6 ms·

It’s funny how the elites use this ploy to stamp out any differences from the dominant narrative - from the alleged left or right. Freedom of speech is a dange

• simonh 6y ago
  That's a mischaracterisation. Debs was convicted of encouraging violations of the law, specifically the draft laws. His arguing against the war was held to be perfectly legal.
• emodendroket 6y ago
  This used to be more or less exactly my attitude but then my mom got really into QAnon nonsense and the whole Capitol raid thing unfolded and I've become a lot more sympathetic to just banning people raving about Chinese Manchurian candidates from social media. Honestly, even when alternative news sources are easily accessible nobody reads them.
  • newsclues 6y ago
    My mom got sucked into the RussiaGate hoax, so we should look into shutting down CNN and other propaganda outlets
    • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
      It was not, in fact, a hoax at all. 10 years ago if you told me people who describe themselves as patriots would be embracing Putin's disinformation campaigns in the US, going so far as to attack the capital to overturn an election, I wouldn't believe you. But here we are.
      • viklove 6y ago
        It's beautiful how we reached the core conundrum so quickly in this HN comment thread. If we're going to start "rooting out extremists" and deplatforming them en-masse, who gets to decide what counts as extremism?
        • emodendroket 6y ago
          In practice, this is exactly the same problem as every other moderated forum in history, right? Who decides what's trolling or flaming?
          • viklove 6y ago
            Not the same problem. Twitter has a lot more power than, say, GameFAQs had back in the day.
    • emodendroket 6y ago
      Russiagate has its similarities but there are obvious limitations to trying to shut down any false or exaggerated narrative being promoted by people with federal power. But hey if you've got a plan I'm listening.
      • rscoots 6y ago
        You'll note that the user you're replying to mentioned news organizations, not people with fedal power. Can you name the people at these large tech companies you trust to determine what constitutes a hoax and what doesn't? How will you hold them to account should they get it wrong?
        • emodendroket 6y ago
          No, I don't, really. But they already do it, often in ways I dislike, and I can't see why to pretend the genie is back in the bottle and acting like I'm sad they're exercising that power against what I consider obviously harmful disinformation.
          • rscoots 6y ago
            If you forgo justice in the name of the greater good don't be mad when you get neither. By your own admission, it's a precarious moral tightrope you're walking here.
            • emodendroket 6y ago
              I don't think that's really what I'm saying. Every Web forum (this one quite notably included) has some kind of ground rules for moderation because if you don't have them they become overrun with pornography, hate speech, or some other kind of content that puts off the majority of users -- in other words they were never radical free speech zones in the first place. If we were talking about sending people to jail for sharing PizzaGate conspiracies I wouldn't support it, but I don't really see what benefit there is to Facebook or Twitter tolerating such content, and with something like 10% of Americans saying they at least partly believe in QAnon it is getting hard to act like the problems arising from this content are irrelevant or just a sideshow.
    • 7thaccount 6y ago
      I don't think those are the same things.