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The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. I remember voting for John Kerry, then Oba
by JPKab 7y ago
The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see.
I remember voting for John Kerry, then Obama, and thinking how the liberals were the party that valued individual liberties over maintaining order via social control.
I never thought in my wildest dreams that Trump winning in 2016 would trigger a movement of mass censorship from the party who I thought was on the side of the people.
It's soul crushing. All over a theory that people actually changed their votes over troll posted news articles, with no evidence that voters actually did this after seeing said articles.
- mirimir 7y ago> The people Taibbi is complaining about don't want to filter what they see. They want to filter what the masses see. Sure, but that's only possible with systems where censorship is possible. Consider Freenet. It's ancient code, but it's arguably impossible to censor. Even to censor what's being stored on your local machine. But unfortunately, there's no anonymity, and users are readily discovered and arrested.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoA few people writing articles is not a movement for mass censorship. But we do need to deal with the fact that the ability to motivate the masses, to control them, via sending them information that convinces them of falsehoods is dangerous to democracy. The source of this worry is that we could lose our democracy to what Neil Stephenson calls the Miasma.
- mirimir 7y agoHuh? Google, Facebook and Twitter are engaging in mass censorship!
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoThey have an interest in stopping scammers, and hate speech, racism, etc. In a pandemic they have an interest in stopping extremely misleading and destructive information. Should you be able to ask other people to hurt someone, to find out where there house is, to encourage people to hurt others? I think not. The challenge is always what is the line between complaining that xyz is a terrible person, or lying or a politician, how to separate people my clearly irrational or misleading statements. I really think Neil Stephenson captured this brilliantly year ahead of time in his idea of the Miasma.