10 ms·

Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. W

Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. Why must fight all censorship. Because once you allow "a thing" to be censored, it becomes possible to censor "any thing". Things in the past which were labeled misinformation and would have been suppressed for even longer (or forever) under current social attitudes of censoring anything that might make us feel bad. - Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the country. - Tobacco is addicting and gives you cancer. - Agent Orange caused US military health problems. - PTSD is a mental health issue (denied since at least WWI). Remember all the power/leeway you give to the "left" (or right) will also be misused when the "right" (or left) take power again.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
It's so far been in the hands of the courts, and like you said, they don't determine what's free speech based on whether something makes us feel bad. Per bhupy, their specific criteria is whether the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech. The legal standard for "inciting or producing imminent lawless action" is given by Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case, which upheld speech openly advocating for violence against specific groups to be protected speech. It overturned an Ohio law that had been directed against communists who "advocated the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform." Brandenburg was a 9-0 Warren court decision. Courts will not uphold anything that has been said about the election as outside the boundaries of free speech, under Brandenburg.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    It is, but I'm not certain the courts will interpret it the same way when applied to a large media corporation making many statements over a long period of time. Like rayiner said, the courts have been protective of media corporation's free speech, but those were cases involving defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress, not an insurrection with the intent to detain and possibly murder elected officials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
    - tiahura 6y ago
      Both of those cases were unanimous decisions upholding free speech. Moreover, they were civil, not criminal cases.
      - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
        They were, and they addressed parody and defamation, which I'm guessing wouldn't apply to a case, civil or criminal, about whether media corporations incited an insurrection.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Related: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection The courts will not consider it to be incitement. If you think the courts even might, you are woefully deficient in your understanding of case law. A key word in the Brandenburg standard is "imminent", and that makes the Brandenburg bar very high. Taking a crowd of antisemites to a Jewish neighborhood and telling them antisemitic creeds and how all Jews need to die doesn't meet that bar--but pointing to a Jew and saying "there's a Jew, get him" does. Thinking SCOTUS might take a narrower view of free speech than its established precedent holds is not a winning bet. I'm not aware of a single case in my lifetime where SCOTUS ruled for more government restriction of speech rather than less, and this approach means taking a broader view of free speech than perhaps most people are willing to stomach (e.g., Citizens United).
protonfish 6y ago
"The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws. Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" is sick and wrong.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Who is 'we'? I don't wish to be included in 'we' and I prefer that the group of 'we' not be in charge of much of anything.
  - whydoibother 6y ago
    Does the concept of a collective confuse you?
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      As long as someone can adequately explain who the collective is, and what they perceive legitimizes their ability to make decisions for others.
      - technick 6y ago
        Isn't this venturing into Borg territory?
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Yes but we have made the judiciary the judge of what goes further than free speech, not the legislative. And that is key. PREEMPTIVE censorship is always a mistake because it only relies on power ideologies.
  - protonfish 6y ago
    Remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad? Good times.
cool_dude85 6y ago
Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.
- goatcode 6y ago
  >Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people You disagree with letting censorship be decided on democratically?
  - vkou 6y ago
    The thing about democracy is that there are so many levels of government - and quite literally any decision made by a democratically elected government can be condemned as undemocratic (Because some other layer of government - or better yet, a Joe on the street - does not agree with it.) This is how you get people shouting about how a democratically elected president, who was given, by a democratically elected congress, powers to operate a regulatory department, is acting undemocratic-ally [1], when he appoints someone those people don't like to head that department. What those people forget is that in a democracy, you can't in good faith cherrypick outcomes as 'undemocratic'. You can only ensure that the process for making changes is democratic. If the people you elect decided to turn your country into a police state, well, that sucks, but that's a democratic decision that they've made - and as long as you can vote them out, it can be democratically reversed. Prohibition was reversed, after all, communist witch hunts eventually ended, it's no longer illegal to ride in a train car while black, people in the US are no longer jailed for writing pro-German newspaper articles, and we no longer round up entire ethnic groups, and concentrate them in a camp (Which are all hallmarks of a police state. They are no longer present in our society, thanks in part to a democratic process. Other hallmarks still are, but if enough people care, we'll eventually get around to them.) [1] Despite neither the constitution, the law that brought that department into existence, the judiciary, nor years of precedent requiring that the department must be ran by an elected official, or that the department's every decision [2] must be voted on by Congress. [2] As it turns out, it's quite democratic for an elected official to defer decision-making to an un-elected underling. That's fine. What makes this democratic, is that you can punish the elected official, if the underling behaves poorly, by voting them out. As long as all power flows from an elected office, this thing works. What is not fine is if the un-elected underling is not appointed, or fire-able by an elected office, or by an agent of an elected office. That's where the difference between democratic, and undemocratic lies.
beowulfey 6y ago
Can you explain this a bit more? At least for the first two, that information was disseminated by government bans or government-mandated labeling. I am not as familiar with Agent Orange but it was first studied by the New Jersey Agent Orange Commission in 1980 and found to be toxic — it helped lead to the Agent Orange Act. PTSD was first recognized by the APA in 1980 as well. These are all positions of authority making these decisions and claims. I guess I am just confused what your point is here. Can you explain how the voices of the people were involved in the above examples?
- tetrahedr0n 6y ago
  I believe the OP's point was that those things (Agent orange, tobacco <> cancer, etc) which our society almost universally agree upon were once, themselves, targeted by dis/misinformation campaigns. And that if we are to allow censorship, we are allowing the potential for disinformation campaigns. IMO, the flaws in this argument are that it assumes a disinformation campaign is something the censor entity is controlling (specifically the US military, in the Agent Orange example). It also assumes disinformation is the only tactic available to a bad actor to manipulate the public. To the spirit of the OP's point, though, I think we need to be wary of any corporation pledging to make the world a safer place by monitoring our communications. Of course the situation is not binary; there are things that should be censored. I would like our law enforcement to use any tool at their disposal to stop human trafficking. Murder is not cool, AT&T should help LE look into those as well. Politician Y is trolling the internet with lies; we actually have a toolset for that and it's called journalism. Understanding that journalism/media is actually part of the problem here doesn't mean AT&T can do a better job.
apostacy 6y ago
Lets of course also not forget the biggest one, COVID. COVID was fake news, until it wasn't. Previous weeks (months?) were spent suppressing warnings about it. I specifically remember being banned for saying that people should wear face coverings. In February I tried saying that people should think twice before taking the subway or going to Lunar New Year. January 2020, there was overwhelming evidence that something bad was coming, even though independent and citizen journalists didn't know the exact scope of it. But their narrative was that COVID may exist but it isn't dangerous, and wearing a mask is alarmist and probably sinophobic racist Russian propaganda; continue having public gatherings and stop asking questions. Within 48 hours, big tech decided that the truth is that we had always been at war with Eurasia and that anyone who had any doubts about lockdown strategy was basically a white supremacist and needed to be censored with extreme prejudice. In my mind, that should have been it. After so many lives lost, that is when we should have decided that corporate america should not set up a de-facto ministry of truth, but I guess most people don't agree with me.
- Terretta 6y ago
  To be fair, that wasn’t “corporate America”, that was the Minister of Unhealth, usually called the Surgeon General: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!" https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-13-at-9.15.43-AM.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-1... The tweet made no sense: if you’re a member of the public, COVID cleverly renders masks ineffective, so leave them for healthcare providers where COVID magically can’t bypass the masks? The only things more annoying than pretending COVID could discriminate by profession were (a) the additional six to nine months of pretending it wasn’t airborne, and (b) company annoyance with remote work and individual boredom with staying home overriding caution even as the spread hits rates not seen since March/April 2020. And this is where Corporate America comes in — they are by and large refusing to acknowledge the revision in guidance around it being airborne, since this would require more investment to make safe the butts-in-seats management preferred by non-practitioners in middle and senior levels of firms.
- 6y ago
kryogen1c 6y ago
> Things in the past which were labeled misinformation I know that item-level thinking like this is necessary to gain emotional traction with people, but this issue is just so obvious at a systems-level. the idea that we, right now the instant youre reading this, have discovered 100% of what there is to learn and 0% of what we know is wrong is so painfully, horrifically, obviously stupid (we've had computers for thirty years now, we're probably good for ETERNITY, right?). we both WANT and NEED a mechanism for dissenters and disinformation. misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less! scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles. to say anything but this is to make the existential case that people are not to be trusted with their own free will.
- shakezula 6y ago
  > misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less! I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen? The saying goes something like "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nitsky 6y ago
    I have heard this expression rephrased as "Logic is useless against those who reject it". However, in my experience, both sides are logical, they just start from different axioms.
    - shakezula 6y ago
      This is my experience as well, but I've also noticed that both sides do not adhere to their base axioms with the same tenacity, and the issues can be a spectrum of adherence to their claimed base beliefs.
trey-jones 6y ago
I agree with this: > Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. But I'm not sure about this: > Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. It's definitely a very difficult problem. I like to think that I personally can distinguish decently well between information and mis/dis-information, but I look around and see plenty of people who simply cannot. And I could also be wrong about myself. The pandemic itself has at least had the effect of showing me that I can't always figure out what's true by intuition. So I guess I believe that people in general are not good at making the distinction. We're too emotional. I'm inclined to say that a digital solution has the best chance of defeating this digital problem. A computer for President, I guess.
- Clubber 6y ago
  People certainly aren't perfect about judging the validity of information, but the danger is just too great to have a corporation and especially a government decide what's valid information.
  - trey-jones 6y ago
    I am in complete agreement.
- offby37years 6y ago
  If you don't trust your fellow citizens to discern misinformation from truth, you don't trust them to vote.
  - trey-jones 6y ago
    I don't, do you? It's the slipperiest slope around, however. For instance: In my state there was an executive order from the governor allowing mask mandates, but polling places were specifically excluded, because you simply cannot disallow people from voting. Another very difficult problem. How can you enforce voter education without enabling voter suppression? I don't have an answer. I'm mainly here to point out that problems are hard.
PTOB 6y ago
"Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the [world]." FTFY
specialist 6y ago
Garbage in, garbage out. Solution is real simple: share your data, cite your sources, sign your name. Without provenance, accountability, transparency, it doesn't matter who is judging.
- shakezula 6y ago
  The problem is there's a non-trivial amount of people who consider their ignorance equal to your research, your facts, your studies, your anything.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    That isn't a problem unless you're discussing something where anonymity is key - or it wouldn't be if the internet didn't make anonymity the rule by default. Anonymity is really great for private citizens, but people trying to spread information need to be held to a higher standard since their words shouldn't be preemptively censored but must be held to account after the fact. Oh also, taking away anonymity is quite dangerous as well - there isn't an easy answer here.
    - shakezula 6y ago
      I'm not sure I'm convinced that taking away anonymity fixes the problem. We have very prominent politicians who are driving entire political campaigns around this strategy of ignoring all fact.
      - munk-a 6y ago
        I honestly think that prominent politicians wouldn't have any willingness to adopt this insane level of misinformation if there wasn't such a general societal acceptance of it. The people in congress that believe in jewish space lasers didn't get elected because everyone around them thought they were crazy conspiracy theorists.
      - specialist 6y ago
        Adding the option of authentic speech merely broadens the Marketplace of Ideas. No one could curtail inauthentic speech; no point in even trying.
devwastaken 6y ago
We either allow foreign influence to undo our democracy or we allow current and future governments to suppress our democracy. We should isolate western internet lines from russia/china/israel and any cooperating countries that are apart of these significant bot campaigns that generate fake news targeting our elections. We're still at war, and information is the weapons of that war. We are currently allowing fascist governments to take advantage of the inherent flaws to democracy - belief and choice.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  Eliminate the foreign influence, and you will still have a corrupt system filled with fascist information. At the same time you will have undermined American companies since every other country will wonder when they're next. I know it's easy to blame the other, but democracy rots from within.
dfxm12 6y ago
Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. The government is the people, no? In any case, by the time the country elects a majority federal politicians who are all unified in spreading the same misinformation, we were in trouble long before that... Also, if you think these letters represent censorship, I think you should take a look at the definition of that word. At best, you're crying wolf and at worst, you're spreading misinformation yourself.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

It's so far been in the hands of the courts, and like you said, they don't determine what's free speech based on whether something makes us feel bad. Per bhupy, their specific criteria is whether the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech.

rayiner 6y ago
> If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not be considered free speech. The legal standard for "inciting or producing imminent lawless action" is given by Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case, which upheld speech openly advocating for violence against specific groups to be protected speech. It overturned an Ohio law that had been directed against communists who "advocated the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform." Brandenburg was a 9-0 Warren court decision. Courts will not uphold anything that has been said about the election as outside the boundaries of free speech, under Brandenburg.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  It is, but I'm not certain the courts will interpret it the same way when applied to a large media corporation making many statements over a long period of time. Like rayiner said, the courts have been protective of media corporation's free speech, but those were cases involving defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress, not an insurrection with the intent to detain and possibly murder elected officials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
  - tiahura 6y ago
    Both of those cases were unanimous decisions upholding free speech. Moreover, they were civil, not criminal cases.
    - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
      They were, and they addressed parody and defamation, which I'm guessing wouldn't apply to a case, civil or criminal, about whether media corporations incited an insurrection.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Related: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...
jcranmer 6y ago
> If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection The courts will not consider it to be incitement. If you think the courts even might, you are woefully deficient in your understanding of case law. A key word in the Brandenburg standard is "imminent", and that makes the Brandenburg bar very high. Taking a crowd of antisemites to a Jewish neighborhood and telling them antisemitic creeds and how all Jews need to die doesn't meet that bar--but pointing to a Jew and saying "there's a Jew, get him" does. Thinking SCOTUS might take a narrower view of free speech than its established precedent holds is not a winning bet. I'm not aware of a single case in my lifetime where SCOTUS ruled for more government restriction of speech rather than less, and this approach means taking a broader view of free speech than perhaps most people are willing to stomach (e.g., Citizens United).

protonfish 6y ago

"The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws. Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" is sick and wrong.

linuxftw 6y ago
Who is 'we'? I don't wish to be included in 'we' and I prefer that the group of 'we' not be in charge of much of anything.
- whydoibother 6y ago
  Does the concept of a collective confuse you?
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    As long as someone can adequately explain who the collective is, and what they perceive legitimizes their ability to make decisions for others.
    - technick 6y ago
      Isn't this venturing into Borg territory?
pfortuny 6y ago
Yes but we have made the judiciary the judge of what goes further than free speech, not the legislative. And that is key. PREEMPTIVE censorship is always a mistake because it only relies on power ideologies.
- protonfish 6y ago
  Remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad? Good times.

cool_dude85 6y ago

Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.

goatcode 6y ago
>Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people You disagree with letting censorship be decided on democratically?
- vkou 6y ago
  The thing about democracy is that there are so many levels of government - and quite literally any decision made by a democratically elected government can be condemned as undemocratic (Because some other layer of government - or better yet, a Joe on the street - does not agree with it.) This is how you get people shouting about how a democratically elected president, who was given, by a democratically elected congress, powers to operate a regulatory department, is acting undemocratic-ally [1], when he appoints someone those people don't like to head that department. What those people forget is that in a democracy, you can't in good faith cherrypick outcomes as 'undemocratic'. You can only ensure that the process for making changes is democratic. If the people you elect decided to turn your country into a police state, well, that sucks, but that's a democratic decision that they've made - and as long as you can vote them out, it can be democratically reversed. Prohibition was reversed, after all, communist witch hunts eventually ended, it's no longer illegal to ride in a train car while black, people in the US are no longer jailed for writing pro-German newspaper articles, and we no longer round up entire ethnic groups, and concentrate them in a camp (Which are all hallmarks of a police state. They are no longer present in our society, thanks in part to a democratic process. Other hallmarks still are, but if enough people care, we'll eventually get around to them.) [1] Despite neither the constitution, the law that brought that department into existence, the judiciary, nor years of precedent requiring that the department must be ran by an elected official, or that the department's every decision [2] must be voted on by Congress. [2] As it turns out, it's quite democratic for an elected official to defer decision-making to an un-elected underling. That's fine. What makes this democratic, is that you can punish the elected official, if the underling behaves poorly, by voting them out. As long as all power flows from an elected office, this thing works. What is not fine is if the un-elected underling is not appointed, or fire-able by an elected office, or by an agent of an elected office. That's where the difference between democratic, and undemocratic lies.

beowulfey 6y ago

Can you explain this a bit more? At least for the first two, that information was disseminated by government bans or government-mandated labeling. I am not as familiar with Agent Orange but it was first studied by the New Jersey Agent Orange Commission in 1980 and found to be toxic — it helped lead to the Agent Orange Act. PTSD was first recognized by the APA in 1980 as well. These are all positions of authority making these decisions and claims. I guess I am just confused what your point is here. Can you explain how the voices of the people were involved in the above examples?

tetrahedr0n 6y ago
I believe the OP's point was that those things (Agent orange, tobacco <> cancer, etc) which our society almost universally agree upon were once, themselves, targeted by dis/misinformation campaigns. And that if we are to allow censorship, we are allowing the potential for disinformation campaigns. IMO, the flaws in this argument are that it assumes a disinformation campaign is something the censor entity is controlling (specifically the US military, in the Agent Orange example). It also assumes disinformation is the only tactic available to a bad actor to manipulate the public. To the spirit of the OP's point, though, I think we need to be wary of any corporation pledging to make the world a safer place by monitoring our communications. Of course the situation is not binary; there are things that should be censored. I would like our law enforcement to use any tool at their disposal to stop human trafficking. Murder is not cool, AT&T should help LE look into those as well. Politician Y is trolling the internet with lies; we actually have a toolset for that and it's called journalism. Understanding that journalism/media is actually part of the problem here doesn't mean AT&T can do a better job.

apostacy 6y ago

Lets of course also not forget the biggest one, COVID. COVID was fake news, until it wasn't. Previous weeks (months?) were spent suppressing warnings about it. I specifically remember being banned for saying that people should wear face coverings. In February I tried saying that people should think twice before taking the subway or going to Lunar New Year. January 2020, there was overwhelming evidence that something bad was coming, even though independent and citizen journalists didn't know the exact scope of it. But their narrative was that COVID may exist but it isn't dangerous, and wearing a mask is alarmist and probably sinophobic racist Russian propaganda; continue having public gatherings and stop asking questions. Within 48 hours, big tech decided that the truth is that we had always been at war with Eurasia and that anyone who had any doubts about lockdown strategy was basically a white supremacist and needed to be censored with extreme prejudice. In my mind, that should have been it. After so many lives lost, that is when we should have decided that corporate america should not set up a de-facto ministry of truth, but I guess most people don't agree with me.

Terretta 6y ago
To be fair, that wasn’t “corporate America”, that was the Minister of Unhealth, usually called the Surgeon General: "Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!" https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-13-at-9.15.43-AM.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-1... The tweet made no sense: if you’re a member of the public, COVID cleverly renders masks ineffective, so leave them for healthcare providers where COVID magically can’t bypass the masks? The only things more annoying than pretending COVID could discriminate by profession were (a) the additional six to nine months of pretending it wasn’t airborne, and (b) company annoyance with remote work and individual boredom with staying home overriding caution even as the spread hits rates not seen since March/April 2020. And this is where Corporate America comes in — they are by and large refusing to acknowledge the revision in guidance around it being airborne, since this would require more investment to make safe the butts-in-seats management preferred by non-practitioners in middle and senior levels of firms.
6y ago

kryogen1c 6y ago

> Things in the past which were labeled misinformation I know that item-level thinking like this is necessary to gain emotional traction with people, but this issue is just so obvious at a systems-level. the idea that we, right now the instant youre reading this, have discovered 100% of what there is to learn and 0% of what we know is wrong is so painfully, horrifically, obviously stupid (we've had computers for thirty years now, we're probably good for ETERNITY, right?). we both WANT and NEED a mechanism for dissenters and disinformation. misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less! scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles. to say anything but this is to make the existential case that people are not to be trusted with their own free will.

shakezula 6y ago
> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less! I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to listen? The saying goes something like "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nitsky 6y ago
  I have heard this expression rephrased as "Logic is useless against those who reject it". However, in my experience, both sides are logical, they just start from different axioms.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    This is my experience as well, but I've also noticed that both sides do not adhere to their base axioms with the same tenacity, and the issues can be a spectrum of adherence to their claimed base beliefs.

trey-jones 6y ago

I agree with this: > Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. But I'm not sure about this: > Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. It's definitely a very difficult problem. I like to think that I personally can distinguish decently well between information and mis/dis-information, but I look around and see plenty of people who simply cannot. And I could also be wrong about myself. The pandemic itself has at least had the effect of showing me that I can't always figure out what's true by intuition. So I guess I believe that people in general are not good at making the distinction. We're too emotional. I'm inclined to say that a digital solution has the best chance of defeating this digital problem. A computer for President, I guess.

Clubber 6y ago
People certainly aren't perfect about judging the validity of information, but the danger is just too great to have a corporation and especially a government decide what's valid information.
- trey-jones 6y ago
  I am in complete agreement.
offby37years 6y ago
If you don't trust your fellow citizens to discern misinformation from truth, you don't trust them to vote.
- trey-jones 6y ago
  I don't, do you? It's the slipperiest slope around, however. For instance: In my state there was an executive order from the governor allowing mask mandates, but polling places were specifically excluded, because you simply cannot disallow people from voting. Another very difficult problem. How can you enforce voter education without enabling voter suppression? I don't have an answer. I'm mainly here to point out that problems are hard.

PTOB 6y ago

"Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the [world]." FTFY

specialist 6y ago

Garbage in, garbage out. Solution is real simple: share your data, cite your sources, sign your name. Without provenance, accountability, transparency, it doesn't matter who is judging.

shakezula 6y ago
The problem is there's a non-trivial amount of people who consider their ignorance equal to your research, your facts, your studies, your anything.
- munk-a 6y ago
  That isn't a problem unless you're discussing something where anonymity is key - or it wouldn't be if the internet didn't make anonymity the rule by default. Anonymity is really great for private citizens, but people trying to spread information need to be held to a higher standard since their words shouldn't be preemptively censored but must be held to account after the fact. Oh also, taking away anonymity is quite dangerous as well - there isn't an easy answer here.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    I'm not sure I'm convinced that taking away anonymity fixes the problem. We have very prominent politicians who are driving entire political campaigns around this strategy of ignoring all fact.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I honestly think that prominent politicians wouldn't have any willingness to adopt this insane level of misinformation if there wasn't such a general societal acceptance of it. The people in congress that believe in jewish space lasers didn't get elected because everyone around them thought they were crazy conspiracy theorists.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Adding the option of authentic speech merely broadens the Marketplace of Ideas. No one could curtail inauthentic speech; no point in even trying.

devwastaken 6y ago

We either allow foreign influence to undo our democracy or we allow current and future governments to suppress our democracy. We should isolate western internet lines from russia/china/israel and any cooperating countries that are apart of these significant bot campaigns that generate fake news targeting our elections. We're still at war, and information is the weapons of that war. We are currently allowing fascist governments to take advantage of the inherent flaws to democracy - belief and choice.

adamcstephens 6y ago
Eliminate the foreign influence, and you will still have a corrupt system filled with fascist information. At the same time you will have undermined American companies since every other country will wonder when they're next. I know it's easy to blame the other, but democracy rots from within.

dfxm12 6y ago

Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. The government is the people, no? In any case, by the time the country elects a majority federal politicians who are all unified in spreading the same misinformation, we were in trouble long before that... Also, if you think these letters represent censorship, I think you should take a look at the definition of that word. At best, you're crying wolf and at worst, you're spreading misinformation yourself.