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The problem is that it has become acceptable to treat ideas as dangerous. For example, if I want to deny the Holocaust, that is my right. No one has the moral,

The problem is that it has become acceptable to treat ideas as dangerous. For example, if I want to deny the Holocaust, that is my right. No one has the moral, and no one should have the legal, right to try and prevent me from doing that. But that is not the view of those who control the discourse. They have accepted that certain views are inherently dangerous. The slope is slippery. It begun with Nazism and pedophilia advocacy but already includes Corona "misinformation", r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, Hamas' Twitter account, WikiLeaks, Mila Yanniopolis, and a whole host of stuff I just don't know about because some powerful fucks decided it was too dangerous for me (please don't read so much into my examples - these are the ones I know about. I think both the left and the right is guilty of trying to censor the other side). If you don't believe this creeping censorship will eventually reach you, you either have very vanilla opinions or are very naive. Furthermore, more and more power over expression online is concentrated in a handful of American mega corporations, making it practically impossible to escape it. You can't "just start your own site" if Google blacklists it and refuses to index it because no one will find it. They effectively control the online discourse. Just yesterday, Leila Khaled was supposed to participate in an discussion panel online sponsored by an American university. Zionist lobby groups got her booted from Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook, preventing the meeting from taking place. Reportedly, the university had a backup if one platform would boot her, but not all three! To the best of my knowledge, there are no alternative to these platforms. If they won't allow you to stream to an international audience, you just can't do it. At least not if you are not a techie who knows how to setup your own video streaming server. I think there is a huge need for software for censorship resistant online platforms. Something that is distributed so that it can't be taken down, but not so complicated that only a few can use it.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Given that you can give a laundry list that includes Nazi advocacy, ChapoTrapHouse Hamas' Twitter account, And Mila Yanniopolis, it seems the attempts to censor aren't really working. Hypothesis: it's the opposite. The era of bidirectional mass communication is allowing geographically-dispersed fringe interests to consolidate into political blocs. Interest groups that previously would have been censored implicitly (by being a small, isolated group in a larger community) or explicitly (by the authority-controlled media, such as cable, television, and radio, having standards and practices that excluded giving pedophiles a half hour to plead the pro-side of their case on the air) now have the tools to communicate with each other and the public outside of gatekeepers.
save_ferris 6y ago
The problem that companies are trying to navigate is how to keep speech as free and open as possible without permitting state-sponsored disinformation operations to fester within the platform. I agree that individuals should have the right to believe what they wish, however heinous their opinions may be. But it's clear that social media platforms are very powerful credibility launderers that give nefarious actors an incredible amount of power in shaping public discourse, and we can't ignore that either. We have to take disingenuous efforts to pollute discourse by malicious actors as seriously as we take protecting genuine speech.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Given that you can give a laundry list that includes Nazi advocacy, ChapoTrapHouse Hamas' Twitter account, And Mila Yanniopolis, it seems the attempts to censor aren't really working. Hypothesis: it's the opposite. The era of bidirectional mass communication is allowing geographically-dispersed fringe interests to consolidate into political blocs. Interest groups that previously would have been censored implicitly (by being a small, isolated group in a larger community) or explicitly (by the authority-controlled media, such as cable, television, and radio, having standards and practices that excluded giving pedophiles a half hour to plead the pro-side of their case on the air) now have the tools to communicate with each other and the public outside of gatekeepers.

save_ferris 6y ago

The problem that companies are trying to navigate is how to keep speech as free and open as possible without permitting state-sponsored disinformation operations to fester within the platform. I agree that individuals should have the right to believe what they wish, however heinous their opinions may be. But it's clear that social media platforms are very powerful credibility launderers that give nefarious actors an incredible amount of power in shaping public discourse, and we can't ignore that either. We have to take disingenuous efforts to pollute discourse by malicious actors as seriously as we take protecting genuine speech.