5 ms·

This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced. IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective. Without acc

by dagmx 6y ago

This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced. IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective. Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the same issues. You can see this with the rise of every new medium for information. From newspapers to books to movies and music to each new major social media platform. Without education resources, there is a much lowered threshold for people accepting information provided to them as truth. We need to globally, but especially in America, increase education of the sciences and critical thinking. Maybe it's too late for entire generations today but the future can be very bright. Unfortunately the premise of the title will most likely provoke an emotional response from many, to which the concept of unfettered free speech is inalienable, even the discussion of the problematic side effects it can create.

zepto 6y ago
Can you say more about what ‘accountability’ means in this case?
- dagmx 6y ago
  Accountability could take many forms: * Having to delineate between news and opinion more clearly. Fox news is a high profile example, but many news sources do this. The inter mixing of news and opinion without clearly defining what is opinion, leads to the spread of opinion as truth. * encouraging social media sites to require political ads be transparent of who funds them and make it clear to a viewer. * require political ads to provide sources for their claims. * Bring back some form of the fairness doctrine to prevent hyper partisan news. Accountability to me means, there should be transparency to the consumer of news of where the content is coming from, differentiating news and opinion ,and providing them with the direct means to learn more. A large part of the article is about how there's no easy paper trail for the lay person to verify their source. I would like to take the emotion and deceit out of politics and news. Free speech is great, but it hasn't scaled well with the unfettered ability for deceit to be part of it. There should be solutions to provide more free speech while allowing people to curtail the inherent deceit that it also allows, by arming them with the mental tools to do so.
  - didibus 6y ago
    Those are good starts. I'd add that one of the biggest problem with free speech currently is that we allow actors to speak and publish content that we don't even know are real Citizen of the US. And we allow people to speak and publish content at scales that are unprecedented. I think this is a big issue that somehow people don't talk about as much. It isn't free speech that's so much being attacked, more so we are trying to define the framework of free speech on the internet. There is one perspective that could say the internet is like anything else, and so free speech applies the same. Except the internet isn't like anything else. It hides people behind anonymity, it allows actors that arn't american or even real to present themselves as if they were and speak to US affairs. It makes it trivial to decimate false claims to a greater audience at almost no cost. And the platforms of information built around it have designed automated systems to burry high quality discourse and instead promote sensational headlines. To me, this is similar to problems of spam, phishing, fraud and abuse that say Amazon faces on its store front, like counterfeit, fake reviews, bot accounts, money laundering, etc. Democracy on the internet faces similar problems of fraud and abuse. And just like Amazon needs a framework to mitigate those fraud and abuses, our democracy needs it as well.
  - zepto 6y ago
    I really like those. Verifiability and paper trail seem very important. I’d recommending not using the term accountability if these are the things you mean. Generally it has the connotation of being responsible for outcomes. I also think that there is possibly a false dichotomy between free speech and news here. As if regulating news is somehow the same thing as curtailing free speech. I’m not sure it needs to be so stark. If we introduced some or all of these regulations, we could simply attach them to the use of ‘news’ as a product description. I.e. If you don’t do these things, you can’t sell a product called news. This would be similar to not being able to call yourself a medical doctor or police officer without he right credentials. As far as I can see free speech is a red-herring. We should preserve it strongly, but also introduce a category of media product that has certain guarantees or protections.
    - dagmx 6y ago
      The main point of the article is that the free speech laws in this country have clouded the divide between free speech for individuals, and the rights for media companies and political parties to spread misinformation as they see fit. What you're proposing in your last paragraph is what the article is proposing too. The issue is that under the guise of an absolutist take of free speech, we've now put all free speech under the same banner. To apply protections to the categories of media would require rethinking what free speech means and who it applies to. IMHO free speech is great. It just needs certain measures around transparency and corporate lobbying to prevent it being brought down with the bad actors
orangecat 6y ago
This congregates power into the already powerful As opposed to throwing people in prison for expressing incorrect views? Who do you think will be in charge of that process? Hint: not the powerless.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The article doesn't seem to propose any ideas that would result in people being thrown in prison for incorrect views.
- dagmx 6y ago
  That's a bit of a reactionary straw man there. Nobody said anything about prosecution for incorrect views. Neither I, nor the article, advocate for jail. Accountability can take many forms , none of them need to be dire. Many can just be tantamount to better transparency so we know who to hold accountable in the first place, and the requirement for posting sources in political ads for further reading.
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    You might have good intentions here, but you also have a setup for a motte-and-bailey argument. It starts with "surely the enforcement would be benign" but who holds the powerful to account when it actually comes time to reign the powerful in? Maybe they'll merely be blacklisted from lucrative or prestigious positions in government or industry?
    - dagmx 6y ago
      Surely the same could be said for your argument though where you're taking it to an authoritarian extreme? The opposite of free speech isn't regulated speech for everyone like a distopian future. It could be as simple as requirements for more transparency in certain types of speech like political ads and what qualifies as news versus opinion. One of the major points of the article is that the spirit of free speech has been corrupted because it has allowed it to be coopted by political and corporate parties that can drown out the voices of the people with no trail back to who's presenting the version of reality to you. We can regulate categories of media separately of individual rights. Many countries do this successfully without being authoritarian regimes
ilaksh 6y ago
> massive increases in education resources This is why China is the most advanced country in the world. They have entire camps set up for immersive education for people who talk about religious nonsense! How progressive!
- dagmx 6y ago
  That's a straw man in bad faith. Increasing education resources doesn't have to have an end goal of reeducation camps. Education is woefully underfunded in America, especially rural America. Starting with giving people access to the same level of education across the board is a good first step in increasing critical thinking. Not everything has to be torn down into authoritarian versus a free for all. There are lots of shades of grey in between.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    It's not just underfunded in rural America. It's underfunded in urban America also. The world is a smaller place than you think. You could get on a plane and be in one of those re-education camps tomorrow if allowed foreigners in it. It's a real thing that is happening now. In the name of education. Because those people are expressing beliefs that the authorities don't condone. Rural America is where people who have different beliefs from you are. Which is really what this is about. Otherwise you would have included all of the urban and suburban education underfunding.
    - dagmx 6y ago
      You seem to be the one making it about different teams. I specifically said it's underfunded across the country, with an emphasis on rural America because they generally have lower funding available. I'm not sure why you keep jumping to authoritative straw man arguments. Please at least try and argue in good faith and read what I'm writing.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > Education is woefully underfunded in America, especially rural America. Relative to what? The US spends among the most of any country on education. https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/International-Education-Spending-Data_Image.png https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/International-E... If the assertion is that education is underfunded everywhere in the world, that’s an interesting assertion, but what’s the basis?
betwixthewires 6y ago
"Free speech" cannot be held to account for anything, only people can be held to account for speaking. Accountability to whom? Every "whom" has an interest. Any way for any entity to hold any other to any artificial consequence for saying anything at all will assuredly be perverted. This is why free speech is held as an absolutist value. Any compromise will inevitably lead to abuse. There can be no legitimate mechanism to enforce this. There can be no criteria required to say whatever you want or learn whatever you want. Anything less than everyone having the right to say anything for any reason is an unacceptable compromise. You as a free individual cannot allow the normalization of speech policing to occur. If you do so you will inevitably be victimized.

by dagmx 6y ago

zepto 6y ago

Can you say more about what ‘accountability’ means in this case?

dagmx 6y ago
Accountability could take many forms: * Having to delineate between news and opinion more clearly. Fox news is a high profile example, but many news sources do this. The inter mixing of news and opinion without clearly defining what is opinion, leads to the spread of opinion as truth. * encouraging social media sites to require political ads be transparent of who funds them and make it clear to a viewer. * require political ads to provide sources for their claims. * Bring back some form of the fairness doctrine to prevent hyper partisan news. Accountability to me means, there should be transparency to the consumer of news of where the content is coming from, differentiating news and opinion ,and providing them with the direct means to learn more. A large part of the article is about how there's no easy paper trail for the lay person to verify their source. I would like to take the emotion and deceit out of politics and news. Free speech is great, but it hasn't scaled well with the unfettered ability for deceit to be part of it. There should be solutions to provide more free speech while allowing people to curtail the inherent deceit that it also allows, by arming them with the mental tools to do so.
- didibus 6y ago
  Those are good starts. I'd add that one of the biggest problem with free speech currently is that we allow actors to speak and publish content that we don't even know are real Citizen of the US. And we allow people to speak and publish content at scales that are unprecedented. I think this is a big issue that somehow people don't talk about as much. It isn't free speech that's so much being attacked, more so we are trying to define the framework of free speech on the internet. There is one perspective that could say the internet is like anything else, and so free speech applies the same. Except the internet isn't like anything else. It hides people behind anonymity, it allows actors that arn't american or even real to present themselves as if they were and speak to US affairs. It makes it trivial to decimate false claims to a greater audience at almost no cost. And the platforms of information built around it have designed automated systems to burry high quality discourse and instead promote sensational headlines. To me, this is similar to problems of spam, phishing, fraud and abuse that say Amazon faces on its store front, like counterfeit, fake reviews, bot accounts, money laundering, etc. Democracy on the internet faces similar problems of fraud and abuse. And just like Amazon needs a framework to mitigate those fraud and abuses, our democracy needs it as well.
- zepto 6y ago
  I really like those. Verifiability and paper trail seem very important. I’d recommending not using the term accountability if these are the things you mean. Generally it has the connotation of being responsible for outcomes. I also think that there is possibly a false dichotomy between free speech and news here. As if regulating news is somehow the same thing as curtailing free speech. I’m not sure it needs to be so stark. If we introduced some or all of these regulations, we could simply attach them to the use of ‘news’ as a product description. I.e. If you don’t do these things, you can’t sell a product called news. This would be similar to not being able to call yourself a medical doctor or police officer without he right credentials. As far as I can see free speech is a red-herring. We should preserve it strongly, but also introduce a category of media product that has certain guarantees or protections.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    The main point of the article is that the free speech laws in this country have clouded the divide between free speech for individuals, and the rights for media companies and political parties to spread misinformation as they see fit. What you're proposing in your last paragraph is what the article is proposing too. The issue is that under the guise of an absolutist take of free speech, we've now put all free speech under the same banner. To apply protections to the categories of media would require rethinking what free speech means and who it applies to. IMHO free speech is great. It just needs certain measures around transparency and corporate lobbying to prevent it being brought down with the bad actors

orangecat 6y ago

This congregates power into the already powerful As opposed to throwing people in prison for expressing incorrect views? Who do you think will be in charge of that process? Hint: not the powerless.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The article doesn't seem to propose any ideas that would result in people being thrown in prison for incorrect views.
dagmx 6y ago
That's a bit of a reactionary straw man there. Nobody said anything about prosecution for incorrect views. Neither I, nor the article, advocate for jail. Accountability can take many forms , none of them need to be dire. Many can just be tantamount to better transparency so we know who to hold accountable in the first place, and the requirement for posting sources in political ads for further reading.
- humanrebar 6y ago
  You might have good intentions here, but you also have a setup for a motte-and-bailey argument. It starts with "surely the enforcement would be benign" but who holds the powerful to account when it actually comes time to reign the powerful in? Maybe they'll merely be blacklisted from lucrative or prestigious positions in government or industry?
  - dagmx 6y ago
    Surely the same could be said for your argument though where you're taking it to an authoritarian extreme? The opposite of free speech isn't regulated speech for everyone like a distopian future. It could be as simple as requirements for more transparency in certain types of speech like political ads and what qualifies as news versus opinion. One of the major points of the article is that the spirit of free speech has been corrupted because it has allowed it to be coopted by political and corporate parties that can drown out the voices of the people with no trail back to who's presenting the version of reality to you. We can regulate categories of media separately of individual rights. Many countries do this successfully without being authoritarian regimes

ilaksh 6y ago

> massive increases in education resources This is why China is the most advanced country in the world. They have entire camps set up for immersive education for people who talk about religious nonsense! How progressive!

dagmx 6y ago
That's a straw man in bad faith. Increasing education resources doesn't have to have an end goal of reeducation camps. Education is woefully underfunded in America, especially rural America. Starting with giving people access to the same level of education across the board is a good first step in increasing critical thinking. Not everything has to be torn down into authoritarian versus a free for all. There are lots of shades of grey in between.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  It's not just underfunded in rural America. It's underfunded in urban America also. The world is a smaller place than you think. You could get on a plane and be in one of those re-education camps tomorrow if allowed foreigners in it. It's a real thing that is happening now. In the name of education. Because those people are expressing beliefs that the authorities don't condone. Rural America is where people who have different beliefs from you are. Which is really what this is about. Otherwise you would have included all of the urban and suburban education underfunding.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    You seem to be the one making it about different teams. I specifically said it's underfunded across the country, with an emphasis on rural America because they generally have lower funding available. I'm not sure why you keep jumping to authoritative straw man arguments. Please at least try and argue in good faith and read what I'm writing.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Education is woefully underfunded in America, especially rural America. Relative to what? The US spends among the most of any country on education. https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/International-Education-Spending-Data_Image.png https://www.mercatus.org/sites/default/files/International-E... If the assertion is that education is underfunded everywhere in the world, that’s an interesting assertion, but what’s the basis?

betwixthewires 6y ago

"Free speech" cannot be held to account for anything, only people can be held to account for speaking. Accountability to whom? Every "whom" has an interest. Any way for any entity to hold any other to any artificial consequence for saying anything at all will assuredly be perverted. This is why free speech is held as an absolutist value. Any compromise will inevitably lead to abuse. There can be no legitimate mechanism to enforce this. There can be no criteria required to say whatever you want or learn whatever you want. Anything less than everyone having the right to say anything for any reason is an unacceptable compromise. You as a free individual cannot allow the normalization of speech policing to occur. If you do so you will inevitably be victimized.