Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?
Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many!
> if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve
I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
We were told mass surveillance against US citizens doesn't happen. It did and still is. We were told healthcare reform will not force people to change their insurance coverage and healthcare providers. It turned out to be "a lie of the year". We were told US law enforcement supplying guns to drug cartels is crazy talk. It was true. We were told FBI, CIA and DOJ heads would never lie to the Congress. They did, and suffered no consequences. We were told the inflation is a temporary phenomenon that is going to go away very quickly, and is insignificant. It never did, and was very significant. We were told the hypothesis of COVID originating from Wuhan lab leaks is insane fantasy which no scientists have ever believed and it has no evidence at all behind it. It turned out to be not so. We were told migration restrictions as a way to reduce the impact of the pandemic is a racist bigotry. Then in a short time it became a mandatory policy. We were told masks are useless and nobody but medical workers should use them. Then there were mandated for everyone. We were told COVID is nothing to worry about and is less dangerous than the flu. Then 2020-21 happened. We were told lockdowns are vital and even sole person daring to go to an empty beach should be arrested because it is necessary to prevent millions of deaths. Then the same people endorsed mass protests where thousands of people gathered together. We were told 2020 protests were "mostly peaceful". They were anything but. We were told we need just a two week lockdown to flatten the curve. It turned to be many months. We were told closing the schools is absolutely necessary or our kids will die. It turned out not to be so. We were told COVID vaccines prevent the spread of the virus. They did not. We were told Hunter laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. It wasn't. We were told rumors of US government working with social media companies to censor dissenting opinions are total lies. Until the documents confirmed that's exactly what happened. We were told rumors of Joe Biden being unfit to rule are absolutely false and he's never going to be replaced as a candidate. He was.
These are just some random examples, only from recent years, I could have many more, especially if I dug deeper into the modern history. The press and the government are lying to us constantly, incessantly, brazenly. And the only way we even know they do and can challenge them on it is because they don't yet have the total control over the information. And that's why they want it.
> There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
There are. But that doesn't mean some self-appointed guys that get paid for bloviating in public are now some magic geniuses that have the right to tell us all how it really is. They do not possess any such capacity and they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Except that they have been already caught, many times, lying to us.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid...
Excerpt:
> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.
Biden was asked if he would pardon his son, and he said no. But this is entirely beside the point, because Trump would pardon his son without a second thought and Trump supporters wouldn't blink.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-tells-muir-wouldnt-par... https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/politics/biden-will-not-p... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c133mdjkl7go
> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.