Misinformation should be refuted, not censored
fcpp.org
fcpp.org
How do you know? People don't post "thanks for changing my mind!" when they change their mind.
Have you ever changed your mind? How often did you go and express that you changed your mind to the person who changed your mind? Did you at some point start voting differently? Did you go to the politician that convinced you and told him he changed your mind? Probably not, people mostly change their mind in silence, many wont even acknowledge they changed their mind if you confront them.
And we know what's right and wrong so we need to take swift and bold action against these cretins - I mean citizens - who are espousing the wrong views.
What a lovely free and liberal society we have. And it just so happens our kids are learning less and less in school [0]... darn, I guess we'll have to crackdown even harder and triple the budget....
[0] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r...
The term has been well known in public-policy discussions for at least a decade. The basic idea goes back a loooooong time, at least to 1170 when Henry II of England asked, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" (meaning Thomas Becket). Thus he ensured that someone would and did, even though he didn't know who, where, or how. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie could serve as a contemporary example that also predates what wiki-editors seem aware of. Offering a clear path to gain favor is almost as good as an order.
Nowadays, when a prominent US politician says "these people are {killing babies|sexualizing children|stealing an election} and something should be done about it" then it becomes increasingly likely that violent acts will follow, even though no specific or direct order was given. It's a way to rule by fear while supposedly retaining deniability, but anybody who has been paying attention can see right through it and it's beginning to look as though the legal system might catch up.
I am not a lawyer but we’ve had these same discourses during the 1960s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)
Can you explain what you mean here, then?
I’m talking about the current legal system here like you, so I’m wondering what’s fundamentally so new that censorship is the only answer here?
Exactly what it says: the legal system has not caught up. Even in a post-Brandenburg world, the standard is still that the threat must be both explicit and imminent. They're still struggling with the "stochastic" part of stochastic terrorism, even though the phenomenon itself has existed for centuries.
> I’m talking about the current legal system here like you, so I’m wondering what’s fundamentally so new that censorship is the only answer here?
Never said, never implied, not even relevant in this particular sub-thread.
That’s not an answer. I already showed you where we have existing laws and precedent; so I ask again what’s different?
Or are you saying that the bar for inciting violence was considered too stringent?
Because the only legal lack I’m aware of is what to do when a President is the one that incites a rebellion.
> Never said, never implied, not even relevant in this particular sub-thread.
Fair. The sub-thread spawned from moderated speech but I agree moderation isn’t the same as censorship.
After all, the most violent political acts in the last few years in the USA were the Floyd riots. But do you really want to prosecute anyone who argues that there's a racism problem in America for "stochastic terrorism", because some people heard that and went looting? Seems obviously inflammatory and unwise.
Should you be held responsible if someone attacks "a prominent US politician" after reading your comment?
There are billion dollar industries designed to change your mind and get you to act against your best interest without you even recognising it, but people think they are "free thinkers".
But don't you dare silence me.
How do you feel about literacy tests for voting? Presumably you're all in.
Assuming you are a human, you don't have time to read everything even on just the important issues. The people who are deliberately producing information (as opposed to those whose misinformation is due to error) can often outnumber the producers of accurate information by orders of magnitude.
That's both because it takes much more work to produce something accurate than to produce something inaccurate, and because those deliberately producing misinformation often more resources to put toward such production.
Meanwhile people laying fibreoptic cable are attacked for creating covid
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/07/5g-conspira...
The perpetrators of these attacks don't come up with their ideas from nowhere.
lets create special goverment commitee that will read all messages before posting and block any 'misinformation'
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-war-against-printing/
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65585/pg65585-images.ht...
"even the most ignorant might might feel emboldened to try interpreting God’s words for themselves. As such, there was serious risk that honest folk would be led far from the path of orthodoxy"
This happened, and (among other things) lead to contemporary Biblical literalism (an extreme from of the protestant elevation of the Bible as authoritative over theological argument and tradition).
On the other hand, however bad a thing you think Biblical literalism is, I do not think anyone would argue (now, with the benefit of hindsight etc) that it would have been a good thing to censor books in the way Filippo wanted.
>Among the positions promoted by the Centre is climate change denial.
>Funding comes from private charitable foundations (63%) such as the Aurea Foundation and the Heartland Institute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Centre_for_Public_Pol...
>Many of their published articles are by well-known climate change skeptics Patrick Moore (see publications), Donna Laframboise (see publications), and Paul Driessen (see publications)
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Anyone unwilling to address this in the free speech argument is not arguing in good faith. Putting things out there in bad faith is the exact reason why censorship needs to be considered. Not a good look.
This problem is not new (boy that cried wolf).
Doesn’t unmasking all actors provide an efficient shortcut?
I can't figure out what you are suggesting here. It kind of feels like you are suggesting removing anonymity from online discussions is the solution? But I doubt that's actually what you are driving at.
Such as continent, nation, state/city, down to the individual.
But I also mean that everyone knows who the others are from the start of a conversation. Not so much as a punitive measure after-the-fact.
My question is this: Rather than censoring, why aren’t we asking whether/how misinformation can be directly and visibly attributed to the sources peddling the misinformation?
The first refutation is in response to a steelman version of the argument. It's simply that that you often can't know whether a claim is or isn't bullshit until someone manages to refute it, or tries to and fails. Thus even if this claim is correct, it doesn't matter. People will just have to spend the energy in order to discover what's true.
The second refutation is to observe that Brandolini's Law is itself bullshit. Therefore anyone presenting it as relevant to a debate on free speech is in fact arguing in bad faith, as you put it, whether they know it or not.
Where does this "law" come from? Calling it a law makes it sound like it's got some empirical basis in fact, and it's phrased in a mathematical way, but in reality it's literally a snarky tweet made in 2013 by some rando programmer [1]. Not only was it presented with no evidence but when asked "How do you know that" his reply was "Just read #ThinkingFastAndSlow ... then everything will fall in place". But very ironically Thinking Fast and Slow is a book famous for being built on bullshit. Many of the studies within it don't replicate, and the author later admitted that he relied too heavily on underpowered studies for his claims.
Even if this book wasn't full of bullshit, nothing in it is about the claim Brandolini made! So we have something that pretends to be some sort of scientific law but isn't, and which is justified via a bullshit irrelevant reference to a book that doesn't make that claim and which is itself full of bullshit studies. It's a fractal of bullshit.
Brandolini's Law is a good example of why we need an open and uncensored internet. Far too many people are willing to take claims at face value because they are phrased in ways that sound superficially scientific or authoritative. Our only defense against this is when people are free to refute such claims in public, extensively and robustly, without being moderated into oblivion. Only then will we be able to inch slowly closer to a truth-based and shared reality.
Real investigative journalism is costly, for example, and fewer outlets are able to do this today.
Our society is the poorer for it but there seems to be too many interests and market forces against this.
We see this in science where it’s the lack of replication that uncovers the BS.
We’ll agree to disagree, but I’m willing to assume this as a given to progress an argument.
Hacker News is an especially good example of why it's important. This forum is full of people who both generate and accept vast quantities of "right sounding" BS all the time, just look at any discussion of COVID, climate, etc. All you'd do with your proposals is enable large-scale harassment and punishment of anyone pointing out that yes Virginia, it's actually quite likely that a novel coronavirus came from the lab right next to the first cases, the that was experimenting on novel coronaviruses. Instead of leading us towards insight and truth you'd have it that all such people are immediately silenced on the grounds of producing producing clever "BS" that's too hard to refute.
As for science, I'm afraid that replication is usually not necessary to uncover a paper as BS. It's actually one of the things I was thinking of when I said high effort BS can often be trivially refuted. Scientists like to do a full replication anyway because within their culture that's considered respectable and lawsuit-proof, whereas pointing out that a paper is illogical, makes absurd assumptions and none of the numbers add up can land you in hot water. But in reality lots of high-effort scientific papers that took a team of authors months to produce can be refuted in five minutes by just pointing out things in the text. "How did this get through peer review?" is a very common response to studying bad scientific papers - you don't need a full blown replication to detect these problems.
I live in an age where the WHO called Covid droplet spread when it was and proven to be airborne and governments around the globe are still telling people to diligently wash their hands for a virus they breath in. Most of the mainstream media and social media is happily going with that as well. You can't trust people generally, including the authorities and experts on a topic.
I choose no one to have the power over what I can read.
The challenger incident is a good case study. The motivated management to attempt the launch made it such that the quiet truth of the actual safety was hard for the group to hear. Until it was a disaster.
(Yes, I think I'm basically restating the squeaky wheel idea.)
FTFY
Probably all of us would be against censoring the verbal communications between individuals in our society. Such communication is full of untruths and agenda-driven lies. Right now parents and teachers the world over are propagating untruths to children. Workplace discussions are happening around watercoolers where unscientific nonsense is spreading. We just accept that this space of human interaction is the noise floor of our civilization, and maybe even appreciate the agency that this gives us.
With the spread of the internet, that same communication is happening online. It being online is literally the only difference. Let the noise flow, I say, and from it can both objective and social truths arise. To do anything else doesn't give us truth anymore than did restricting interpersonal speech in certain unpleasant regimes throughout history.
I believe if we had had a system in place to censor unscientific information regarding climate change, we would not be in as deep shit as we are now. It's a very strong argument for moderating what can and cannot be said publicly, as the negative consequences will be felt dearly by many.
Obviously there are problems with censorship, but I just want to point out that nothing about this is as clear cut as you would like to believe.
i absolutely agree that the spread of some messages should be limited, but outright censorship risks removing the wrong messages, and gets in the way of a critical discussion.
Quoting the fantastic Terry Pratchett: "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
This has a few consequences: 1) Most of the damage is done. 2) Correcting the lie/misinformation takes a lot more effort that it takes to spread the lie. 3) The lie/misinformation can cost lives (missinformation on vaccines, coloidal silver, etc)
It doesn't help that some people and publications make money by selling lies and inflaming people (tabloids, many 'influencers', etc). And also that some supposedly respected institutions are often the originator of those lies (e.g. health risks of smoking, excess sugars, etc)
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Good bullshit and misinformation traveled well even before the internet, so how did we manage before?
This asymmetry has been written about many times - as bullshit, flooding the zone, sealioning, etc. What some call censorship is often just trying to make things symmetrical again, to give those who are trying to argue from facts a fighting chance. That's why such accusations are a staple among the people who peddle the misinformation in the first place, and also among people who are just trying to avoid accountability when they've always been perfectly free to say what they want. People need to learn what real censorship is, and stop throwing the term around any time they don't think they're getting the hearing or reaction they deserve.
Correct. What about our ability to ruin reputations? Hasn’t that amplified as well via the so-called Streisand effect?
You are advocating for censorship for practical reasons, but it is censorship at the end of the day.
What you’re saying is that it’s hard to battle misinformation, and this is true. What isn’t true is that muzzling misinformation is the only way to combat this problem, even if it seems like the easiest approach.
And if you want accountability, then censorship is the least effective approach in a democratic society; as you’ve hidden away what should be held to account.
If a person contributing online is incorrect but participates in good faith, refuting is a great way to continue the discussion in a healthy, constructive manner.
If a person contributing online is not participating in good faith, this becomes a lot more complex. Especially based on the degree and potential impacts of misinformation.
Free speech is a right that only works when people utilizing it do so responsibly.
The problem is making the tough choices of what to do about uncivil discourse or bad faith actors who are not interested in upholding civility for the sake of the society. Unfortunately there are no easy answers which leave us with a lot of bad or difficult options to choose from.
Then an entire class of trolling stops becoming scalable.
I'd think we're not utilizing all of our social faculties we otherwise would in a face-to-face conversation. We don't see a human in front of us so our brains aren't "firing on all cylinders". E.g. being polite, assuming good-faith, tempering negative impulses and all of the other social lubricant that normally allows humans to peacefully coexist in a society.
The correct approach is to lay out the facts clearly, outlining the chain of reasoning so that anyone can follow it if they choose. Identify known purveyors of bullshit and shut them down so they stop polluting the idea space. And carefully, with intellectual humility consider opposing but well reasoned ideas.
Shutting down known bullshiters is necessary for preserving public discourse otherwise they just spray bullshit at all hours of all days and overwhelm well reasoned discourse.
If someone is shouting nonsense in a debate, interrupting, and not listening you have no obligation to keep them in the debate. In fact if they’re arguing in bad faith that alone is enough to stop listening to them, stop amplifying them, stop talking about their ideas.
If it's well proven then you can easily link to a rigorous proof of that claim, one that justifies the use of mathematical terminology like "exponentially easier". Yes?
I think it's not actually proven and cannot be proven because you don't have a precise definition of bullshit to begin with, let alone a reliable means of identifying it, nor any way to measure how "easy" it is to create rather than refute.
Therefore any claim that it is exponentially easier, must itself be misinformation. Which means that under your own policy you would be "shut down", whatever that means. See how sharp the sword is that you wish to wield here?
Some "misinformation" is information where there are multiple perspectives, and the "mis" classification is because the ruling party is on the opposite side. This is why censorship is chosen, because it cannot be refuted. The correctness or incorrectness is in the eye of the beholder.
I'll get ravaged for pointing this out, but Hunter Biden's laptop and Joes corruption in Ukraine were Russian misinformation until last year. Now the NYT admits the laptop is real and is slowly admitting that Burisma smells really bad.
I deeply disagree with the proponents of anti-vax; and many of the right-wing positions.
And I think, for instance, removing some of the internet anonymity and breaking up tech monopolies would both be quite helpful in solving the problems we have today.
Completely shutting down discourse and not allowing fringe ideas to be discussed, however, can’t be the way.
Not only is it significantly harder to debunk misinformation than to create it (i.e., Brandolini's Law), but there's a good chance on social media platforms that the types of individuals presented with misinformation from some party A will never even be exposed to the debunking information from some party B at all.
So, for many, they're effectively already in a censorship-rich environment. The idea that there is or has ever been a truly free exchange of ideas seems disingenuous at best.
The police are a way for us to delegate our self-defense to a third party, the state. We give the police a certain level of authority in return for (hopefully) safety.
In your metaphor you're suggesting, "don't protect yourself, you already delegated that responsibility".
Censoring speech on the internet is exactly the same delegation of responsibility. "Don't protect yourself, delegate that responsibility to the censors".
Your metaphor is making the opposite point that you're intending.
In that time you have 1000 more items of misinformation to debunk.
How do we win?
It would be really interesting to know the cost-benefit analysis they did before considering such a drastic step because not only does it go against their democratic values it suddenly introduces a very apparent cognitive dissonance to the western idea that Russia is weak and irrelevant as a super power (and isn't even worthy to be called a super power) - if that is the reality then why is it that the US, the most vocal vanguard of free speech, suddenly feels so threatened by the ideas in RT? And why do US and European political leaders suddenly believe that they are no longer in a position to present a strong counter view to the ideas in RT?
My regular sources of news includes my country's own local media, and international outlets like BBC, CNN, DW, Arab News, Gulf Times, NYT, NYP, NPR etc. RT wasn't even on the radar. RT is now part of my regular sources of news - when I learnt about the ban, I got curious about it and checked it out (the Streisand effect at work). I found the content to be similar to many of the other public funded media outlets - all of them have similar types of news, views and propaganda (why their own country / culture is great, how their enemies are wrong, and their different perspective about other countries depending on their own country's relationship with them etc.).
Yes, when it comes to reporting on the US, I did notice a definite slant towards Republican politics on RT.
But then, if one believes in democracy and free speech the way the US does, why should a non-Republican administration feel threatened if RT paints the American Republicans in a better light than the Democrats (or some other politician or party)? It's natural for voters to be swayed but finally it is still an American who is elected by the masses - whether it be a Democrat or a Republican. And representational democracy offers a check and balance in such a democracy - just because Americans who read RT get swayed and elect Republicans, doesn't mean the elected Republicans have to be swayed by the mass (in fact it often is the other way, and like I pointed out, representation can serve as one of the built-in checks and balances of representational democracy against majoritarianism).
However, if some Democrats / Americans believe that their own fellow American politicians will not serve their own country's interest, America has an existential issue bigger than Russia.
Censoring information just makes the educated suspicious towards an administration. Countering it, or even just presenting an alternate perspective to it is what cultivates democratic value. Else it is a slow slide to authoritarianism, which is what we are all seeing more and more of, around the world.
So, no. If we can prevent it from being created or launched, or if we can prevent it from reaching its audience, then, and only then, information can win.
Agreed, we must shut down the dastardly Internet immediately! And burn all the books!
Remember the reason for free speech: it exists so that the people can be informed, a fundamental requirement for the exercise of democracy. When someone actively and deliberately misinforms the people, for whatever reasons, they should be held accountable for any damage they cause - the very same way one can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre and expect society not to punish them for the deaths they caused.
Government censorship is bad, and bill C-10 is bad, but the one-sided nature of this article reveals its true motivation, which is to support conservative politics.
When refuted this article I at least gave you examples to work with.
I can tell we have deep disagreements, and it would take entirely too much time and effort to try and convince you otherwise (which is probably unachievable in this sort of forum anyways).
I'll just say that I disagree with the framing of your points around school curriculum and Florida censorship. The framing is the most uncharitable interpretation of what's actually going on, which is why I referred to your "less factual versions of reality".
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1467/?Tab=BillTex...
It allows individual parents to DDoS the school with objections to individual materials, forcing hearings led by a vaguely defined “unbiased” individual.
It requires librarians to undergo state level training to choose materials. How bad this is really depends on the content of the training (do any of us know what that is?). We all know who controls the state government of Florida.
It doesn’t have to be overt censorship to be a bad bill that disincentivizes schools from carrying books with controversial topics and has the effective result of censorship. If a school wants to avoid a procedural nightmare they just can’t carry some materials at all.
Here’s a quote directly from Ron DeSantis’ website championing the bill:
> “Recently I discovered one of the most disturbing, pornographic books in my child’s high school in Orange County,” said Alicia Farrant, Parent, Orange County. “After some research, I learned that an alarming percentage of high school and middle school library books contain similar material. It is appalling that removal of pornographic and sexually explicit books has even been cause for debate.”
https://www.flgov.com/2022/03/25/governor-ron-desantis-signs...
In other words, some parent was mad that a book discussed sex. A glaring omission is the title of the material, it’s just an anonymous unknown scapegoat. Now the it is undoubtedly banned thanks to the objection of one parent.
Now students have one less resource that gives them information and perspective about the changes happening to their body and their journey to adulthood. Now parents can easily get books removed based on their personal objections rather than their value to the school community as a whole.
> Unfortunately, some politicians seem to have an unhealthy obsession with censorship. For example, U.S. President Joe Biden recently accused social media platforms, like Facebook, of “killing people” with misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Criticizing something, even by the President, is not censorship.