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I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough. Restrictions on free speech ine

I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough. Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way. So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.

remarkEon 6y ago
I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it. I'm sorry if that's dismissive but it's extremely frustrating hearing these kinds of things in the context of social media companies, who have never had a problem with advertisers milking FOMO and gaslighting their entire audience with this stuff for years now. (you are inadequate if you don't buy this product, you are a loser if you don't share this article right now, you are an enemy of the state if you don't vote for this candidate, etc) And actually they love all that because it drives clicks! The uncomfortable situation they find themselves in now is: At what point is the line drawn, where companies and special interests with millions to spend on ads can no longer lie and gaslight the public? It seems to have been easier for these companies to be the ones to dismiss this when the stakes weren't as high.
  - msla 6y ago
    > I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it. "You say you're in favor of free speech, yet when I run into your house screaming obscenities you try to kick me out. Interesting." HN isn't the only discussion site. Reddit isn't the only discussion site. The big social media companies don't own the Internet, and iHeartMedia doesn't own radio. It's vital we have alternatives, and laws to ensure those alternatives exist can be discussed, but saying that people don't really value free speech when they prefer moderated discussion spaces doesn't track. It's trying to equate unlike things, and create a contradiction where there is none.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      That's what I'm saying, it's irrelevant.
    - asddubs 6y ago
      i thought the point was that it's easy to pretend to be an absolutist, but I find a lot of free speech advocates turn a blind eye to censorship and deception when it's not explicitly political, but just for financial gain.
      - msla 6y ago
        And my point is that commercial censorship can be circumvented by going to a competitor, whereas political censorship can only be circumvented by becoming a political refugee. We need to stop monopolies, but that isn't much to do with free speech law, is it?
  - msla 6y ago
    > I'm sorry if that's dismissive No, you're not, your muddying the waters to try to cleanse regimes like North Korea.
- jariel 6y ago
  There are speech controls everywhere except on your own private website. The MSM press, despite being narrative driven has tons of controls, they hold each other accountable in ways, they generally stay in the domain of facts. Social Media has always been censored, if you try to attack people or incite violence on Twitter, you'd get banned 10 years ago, nothing new about that. YouTube has been dropping channels for a long time now, mostly anything that upsets advertisers etc.. The issue isn't so much 'Free Speech' or 'Censorship' in the classical sense - it would be if web sites were being taken down, or, if the White House for example forbade MSM to talk about certain issues, or worse, took control over MSM outlets. It's more subtle than that.
- Aunche 6y ago
  Well too much free speech on Facebook allegedly caused the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Either that free speech sensationalized the role of Facebook in the genocide to the point where Facebook doesn't have free speech.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I came into the article expecting to hate it, but the author eventually kind of won me over. She doesn't think Americans should abandon free speech, but she does think we should approach it more like Germany and France. > Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Guess what are two most frequent reason for site blocking and prosecution of dissidents in Russia? Articles 280 (Calls to extremism), 282 (actions aimed at inciting hatred or enmity, humiliation of human dignity). So you say on VK (one of russian social networks), "Corrupt mayor from the ruling party is a crook and must be prosecuted"... well, you are inciting hatred to the ruling party. With luck you'll get 2 years of suspended sentence.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Yeah—if there's one misgiving I have with the article, it's that they never really address the question of "who makes the rules?" It sounds like one reason Germany and France have fewer problems is that everyone there is just... more responsible. > Two days before [France's] national election, the Russians posted online thousands of emails from En Marche!, the party of Emmanuel Macron, who was running for president. France, like several other democracies, has a blackout law that bars news coverage of a campaign for the 24 hours before an election and on Election Day. But the emails were available several hours before the blackout began. They were fair game. Yet the French media did not cover them. Le Monde, a major French newspaper, explained that the hack had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot.” Can you imagine the American media completely ignoring a major leak because it had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot"? I know I can't! But also—that blackout law is an example of a measure that seems like utter common sense! Don't allow sudden bombshells to go off right before voting starts, when there isn't enough time to calm down and examine them reasonably. America should adopt something similar. My overall takeaway from the article was that free speech can both protect and threaten democracies. Russia is certainly an example of what can go wrong when speech is restricted, but Hitler is an equally salient example of how misinformation can be used seize power. The harsh reality is that Democracy is extremely fragile, and faces threats from both sides!
l33tbro 6y ago
Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Exactly. So every time I see news of twitter/fb 'fact-checking', it reeks to me with a far too familiar KGB / STASI odor. Going down this path will not end well.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Good point. Although, arguably, "fact checking" is merely replying to what others are saying. It's a "the solution to free speech is more speech" approach.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > "fact checking" is merely replying to what others are saying. Not if "fact checking" actually means "taking down the post because we disagreed with it".
      - Animats 6y ago
        Right. It should be attaching a fact-based reply. This is not too hard, because the number of different bogus memes seen in bulk is not that large.
        Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        But who will fact-check the fact-checkers? Also, who will ensure that fact-checking rules are consistently applied to everyone?
        6y ago
Animats 6y ago
It's worth listening to the people from censorship-heavy countries. The US is better off for not having censorship. Free speech is messy. But it beats the alternative. It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.) Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger. That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.
- monoideism 6y ago
  > Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK) I'm much more ambivalent than I used to be about UBI, after seeing what large groups of sequestered, out-of-work, bored, and angry people are capable of doing, but just to clarify, UBI is not the same as the dole. The dole is only given to people who are unemployed, whereas UBI is given to everyone.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Probably worth keeping in mind that what you're seeing is sequestered, out-of-work, bored, angry people who still have to make ends meet in a hyper-capitalist society without some kind of guaranteed income. In general, it's not people with time on their hands who pick up a brick and huck it through a store window; if it were, you'd see more millionaire looters. It's people who don't have anything to lose.
datschmo 6y ago
Coming from a country where free speech "was never really a thing" implies that your government either stops you from conveying X, retaliates, or is unwilling to protect you from another entity doing the same. I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.
nradov 6y ago
It was particularly bizarre when Facebook anointed Snopes as an official fact checker, and then Snopes proceeded to "fact check" posts by the Babylon Bee as "fake news". (The Babylon Bee is a humor web site and clearly labeled as such.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Not clearly enough. Multiple people (including the President) have been tripped up by Bee "news."
  - nradov 6y ago
    You've got to be kidding. How much clearer can they possibly be?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'm not sure they could be clearer, which is kinda the problem. I don't think these kind of satire sites should be illegal, or even necessarily removed from Facebook. But given how inevitable it seems to be that even reasonably well-informed people will get tricked, it's hard for me to look at them and see a net positive to society.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  News stories from satire sites routinely get shared across social media with little context and, very importantly, without anyone clicking on them to check out the source. It may seem absurd to "fact check" them, but it really isn't, particularly ones that aren't very well-known to a wide audience -- which essentially means "anything but the Onion and even they get quoted straight-faced on occasion".
  - refurb 6y ago
    If we start censoring everything people might misinterpret we might as well just throw in the towel at that point.
cortesoft 6y ago
Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm. While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true. So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen. If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.
- mdale 6y ago
  I think this sums up our predicament: "Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true."
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, Well, sure. But the problem is the censors are also human. If crafty lies can deceive the average person, why do we believe that the authorities are any less immune? I feel like so many times anti-libertarian arguments follow this formula. "Regular people keep making this mistake. So let's just have the government, helpfully stop them from making the mistake. Except of wait... the government is also made up of people who make mistakes." In other words, who watches the watchmen? Even in a world filled with crafty lies, open speech is the obvious solution. It's much harder to deceive 300 million people than it is to deceive a small agency responsible for "arbitrating truth". Yeah, a lot of people will still screw up and get the wrong answer. But when millions have access to open information, it's virtually guaranteed that at least some non-neglible subset will figure out the truth. A world with centrally managed opinion is not very robust, and likely to see truths die out completely.
hilife89 6y ago
Or just stop using their services? I like that we've just sort of accepted that Facebook and Twitter are trans-government institution level monopolies and that there's nothing we can do about it, or have better alternatives. There's no mandatory reason to have a twitter or facebook, there's plenty of ways you can connect with someone. And I'd happily trade online messaging for personal communication especially if I'm concerned about censorship and privacy rights from that institution.
juniper_strong 6y ago
Right on.
afurculita 6y ago
This is like saying: I come from a country where free market was never a real thing and you should oppose even the slightest regulation, anti-trust laws etc.
dkobia 6y ago
I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own. That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
We used to have free speech in the 1960s in Canada but we removed this. We created an opening to start policing speech. Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect" Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court. Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist. In BC they even teach kids in school to be right-wing is to be a racist: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-teacher-criticized-for-political-worksheet-1.4120976 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-... Then you can see why no right-wing parties are represented in their elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_...

remarkEon 6y ago

I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.

cycloptic 6y ago
I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it. I'm sorry if that's dismissive but it's extremely frustrating hearing these kinds of things in the context of social media companies, who have never had a problem with advertisers milking FOMO and gaslighting their entire audience with this stuff for years now. (you are inadequate if you don't buy this product, you are a loser if you don't share this article right now, you are an enemy of the state if you don't vote for this candidate, etc) And actually they love all that because it drives clicks! The uncomfortable situation they find themselves in now is: At what point is the line drawn, where companies and special interests with millions to spend on ads can no longer lie and gaslight the public? It seems to have been easier for these companies to be the ones to dismiss this when the stakes weren't as high.
- msla 6y ago
  > I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it. "You say you're in favor of free speech, yet when I run into your house screaming obscenities you try to kick me out. Interesting." HN isn't the only discussion site. Reddit isn't the only discussion site. The big social media companies don't own the Internet, and iHeartMedia doesn't own radio. It's vital we have alternatives, and laws to ensure those alternatives exist can be discussed, but saying that people don't really value free speech when they prefer moderated discussion spaces doesn't track. It's trying to equate unlike things, and create a contradiction where there is none.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    That's what I'm saying, it's irrelevant.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    i thought the point was that it's easy to pretend to be an absolutist, but I find a lot of free speech advocates turn a blind eye to censorship and deception when it's not explicitly political, but just for financial gain.
    - msla 6y ago
      And my point is that commercial censorship can be circumvented by going to a competitor, whereas political censorship can only be circumvented by becoming a political refugee. We need to stop monopolies, but that isn't much to do with free speech law, is it?
- msla 6y ago
  > I'm sorry if that's dismissive No, you're not, your muddying the waters to try to cleanse regimes like North Korea.
jariel 6y ago
There are speech controls everywhere except on your own private website. The MSM press, despite being narrative driven has tons of controls, they hold each other accountable in ways, they generally stay in the domain of facts. Social Media has always been censored, if you try to attack people or incite violence on Twitter, you'd get banned 10 years ago, nothing new about that. YouTube has been dropping channels for a long time now, mostly anything that upsets advertisers etc.. The issue isn't so much 'Free Speech' or 'Censorship' in the classical sense - it would be if web sites were being taken down, or, if the White House for example forbade MSM to talk about certain issues, or worse, took control over MSM outlets. It's more subtle than that.
Aunche 6y ago
Well too much free speech on Facebook allegedly caused the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Either that free speech sensationalized the role of Facebook in the genocide to the point where Facebook doesn't have free speech.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I came into the article expecting to hate it, but the author eventually kind of won me over. She doesn't think Americans should abandon free speech, but she does think we should approach it more like Germany and France. > Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Guess what are two most frequent reason for site blocking and prosecution of dissidents in Russia? Articles 280 (Calls to extremism), 282 (actions aimed at inciting hatred or enmity, humiliation of human dignity). So you say on VK (one of russian social networks), "Corrupt mayor from the ruling party is a crook and must be prosecuted"... well, you are inciting hatred to the ruling party. With luck you'll get 2 years of suspended sentence.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Yeah—if there's one misgiving I have with the article, it's that they never really address the question of "who makes the rules?" It sounds like one reason Germany and France have fewer problems is that everyone there is just... more responsible. > Two days before [France's] national election, the Russians posted online thousands of emails from En Marche!, the party of Emmanuel Macron, who was running for president. France, like several other democracies, has a blackout law that bars news coverage of a campaign for the 24 hours before an election and on Election Day. But the emails were available several hours before the blackout began. They were fair game. Yet the French media did not cover them. Le Monde, a major French newspaper, explained that the hack had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot.” Can you imagine the American media completely ignoring a major leak because it had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot"? I know I can't! But also—that blackout law is an example of a measure that seems like utter common sense! Don't allow sudden bombshells to go off right before voting starts, when there isn't enough time to calm down and examine them reasonably. America should adopt something similar. My overall takeaway from the article was that free speech can both protect and threaten democracies. Russia is certainly an example of what can go wrong when speech is restricted, but Hitler is an equally salient example of how misinformation can be used seize power. The harsh reality is that Democracy is extremely fragile, and faces threats from both sides!

l33tbro 6y ago

Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Exactly. So every time I see news of twitter/fb 'fact-checking', it reeks to me with a far too familiar KGB / STASI odor. Going down this path will not end well.
- Animats 6y ago
  Good point. Although, arguably, "fact checking" is merely replying to what others are saying. It's a "the solution to free speech is more speech" approach.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > "fact checking" is merely replying to what others are saying. Not if "fact checking" actually means "taking down the post because we disagreed with it".
    - Animats 6y ago
      Right. It should be attaching a fact-based reply. This is not too hard, because the number of different bogus memes seen in bulk is not that large.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        But who will fact-check the fact-checkers? Also, who will ensure that fact-checking rules are consistently applied to everyone?
        6y ago

Animats 6y ago

It's worth listening to the people from censorship-heavy countries. The US is better off for not having censorship. Free speech is messy. But it beats the alternative. It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.) Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger. That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.

monoideism 6y ago
> Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK) I'm much more ambivalent than I used to be about UBI, after seeing what large groups of sequestered, out-of-work, bored, and angry people are capable of doing, but just to clarify, UBI is not the same as the dole. The dole is only given to people who are unemployed, whereas UBI is given to everyone.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Probably worth keeping in mind that what you're seeing is sequestered, out-of-work, bored, angry people who still have to make ends meet in a hyper-capitalist society without some kind of guaranteed income. In general, it's not people with time on their hands who pick up a brick and huck it through a store window; if it were, you'd see more millionaire looters. It's people who don't have anything to lose.

datschmo 6y ago

Coming from a country where free speech "was never really a thing" implies that your government either stops you from conveying X, retaliates, or is unwilling to protect you from another entity doing the same. I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.

nradov 6y ago

It was particularly bizarre when Facebook anointed Snopes as an official fact checker, and then Snopes proceeded to "fact check" posts by the Babylon Bee as "fake news". (The Babylon Bee is a humor web site and clearly labeled as such.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee

shadowgovt 6y ago
Not clearly enough. Multiple people (including the President) have been tripped up by Bee "news."
- nradov 6y ago
  You've got to be kidding. How much clearer can they possibly be?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm not sure they could be clearer, which is kinda the problem. I don't think these kind of satire sites should be illegal, or even necessarily removed from Facebook. But given how inevitable it seems to be that even reasonably well-informed people will get tricked, it's hard for me to look at them and see a net positive to society.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
News stories from satire sites routinely get shared across social media with little context and, very importantly, without anyone clicking on them to check out the source. It may seem absurd to "fact check" them, but it really isn't, particularly ones that aren't very well-known to a wide audience -- which essentially means "anything but the Onion and even they get quoted straight-faced on occasion".
- refurb 6y ago
  If we start censoring everything people might misinterpret we might as well just throw in the towel at that point.

cortesoft 6y ago

Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm. While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true. So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen. If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.

mdale 6y ago
I think this sums up our predicament: "Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true."
dcolkitt 6y ago
> Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, Well, sure. But the problem is the censors are also human. If crafty lies can deceive the average person, why do we believe that the authorities are any less immune? I feel like so many times anti-libertarian arguments follow this formula. "Regular people keep making this mistake. So let's just have the government, helpfully stop them from making the mistake. Except of wait... the government is also made up of people who make mistakes." In other words, who watches the watchmen? Even in a world filled with crafty lies, open speech is the obvious solution. It's much harder to deceive 300 million people than it is to deceive a small agency responsible for "arbitrating truth". Yeah, a lot of people will still screw up and get the wrong answer. But when millions have access to open information, it's virtually guaranteed that at least some non-neglible subset will figure out the truth. A world with centrally managed opinion is not very robust, and likely to see truths die out completely.

hilife89 6y ago

Or just stop using their services? I like that we've just sort of accepted that Facebook and Twitter are trans-government institution level monopolies and that there's nothing we can do about it, or have better alternatives. There's no mandatory reason to have a twitter or facebook, there's plenty of ways you can connect with someone. And I'd happily trade online messaging for personal communication especially if I'm concerned about censorship and privacy rights from that institution.

juniper_strong 6y ago

Right on.

afurculita 6y ago

This is like saying: I come from a country where free market was never a real thing and you should oppose even the slightest regulation, anti-trust laws etc.

dkobia 6y ago

I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own. That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

We used to have free speech in the 1960s in Canada but we removed this. We created an opening to start policing speech. Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect" Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court. Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist. In BC they even teach kids in school to be right-wing is to be a racist: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-teacher-criticized-for-political-worksheet-1.4120976 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-... Then you can see why no right-wing parties are represented in their elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_...