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Comment by traviswingo | Hacker News Reader

There’s a difference between freedom of speech and education. The government did a bad thing. Anyone should be allowed to speak their piece.

We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.

I get the incentive here, but it’s not the governments place to decide what we do and don’t say.

Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data. Because right now, it feels like the people with the most effective voices are taking us in the wrong direction.

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People shouldn't be allowed to speak their piece when that piece can be bright-line traced to people dying.

But fine, let's allow people to speak their piece because bright lines are hard to draw, starting with Twitter, who should be completely free to follow or not follow what the US government says, which is literally what happened here.

This will be overturned on appeal, because the bar for this kind of order is way higher than where the Biden admin was, and for the most part we still care about being consistent when applying the rule of law.

> People shouldn't be allowed to speak their piece when that piece can be bright-line traced to people dying.

Authoritarian governments love it! All for public safety, that’s the spirit!

“You can’t say that, someone might hate it enough to attack me! Doesn’t matter how true it is!” -any dictator

…someone might believe it enough to kill themselves or others.

Absolutism helps no one, and you already rely in the government to protect you in a number of “authoritarian” ways, so it’s not like you have a moral opposition to the idea.

> Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data.

It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.

Besides which. Both the people that produce the lies, and their supporters, are well aware of the fact that it’s not true. They just choose to ignore that. And any facts and data you are able to compile, will fall on deaf ears.

> It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.

Great point, free speech is bad. We should repeal the 1st Amendment. /s

There's an uncomfortable amount of people on this thread that seem to feel that way.

Plus when people do take the time to thoroughly refute misinformation, it's getting easier and easier to drown out any signal that starts spreading with a cacophony of noise from bots.

> We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.

How, though? It takes a lot more work to develop an educated opinion than an uneducated one. There will always be more educated speakers than uneducated speakers. And do you really think that, during a pandemic, the best use of an epidemiologist's time is wading into the trenches and fighting every single case of "wrong on the internet"?

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