the people of the world, even if that government is acting competently in its own self-interest.

However, it's not that odd for a government to be concerned about a foreign government exerting an influence on its citizens that it also wants to exert on its own citizens. As a crude example, it wouldn't be that odd for the US government to be very concerned if China started conscripting US citizens into military service, even though the US government has the ability to do that. Even if you believe that all military conscription is bad, it's hardly a notable "double standard."

>There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

The summary of the entire business model of US media.

If this is what flies, CNN are guilty of malinformation daily, through their use of editorialising, never mind more fringe stuff.

Orwell was an amateur, apparently.

Musk fired that one last Thursday.

Using HN primarily for ideological battle will also get you banned here—regardless of which flavor you favor. So please don't do that either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Telecommunications Act of 1996's supposed purpose was "to promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services"[0]. Now there's far less competition since media conglomerates have greatly consolidated, and deregulation has allowed mainstream media to regulate the viewpoints of popular conversation.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/104/plaws/publ104/PLAW-104publ104.p...

I'm a sadist. I won't kill you, but I'm not going to hide I might smirk. For many years I warned that if you abuse your access, nothing is off the table and it has been that way for years now.

I remember rumors about /b/ but I never saw abuse material, just gore and a bunch of racist bullshit circa 2009.

On my end, I found it... weird... how people would pair "only" looking at cartoons with some really weird shit they're write, on the erotica side of things.

(Weird as in power dynamics -- the idea you might just leak your preferences on a dating site is amusing to me, since... come on... you're both trying to meet people... the problem if it's paired with being more or less helpful depending on if people bang you. Keep in mind, I literally had a conversation with a published author about how so many fiction writers are basically doing a roman a clef I can't tell if it's rude to comment on it, but it's a lot easier to look things up nowadays...)

Anyways MOVING ON!

When I was considering grad schools I was told it was a known thing you can de-anonymize reviewers, but later on someone was dumb enough to self rate a five, state something factually incorrect about what would have become my PhD thesis, then rank it a 1. From there, based on "the metrics" I wasn't accepted to... a privacy thing.

Now, to be fair, before we got to that moment, I could have... not done a full on PhD.

But I was living in a shared house with some ex army libertarian who probably would have thrown a fit if I ran a packet capture, so I kind of assumed on day someone might knock on the door and tried to get a receipt when I went out for coffee -- I fully expected one day I'd have to sigh and go "listen, I just pay the internet bill, here's where I was then, that guy is a weirdo".

The above is... creative nonfiction... but I hope people know that is the source of a HUGE chunk of meme culture. Imagine you're Catholic, sheltered, have only been to Niagara falls, and people keep very obviously asking you questions with the promisem of not repeating your answers because apparently they find your opinions both intriguing and hilarious?

The classic example being that in the aftermath of the G20, people started testing the limits of free expression, and they had some kind of... nude art thing... down at CMU... and the bishop had been offended.

And I was just tired and annoyed and snapped "Well, it's a private college right? If the cmu want to take their pants off tell them to put down a towel" and tried to ask about something actually work related...

It was one of what became a series of very WTF moments. Like, ok we are "privacy researchers"... how am I supposed to ignore that I was born here, so if these rich weirdos want to wander around with thousands of dollars in electronics AND call the cops every time they get scared so someone can come shoot some poor bastard who wasn't lucky enough to be born in "Cali" or whatever...

Especially since I'd been told they had to bring every cop and swat person in from all over the country for the 2009 G20 -- the implication being if you had that many pissed off in multiple cities at once, there is NO WAY they could do the things they did if there were multiple protests at once.

So occasionally, from around Y2K until now, I'd meet these gun reform people who were just... rude. They were bullies who worried someone would literally kill them... like... with a gun. And they'd make a big scene about how someone they knew had been killed with a gun, then push... bad legislation... like the AWB.

And I'd smirk and go "*oh sure, I'd be willing to vote for someone who supports the AWB -- my main concern is just that we maintain access to things like bolt action rifles and revolvers... quiet little things you can't hear from the next house. That's what they did in Prague. Keep shooting those local party officials until one gets shipped in who is less of an asshole... or so I heard."

It's fun to watch their eyes bug out when you say that in your cheeriest "I'm a millenial and yes I vote" voice. (Literary or otherwise.)

You can associate with whoever you want, I think the thing people are finding out is that no one wants to fuck Nazis, then having meltdowns they're gonna have to jerk off for the rest of their lives.

(Personally I'm just hoping one day I can engineer it so it's a girl, but apparently the things I write are so incredibly offensive to women, I'm the poster child for planned parenthood.)

The biggest and most obvious question is who gets to decide what qualifies as "disinformation" - including what the difference is between disinformation and just being wrong, and how is that protected from changes in the political landscape?

Whoever has the right to say their understanding is the correct one and all others should be repressed has power over speech.

Freedom of speech means ALL speech or it means nothing.

If someone defrauds you, prove the fraud and the damage and sue them.

Otherwise, whether you want them to or not, people have a right to tell you what they think, or even to lie to you and tell you something they don't even think.

Otherwise "stopping disinformation" is just "censorship" by another name.

Taking down parody accounts and flagging people for COVID conspiracy theories, as documented in the article? Probably less so.

I do not understand the naivety that comes with this particular view. The freedom of speech is not about saying a $slur. It is about ensuring we are not Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia or China.

Why are people clamoring so hard to become like those states? Beyond government, who benefits from this?

It is not the citizens of US.

edit: added Iraq since that reference may not be as evident in in 2022.

Just label this for what it is, government censorship supported by big tech.

Yes, it is.

> Saying we shouldn’t fight it is as invalid as saying we shouldn’t repel an invading force because that enemy has a right to bear arms.

You're conflating the rights of citizens vs foreigners. Your own citizens are not your enemy. You should never call them that. That sort of thinking is what gets you internment camps. That is a road which we already traveled and do not need to travel again.

The difference between "you can't say that" and "you will go to jail if you say that" is very minor and plenty of western nations have already breached that wall.

PSAs paid for w/ public tax $ like The Ad Council have their controversies but are generally countering some social issue with a "this is bad" message [0] but outright censorship of even blatantly false information is a sign that our government's integrity is shot to hell.

Next time you hear someone spewing some bullshit like the 2016 election was rigged (Russia) or the 2020 election was rigged (tbh not sure who the main villain rigged this one), remember that people have been accustomed to lies from the top and are not completely crazy for looking to the fringes for the real scoop.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Council#Famous_and_Controve...

It's also quite constructive to conceive of "disinformation" as information (as opposed to physical violence) because it leads naturally to the realization that the remedy should be in the realm of information as well (education, establishing trust, trustworthy or verifiable information from trusted sources, etc..), instead of violence (suppression, shutting down, imprisonment).