4 ms·

There are always cases where it is hard to understand what is true and what is not. But then there are also explicit lies. It's not hard to adjudicate that Tru

There are always cases where it is hard to understand what is true and what is not. But then there are also explicit lies. It's not hard to adjudicate that Trumps ambassador to the Netherlands is lying when he talks about politicians being burned to death in the Netherlands due to immigration. But having the claim repeated over and over still creates the impression that there is some truth to it. And that in turn hurts immigrants and makes it harder for people to come to rational decisions. Your reasoning basically presumes that all humans are infinitely rational and have infinite time to investigate facts (the reader gets to decide). Neither of these assumptions is true, or a useful approximation. Otherwise user interface design for programs would look extremely different. As people have all sorts of cognitive fallacies built in, and have extremely limited time to investigate facts, we need to build (and maintain) a society that makes it easy to come to rational, reasonable decisions. The Internet has disrupted the social structures that performed this function in the past, and new ones are only slowly emerging.

martin1975 8y ago
well put. I am for both options existing on the internet - for people who want an AOL/Compuserve/tailored kind of internet as well as for people who like to live on the UNIX command line and peruse gopher for news :). The 1st Amendment, which I admit I treat as the 'gospel' of free speech in these cases, allows for both. It just seems private enterprise in certain geographic areas of the world tends to skew more toward one view of the internet while leaving out the other in the cold... I'm trying to put this is mildly as I can :).
- Certhas 8y ago
  Right, so keeping the ability to host and make your own website around is vital. And there are many regions in the world where you can go to jail for your blog. For the scope of the 1st amendment, I sometimes feel there is some nuance missing when this is invoked, as if this was the only thing written in the constitution. The SCOTUS recognizes that the right to free speech competes with other rights, and thus there are limits. You can't lie in advertisement. You can't provoke someone with "fighting words", you can't say things that are the IP of others, NDAs are honored, you can get fired for what you say on facebook outside working hours, really the list is endless. In fact, as I just discovered, and as is very pertinent to this discussion: In Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court decided that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions#False_statements_of_fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

martin1975 8y ago

well put. I am for both options existing on the internet - for people who want an AOL/Compuserve/tailored kind of internet as well as for people who like to live on the UNIX command line and peruse gopher for news :). The 1st Amendment, which I admit I treat as the 'gospel' of free speech in these cases, allows for both. It just seems private enterprise in certain geographic areas of the world tends to skew more toward one view of the internet while leaving out the other in the cold... I'm trying to put this is mildly as I can :).

Certhas 8y ago
Right, so keeping the ability to host and make your own website around is vital. And there are many regions in the world where you can go to jail for your blog. For the scope of the 1st amendment, I sometimes feel there is some nuance missing when this is invoked, as if this was the only thing written in the constitution. The SCOTUS recognizes that the right to free speech competes with other rights, and thus there are limits. You can't lie in advertisement. You can't provoke someone with "fighting words", you can't say things that are the IP of others, NDAs are honored, you can get fired for what you say on facebook outside working hours, really the list is endless. In fact, as I just discovered, and as is very pertinent to this discussion: In Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974), the Supreme Court decided that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions#False_statements_of_fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...