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More freedom of speech is the answer to misinformation because then it can be challenged. Censorship allows convenient mistruths to spread unchallenged.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
That’s what it does at its best. At its worst it’s a tool to allow oppressive governments to conceal the truth and further their grip on power.
- brigandish 6y ago
  I'd say there was a stronger relationship between governments that censor and those that oppress. Which oppressive governments are using free speech to conceal the truth?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wyattpeak 6y ago
> More freedom of speech is the answer to misinformation because then it can be challenged Do we have any evidence that it's true? Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I see the moral and anti-authoritarian arguments against censorship, but only in the context of accepting the costs. This "have your cake and eat it" argument feels hollow.
- remarkEon 6y ago
  >Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I don't think this is the right conclusion. After thinking about it more, it's not like the internet is patient zero for conspiracies and misinformation. It's just that the internet has exposed to the rest of us how common it is for people to hold such beliefs.
  - wyattpeak 6y ago
    I think it's more than just us noticing such beliefs for the first time. More people than before seem to be acting on misinformation, which would be apparent even without knowing their private beliefs.
- brigandish 6y ago
  Is/was there less misinformation among a population living under strong censorship? We have several examples to choose from, and I'd wager there's more, at any point in history compared to freer societies. > Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I completely agree, but why should we assume falsehoods and truth travel at the same rate? History would suggest otherwise.
  - gitrog 6y ago
    No one here is advocating strong censorship though, and there is a massive chasm between banning specific topics during a pandemic and having generally strong censorship. This slippery slope is fallacious.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      I wasn't making a slippery slope argument, I'm answering to whether there is more or less misinformation under a freer or a less free society. The easiest and best place to start is always going to be at the more extreme ends of something.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      You're declaring the opposite, but for a proponent of the slippery slope argument this would be a perfect example of going down the slippery slope. First came banning hate speech, now comes COVID, what's next?
triceratops 6y ago
Fact checking is hard and time-consuming but making up bullshit is easy. People love sharing contary-to-conventional-wisdom news and ideas that they come across, because it makes them feel smart. Given these two facts, it's far easier for lies to spread quicker than truth. How do you solve for this in your spherical cow model of free speech?
- brigandish 6y ago
  Why are you time limiting it, and why so arbitrarily? Which lies have persisted the longest, and were those lies supported by free speech or by censorship?
  - triceratops 6y ago
    Real-world events such as elections, legislative votes, military ops, referenda, protests and gatherings are time-limited. The lie may have already had its desired effect by the time the truth comes out, if it ever does. Lies about, for example, the stab-in-the-back, tobacco and WMDs in Iraq got the liars what they wanted at the cost of millions of lives. The truth may never become as widely known as the lie due to the frictions it encounters in spreading. People like to see news that confirms their own biases (me too), they like spreading news that's counter-intuitive or unusual, and they hate reading boring stuff (like fact-checks with a long list of citations). An interesting lie will spread quicker and wider, and be remembered for far longer, than the correction that just a few days later. Overall this whole "free speech kills lies" idea sounds like religious dogma to me. It may be true in some cases, but it's taken as an immutable, universal article of faith and its proponents never feel the need to cite any actual evidence or address the horrific consequences of the edge cases. It's an idealistic image of how the world works, similar to a socialist utopia. Free speech is crucial to liberty and progress, and the government must not regulate speech. But that should not apply to private platforms.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      > The lie may have already had its desired effect by the time the truth comes out, if it ever does Yes, that's unfortunate. There is no way to consistently detect lies, which is also unfortunate for anyone arguing for censorship as then you cannot ascertain which claims should be censored and which should not. > Lies about, for example, the stab-in-the-back, tobacco and WMDs in Iraq got the liars what they wanted at the cost of millions of lives. I don't know what "stab-in-the-back" is but tobacco and WMDs are examples of lack of speech. If we'd all had access to secret documents then the lies about WMDs wouldn't have worked quite as well, I reckon. > Overall this whole "free speech kills lies" idea sounds like religious dogma to me Which is ironic considering you've stated it again, and again without reason to back it up. > its proponents never feel the need to cite any actual evidence or address the horrific consequences of the edge cases There are no edge cases because it's not promising utopia, it's promising freedom, and it does that because the alternatives are worse - I would rather choose free speech for all than your idea of censoring people based on which method? The abilities of the high priests to divine it, perhaps? Now that would be religious thinking. Edit: typo
zaarn 6y ago
Youtube already had plenty of free speech where everyone can say anything unhindered and is rewarded if they generate attention. The ultimate free speech hasn't lead anywhere good on the internet because quacks that previously where relegated to soap boxes in their villages when free speech was thought of in the US are now given the same platform and power of voice as field experts who have studied their domain for years and know the dangers.
- brigandish 6y ago
  > Youtube already had plenty of free speech where everyone can say anything unhindered and is rewarded if they generate attention. Hard to separate that out from the algorithms that promote videos. Would it be as bad, in your eyes, if discovery was "flattened", so to speak? i.e. no recommends, no shaping of the feed, no shadowbans or hidden videos
  - zaarn 6y ago
    No because bullshit is easier to make than truth. There is dozens of bot channels that have nothing better to do at the moment but post videos that look like news channel broadcasts with a semi-convincing TTS reads various news regarding conspiracy theories (ie, "Bill Gates about to be arrested over 5G-Corona"). They post videos at almost hourly pace, distributed over several channels and each video has a unique image to it (ie, different logos, different TTS settings). If normal well researched content had to compete with that, it would loose by being buried under the sheer mass of bot generated bullshit. And that isn't even counting the number of videos produced by actual humans that are just as bad. A lot of conspiracy theorists aren't above threatening violence and law suits (usually libel) against those exposing them or simply posting the truth, I've heard of multiple instances of that occuring, atleast one in-person. This isn't two sides arguing peacefully about one position or the other, it's one side being violent and disrespectful to the other. "Flattening" the discovery of other content is basically asking the otherside to be not-violent and stand back so that the violent side can have their say. Sometimes violence comes from both sides of the debate too (ie, US politics) but that doesn't make the amount of disrespect by people purposefully lying or spreading lies any better. Free speech, as I see it, means that you can express your opinion freely without repercussions unless it's advocating for violence against people or groups of people. If you're talking about facts, those should not fall under free speech under the simple premise that facts are either provable or you should say that you have no proof or you should expose them as the opinions they are.
Barrin92 6y ago
There's literally no reason to believe that this is correct and anything else other than dogma. There's quite a lot of psychological evidence suggesting that first impressions stick stronger than corrections (which everyone knows who has ever accidentally believed something just because they heard it quickly), that only people who are predisposed to corrections actually believe them, and that in others corrections even augment belief in the originally wrong claim ("see, the mainstream media feels threatened by this revelation!") There's also a good book by Bartels and Achen[1] suggesting that prevalence of wrong beliefs can actually increase with education (climate change denial is more prominent among highly educated Republicans, highly engaged people on both sides of the political spectrum are more likely to make wrong assumptions about the demographics of the other), because they have more capacity to rationalise false priors. So there's actually significant reason to believe that more speech, by increasing engagement increases partisanship, which in turn leads to ample adoption of misinformation. Which I think makes a little bit more sense when one looks at the state of discourse in the last few years. [1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/democracy-for-realists https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
- Talanes 6y ago
  I know this is anecdotal, but in someone like my dad removing the video has the same effect. I'm pretty sure he's really bought into a few COVID videos that he watched drunk on Youtube because they were removed by the time he tried to go back and revisit them sober.
- brigandish 6y ago
  > There's literally no reason to believe that this is correct and anything else other than dogma. Christianity, for example, was supported by blasphemy laws. Once those laws were undermined or removed its doctrines and practices were able to be challenged, and now we see greater numbers of non-believers in formerly Christian countries as a result. There's certainly dogma in that example but not the sort you were positing. As I've pointed out elsewhere, you've time limited the results for no apparent reason. That a lie can get halfway round the world before truth has a chance to get its trousers on does not obviate the power of truth and the power to speak truth.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
The issues of fake news and misinformation have come about because the freedom of speech at scale that the internet and sites like Youtube enables. What we're experiencing is the limit of freedom of speech. It used to be that at scale things were controlled by the media and governments because they had the monopoly on the infrastructure required, which was costly. You can say that this enabled a level of censorship, but that also enabled to filter a lot of noise.
- brigandish 6y ago
  > What we're experiencing is the limit of freedom of speech. What we're experiencing is what happened with the printing press and every communication technology since - the democritisation of communication. That always leads to unrest because it moves power towards the masses. > You can say that this enabled a level of censorship, but that also enabled to filter a lot of noise. I would say that because it did, but on the noise point, I cannot listen to or read more than I did then, I only have 24 hours in a day. I can choose from more sources but the volume has not gone up. I am the filter now - should I not be? Are you going to tell me what I should read and listen to? I have to tell you that I think I can do a better job that you at that, thanks all the same.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
This assumes rational, reasonable and good-faith arguments and behaviour though; if there's a thousand voices (pushed by interest groups, foreign governments, advertisers, etc) pushing one narrative, what's a single challenging voice going to do? I mean I can invoke Godwin's Law, but we don't have to go that far back; everybody knew Trump was a terrible person and he should not have been eligible for the presidency, but because of tolerance he was given a shot anyway, and a minority of the population (~19%, ~63 million votes) managed to make him president. My new favorite wiki page (for now) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- vixen99 6y ago
  'Because of tolerance' etc., - do you actually read and comprehend what you write? And what's this blatantly political message doing on HN?
- brigandish 6y ago
  > I mean I can invoke Godwin's Law Firstly, the Nazis rose despite and possibly helped by speech laws. > My new favorite wiki page (for now) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Secondly, Popper is not calling for speech to be supressed in any way except for those who choose violence instead of speech. The original[1] is better than a Wikipedia article that cuts off the important part of his words: > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion… Hence he is supportive of the right to discussion for all. He contrasts this with those who won't support speech and sets the limits: > for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols They've given up on speech so he gives up on tolerance, which is wise. Free speech is there to reduce violence and supplant it and nothing Popper wrote in the "paradox of tolerance" contradicts that. [1] https://archive.org/details/TheOpenSocietyAndItsEnemiesPopperKarlSir/page/n837/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TheOpenSocietyAndItsEnemiesPoppe...
anigbrowl 6y ago
Signs point to no: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 It's not that I like censorship, in fact I'm adamantly opposed to it. But saying 'boo censorship, yay free speech' is ducking the real and measurable problem of false content spread by a mix of ignorance and dishonesty. I support calls for more education and critical thinking, but that takes years to pay off; the answer to high levels of fraud or corruption is not as simple as 'let's just create a culture of honesty', which substitutes the desired outcome for the solution. Consider also specific examples of disinformation campaigns. It's easy to create the appearance of controversy by attacking the formation of social consensus, and then to point to point to that appearance of controversy as pseudo-evidence that the prevailing public consensus is a deception carried out by The Powers That Be. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ - trolling behavior in anti-vaccination forums https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ - tobacco industry disinformation strategies
- brigandish 6y ago
  > Signs point to no: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 That's an interesting paper and I hope to give it more than the cursory read I've given it so far. I've requested the dataset (there's a waiting period of 4 weeks, unfortunately) because the outcomes obviously rely upon what is considered false news. Their reliance upon "independent" fact-checkers is not good enough in my eyes, because of what I've learnt about those doing the fact checking (just one example[1], there are many). I agree, false content is a real and somewhat measurable problem and that it is spread through ignorance and dishonesty. However, we know from experience that censorship does not lead to a culture of honesty - far more often it is used to support the opposite - and would you contend that it encourages critical thinking? Those cultures certainly support education as long as it's approved. Hence, I'm not sure why any of those should count against having more free speech. I'm not against being pragmatic, I simply think that there are other more effective and largely unheralded ways these problems could be mitigated. For instance, you shared a paper on trolling (I've yet to read, my apologies). Instead of widespread censorship in response, why not give users the powers that social media companies have? I've seen Twitter claim that they removed bots and score users based on behaviour, why can't you or I see those scores or know who bots are? Why can't I be given power over the algorithms and filters that dictate my feed? Surely that would be a better way forward that diktat by very powerful entities from above? Free speech implies the freedom to choose who to listen to, and censorship also removes that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

That’s what it does at its best. At its worst it’s a tool to allow oppressive governments to conceal the truth and further their grip on power.

brigandish 6y ago
I'd say there was a stronger relationship between governments that censor and those that oppress. Which oppressive governments are using free speech to conceal the truth?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wyattpeak 6y ago

> More freedom of speech is the answer to misinformation because then it can be challenged Do we have any evidence that it's true? Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I see the moral and anti-authoritarian arguments against censorship, but only in the context of accepting the costs. This "have your cake and eat it" argument feels hollow.

remarkEon 6y ago
>Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I don't think this is the right conclusion. After thinking about it more, it's not like the internet is patient zero for conspiracies and misinformation. It's just that the internet has exposed to the rest of us how common it is for people to hold such beliefs.
- wyattpeak 6y ago
  I think it's more than just us noticing such beliefs for the first time. More people than before seem to be acting on misinformation, which would be apparent even without knowing their private beliefs.
brigandish 6y ago
Is/was there less misinformation among a population living under strong censorship? We have several examples to choose from, and I'd wager there's more, at any point in history compared to freer societies. > Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I completely agree, but why should we assume falsehoods and truth travel at the same rate? History would suggest otherwise.
- gitrog 6y ago
  No one here is advocating strong censorship though, and there is a massive chasm between banning specific topics during a pandemic and having generally strong censorship. This slippery slope is fallacious.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    I wasn't making a slippery slope argument, I'm answering to whether there is more or less misinformation under a freer or a less free society. The easiest and best place to start is always going to be at the more extreme ends of something.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    You're declaring the opposite, but for a proponent of the slippery slope argument this would be a perfect example of going down the slippery slope. First came banning hate speech, now comes COVID, what's next?

triceratops 6y ago

Fact checking is hard and time-consuming but making up bullshit is easy. People love sharing contary-to-conventional-wisdom news and ideas that they come across, because it makes them feel smart. Given these two facts, it's far easier for lies to spread quicker than truth. How do you solve for this in your spherical cow model of free speech?

brigandish 6y ago
Why are you time limiting it, and why so arbitrarily? Which lies have persisted the longest, and were those lies supported by free speech or by censorship?
- triceratops 6y ago
  Real-world events such as elections, legislative votes, military ops, referenda, protests and gatherings are time-limited. The lie may have already had its desired effect by the time the truth comes out, if it ever does. Lies about, for example, the stab-in-the-back, tobacco and WMDs in Iraq got the liars what they wanted at the cost of millions of lives. The truth may never become as widely known as the lie due to the frictions it encounters in spreading. People like to see news that confirms their own biases (me too), they like spreading news that's counter-intuitive or unusual, and they hate reading boring stuff (like fact-checks with a long list of citations). An interesting lie will spread quicker and wider, and be remembered for far longer, than the correction that just a few days later. Overall this whole "free speech kills lies" idea sounds like religious dogma to me. It may be true in some cases, but it's taken as an immutable, universal article of faith and its proponents never feel the need to cite any actual evidence or address the horrific consequences of the edge cases. It's an idealistic image of how the world works, similar to a socialist utopia. Free speech is crucial to liberty and progress, and the government must not regulate speech. But that should not apply to private platforms.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    > The lie may have already had its desired effect by the time the truth comes out, if it ever does Yes, that's unfortunate. There is no way to consistently detect lies, which is also unfortunate for anyone arguing for censorship as then you cannot ascertain which claims should be censored and which should not. > Lies about, for example, the stab-in-the-back, tobacco and WMDs in Iraq got the liars what they wanted at the cost of millions of lives. I don't know what "stab-in-the-back" is but tobacco and WMDs are examples of lack of speech. If we'd all had access to secret documents then the lies about WMDs wouldn't have worked quite as well, I reckon. > Overall this whole "free speech kills lies" idea sounds like religious dogma to me Which is ironic considering you've stated it again, and again without reason to back it up. > its proponents never feel the need to cite any actual evidence or address the horrific consequences of the edge cases There are no edge cases because it's not promising utopia, it's promising freedom, and it does that because the alternatives are worse - I would rather choose free speech for all than your idea of censoring people based on which method? The abilities of the high priests to divine it, perhaps? Now that would be religious thinking. Edit: typo

zaarn 6y ago

Youtube already had plenty of free speech where everyone can say anything unhindered and is rewarded if they generate attention. The ultimate free speech hasn't lead anywhere good on the internet because quacks that previously where relegated to soap boxes in their villages when free speech was thought of in the US are now given the same platform and power of voice as field experts who have studied their domain for years and know the dangers.

brigandish 6y ago
> Youtube already had plenty of free speech where everyone can say anything unhindered and is rewarded if they generate attention. Hard to separate that out from the algorithms that promote videos. Would it be as bad, in your eyes, if discovery was "flattened", so to speak? i.e. no recommends, no shaping of the feed, no shadowbans or hidden videos
- zaarn 6y ago
  No because bullshit is easier to make than truth. There is dozens of bot channels that have nothing better to do at the moment but post videos that look like news channel broadcasts with a semi-convincing TTS reads various news regarding conspiracy theories (ie, "Bill Gates about to be arrested over 5G-Corona"). They post videos at almost hourly pace, distributed over several channels and each video has a unique image to it (ie, different logos, different TTS settings). If normal well researched content had to compete with that, it would loose by being buried under the sheer mass of bot generated bullshit. And that isn't even counting the number of videos produced by actual humans that are just as bad. A lot of conspiracy theorists aren't above threatening violence and law suits (usually libel) against those exposing them or simply posting the truth, I've heard of multiple instances of that occuring, atleast one in-person. This isn't two sides arguing peacefully about one position or the other, it's one side being violent and disrespectful to the other. "Flattening" the discovery of other content is basically asking the otherside to be not-violent and stand back so that the violent side can have their say. Sometimes violence comes from both sides of the debate too (ie, US politics) but that doesn't make the amount of disrespect by people purposefully lying or spreading lies any better. Free speech, as I see it, means that you can express your opinion freely without repercussions unless it's advocating for violence against people or groups of people. If you're talking about facts, those should not fall under free speech under the simple premise that facts are either provable or you should say that you have no proof or you should expose them as the opinions they are.

Barrin92 6y ago

There's literally no reason to believe that this is correct and anything else other than dogma. There's quite a lot of psychological evidence suggesting that first impressions stick stronger than corrections (which everyone knows who has ever accidentally believed something just because they heard it quickly), that only people who are predisposed to corrections actually believe them, and that in others corrections even augment belief in the originally wrong claim ("see, the mainstream media feels threatened by this revelation!") There's also a good book by Bartels and Achen[1] suggesting that prevalence of wrong beliefs can actually increase with education (climate change denial is more prominent among highly educated Republicans, highly engaged people on both sides of the political spectrum are more likely to make wrong assumptions about the demographics of the other), because they have more capacity to rationalise false priors. So there's actually significant reason to believe that more speech, by increasing engagement increases partisanship, which in turn leads to ample adoption of misinformation. Which I think makes a little bit more sense when one looks at the state of discourse in the last few years. [1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/democracy-for-realists https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...

Talanes 6y ago
I know this is anecdotal, but in someone like my dad removing the video has the same effect. I'm pretty sure he's really bought into a few COVID videos that he watched drunk on Youtube because they were removed by the time he tried to go back and revisit them sober.
brigandish 6y ago
> There's literally no reason to believe that this is correct and anything else other than dogma. Christianity, for example, was supported by blasphemy laws. Once those laws were undermined or removed its doctrines and practices were able to be challenged, and now we see greater numbers of non-believers in formerly Christian countries as a result. There's certainly dogma in that example but not the sort you were positing. As I've pointed out elsewhere, you've time limited the results for no apparent reason. That a lie can get halfway round the world before truth has a chance to get its trousers on does not obviate the power of truth and the power to speak truth.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

The issues of fake news and misinformation have come about because the freedom of speech at scale that the internet and sites like Youtube enables. What we're experiencing is the limit of freedom of speech. It used to be that at scale things were controlled by the media and governments because they had the monopoly on the infrastructure required, which was costly. You can say that this enabled a level of censorship, but that also enabled to filter a lot of noise.

brigandish 6y ago
> What we're experiencing is the limit of freedom of speech. What we're experiencing is what happened with the printing press and every communication technology since - the democritisation of communication. That always leads to unrest because it moves power towards the masses. > You can say that this enabled a level of censorship, but that also enabled to filter a lot of noise. I would say that because it did, but on the noise point, I cannot listen to or read more than I did then, I only have 24 hours in a day. I can choose from more sources but the volume has not gone up. I am the filter now - should I not be? Are you going to tell me what I should read and listen to? I have to tell you that I think I can do a better job that you at that, thanks all the same.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

This assumes rational, reasonable and good-faith arguments and behaviour though; if there's a thousand voices (pushed by interest groups, foreign governments, advertisers, etc) pushing one narrative, what's a single challenging voice going to do? I mean I can invoke Godwin's Law, but we don't have to go that far back; everybody knew Trump was a terrible person and he should not have been eligible for the presidency, but because of tolerance he was given a shot anyway, and a minority of the population (~19%, ~63 million votes) managed to make him president. My new favorite wiki page (for now) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

vixen99 6y ago
'Because of tolerance' etc., - do you actually read and comprehend what you write? And what's this blatantly political message doing on HN?
brigandish 6y ago
> I mean I can invoke Godwin's Law Firstly, the Nazis rose despite and possibly helped by speech laws. > My new favorite wiki page (for now) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Secondly, Popper is not calling for speech to be supressed in any way except for those who choose violence instead of speech. The original[1] is better than a Wikipedia article that cuts off the important part of his words: > In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion… Hence he is supportive of the right to discussion for all. He contrasts this with those who won't support speech and sets the limits: > for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols They've given up on speech so he gives up on tolerance, which is wise. Free speech is there to reduce violence and supplant it and nothing Popper wrote in the "paradox of tolerance" contradicts that. [1] https://archive.org/details/TheOpenSocietyAndItsEnemiesPopperKarlSir/page/n837/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TheOpenSocietyAndItsEnemiesPoppe...

anigbrowl 6y ago

Signs point to no: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 It's not that I like censorship, in fact I'm adamantly opposed to it. But saying 'boo censorship, yay free speech' is ducking the real and measurable problem of false content spread by a mix of ignorance and dishonesty. I support calls for more education and critical thinking, but that takes years to pay off; the answer to high levels of fraud or corruption is not as simple as 'let's just create a culture of honesty', which substitutes the desired outcome for the solution. Consider also specific examples of disinformation campaigns. It's easy to create the appearance of controversy by attacking the formation of social consensus, and then to point to point to that appearance of controversy as pseudo-evidence that the prevailing public consensus is a deception carried out by The Powers That Be. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ - trolling behavior in anti-vaccination forums https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ - tobacco industry disinformation strategies

brigandish 6y ago
> Signs point to no: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 That's an interesting paper and I hope to give it more than the cursory read I've given it so far. I've requested the dataset (there's a waiting period of 4 weeks, unfortunately) because the outcomes obviously rely upon what is considered false news. Their reliance upon "independent" fact-checkers is not good enough in my eyes, because of what I've learnt about those doing the fact checking (just one example[1], there are many). I agree, false content is a real and somewhat measurable problem and that it is spread through ignorance and dishonesty. However, we know from experience that censorship does not lead to a culture of honesty - far more often it is used to support the opposite - and would you contend that it encourages critical thinking? Those cultures certainly support education as long as it's approved. Hence, I'm not sure why any of those should count against having more free speech. I'm not against being pragmatic, I simply think that there are other more effective and largely unheralded ways these problems could be mitigated. For instance, you shared a paper on trolling (I've yet to read, my apologies). Instead of widespread censorship in response, why not give users the powers that social media companies have? I've seen Twitter claim that they removed bots and score users based on behaviour, why can't you or I see those scores or know who bots are? Why can't I be given power over the algorithms and filters that dictate my feed? Surely that would be a better way forward that diktat by very powerful entities from above? Free speech implies the freedom to choose who to listen to, and censorship also removes that. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...