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> The United States’ score declined for the fifth consecutive year. False, misleading, and manipulated information continued to proliferate online, even affecti

> The United States’ score declined for the fifth consecutive year. False, misleading, and manipulated information continued to proliferate online, even affecting public acceptance of the 2020 presidential election results. The new administration took promising steps to enforce stronger protections for internet users. Why does the proliferation of misinformation imply a lack of freedom? Surely it should be the opposite.

vkou 5y ago
Do you imply that freedom would be increased, if we increased the amount of communication 100-fold, by flooding the Internet with 99% spam? This seems to be a natural corollary to your argument.
- CivBase 5y ago
  ...yes? Absolutely yes. Freedom would certainly increase if we allowed that to happen. How could anything else be true? It may not be healthy, enjoyable, or productive, but it would definitely be more free. I never argued that 100% freedom is good. Every law we have is effectively a limitation of freedom. But this isn't about determining what freedoms should be protected. This is about an organization who has taken it upon themselves to quantify freedom and by the looks of it their methods for doing so are illogical.
  - vkou 5y ago
    If I can't communicate with you, because every communication channel is flooded with noise, and there's five people shouting in my and your ears, how am I more free? How is this situation any different from me being unable to communicate with you, period?
    - CivBase 5y ago
      In what scenario would the proliferation of misinformation result in you being outright unable to communicate with me? The internet is already flooded with spam, but AFAIK that has never had an adverse affect on our ability to directly communicate with one another.
      - handrous 5y ago
        > The internet is already flooded with spam, but AFAIK that has never had an adverse affect on our ability to directly communicate with one another. It ruins email inboxes over time, without active management, and lots of people no longer answer phone calls from numbers that aren't already in their contact list, to pick just two examples. Are those not adverse effects? If there's more total communication but a given person requires 20% (just to pick a number) more time for the same amount of communication as before, is that more free? It means that person's max theoretical amount of daily signal-not-noise communicating is lower than it had been, and that they have to give up more time that could have been spent on other things, to maintain the same amount of communication.
        commandlinefan 5y ago
        > people no longer answer phone calls from numbers that aren't already in their contact list It's worth noting that nobody - nobody - is doing anything to address that. They are working overtime to prevent Nicki Minaj from sharing a story about somebody she knew who had a side effect from the Covid vaccine. So not only are the beneficent censors shutting down arbitrary conversations, they're also not working on the actual nuisances that everybody might agree would have been worthwhile.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      Presumably because of the 100-fold increase in communication? The parent comment's point is that the term freedom doesn't mean "the optimal balance of restrictions", it means "fewer restrictions". It may be the right move to restrict the behavior of specific actors, but that doesn't mean that restricting their actions increases "freedom". I get that it's in vogue to redefine every word (violence, freedom, harm, etc) to pretend that policy choices don't have trade-offs, but it's a dishonest strategy that's more useful for advocacy than for understanding.
      - handrous 5y ago
        There's a big difference between "what I'm allowed to do" and "what I'm actually able to do". Either could be called freedom. Personally, I tend to favor the latter, if I have to choose between the two, much as I'd rather hold an ordinary deed to an acre of land a mile from my house than hold the absolute and eternal title of God King of some galaxy a billion light years away.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      > there's five people shouting in my and your ears So, accepting your absolute scenario, we have two diametrically opposed possibilities: one in which it's up to me to slog through the noise to find the signal and another (the one you're proposing) where somebody else does that for me. By now, I think it's pretty obvious that nobody - not you, not me, and definitely not an unpaid "moderator" - can be trusted to filter out just "noise" and not inject their own biases. So, yes, given just those two options I'll absolutely take the option where I have to do the work of filtering out spam myself than trusting some unaccountable partisan to do my thinking for me.
      - vkou 5y ago
        Then I'll just pile more freedom spam on, until you won't have enough hours in the day to do that work.
        CivBase 5y ago
        What does spam even have to do with proliferation of misinformation to begin with?
        vkou 5y ago
        It's a lever that pries open the non-qualified 'more speech = more freedom' argument, by demonstrating very succinctly that in order to maximize freedom, we, ironically, have to restrict it.
        CivBase 5y ago
        What? Who is arguing more speech = more freedom? Speech restrictions limit the subject matter if speech, not the sheer volume of speech overall. You also seem to be conflating the freedom to say what you want with the right to be listened to.
    - fouric 5y ago
      This comment made me think a bit about the natures of freedom of speech and spam (where "spam" partially includes the scenario that you're referring to). I've come to the conclusion that they're two completely separate problems. You can have spam with no freedom of speech, freedom of speech with no spam, or anything in-between, depending on implementation. The problem with conventional spam is that e-mail accounts aren't usually tied to real identities (although that's arguably a good thing), and phone numbers aren't authenticated at all, and you don't need any sort of permission to call someone or send someone an email. This isn't the case with social media platforms (and their analogous "spam"), either existing ones or theoretical ones. Signups are throttled and somewhat tied to a real identity - although even if they weren't, you can easily design a system where, say, you can't send someone a message without their permission (which some platforms e.g. Instagram do), or accounts are un-discoverable by default unless you make them visible. Additionally, virtually every social media platform in existence gives you the ability to block users (and, very few, if any, people claim that "free speech" means that arbitrary users on a platform can't block you - almost everyone focuses on bans from the platform itself - and you're conflating the two). Therefore, the virtual equivalent of "five people shouting in my and your ears" is not an issue because there's no virtual equivalent to "blocking" someone IRL, which trivially fixes this problem. You're conflating "forcing everyone to hear me" (which very few people think is a good idea) with "having a presence on a platform" (which is the issue actually under contention). In short, the issue that you're describing can be pretty trivially dealt with even when a platform has "perfect free speech" and does not remove any content that it is not legally required to. ...and, because the issue is a non-issue, it doesn't reduce freedom.
    - stale2002 5y ago
      If you have a voluntary choice of whether you want to filter out, or not filter out, what you are calling "noise", then in that situation you would be more free, yes. The solution to "noise" is give people the choice of if they want that info or not. And to allow people to choose if they want to see it, or choose if they don't want to see it.
  - titzer 5y ago
    Legislative body passes a law "granting the freedom to" slap anyone in the face who utters the word "y'all". Suddenly, southerners find life a lot less free. Freedoms can be opposed to each other. In fact, it's more the norm than the exception; different freedoms are in constant conflict with each other.
    - CivBase 5y ago
      Southerners would be no less free. They would have fewer rights. Rights != Freedom Freedom is the absence of restraint. A right is an entitlement. They often conflict with one another. We have many laws which sacrifice our freedoms in exchange for various rights. Depending on the trade, that can be a very good thing. 100% freedom is not desirable.
  - acchow 5y ago
    What about non-government groups organizing continuous DDOS attacks against certain websites with certain views effectively taking them down indefinitely. Is that more or less internet freedom?
halfjoking 5y ago
I think this organization is a part of opposite world. - More censorship of things we don't like == Freedom - Required reporting of every bank transaction == More security - Vaccine mandates == Civil rights
voldacar 5y ago
You have to learn to read NGO/thinktank language. Freedom = people do things we approve of Democracy = people vote for policies we approve of

vkou 5y ago

Do you imply that freedom would be increased, if we increased the amount of communication 100-fold, by flooding the Internet with 99% spam? This seems to be a natural corollary to your argument.

CivBase 5y ago
...yes? Absolutely yes. Freedom would certainly increase if we allowed that to happen. How could anything else be true? It may not be healthy, enjoyable, or productive, but it would definitely be more free. I never argued that 100% freedom is good. Every law we have is effectively a limitation of freedom. But this isn't about determining what freedoms should be protected. This is about an organization who has taken it upon themselves to quantify freedom and by the looks of it their methods for doing so are illogical.
- vkou 5y ago
  If I can't communicate with you, because every communication channel is flooded with noise, and there's five people shouting in my and your ears, how am I more free? How is this situation any different from me being unable to communicate with you, period?
  - CivBase 5y ago
    In what scenario would the proliferation of misinformation result in you being outright unable to communicate with me? The internet is already flooded with spam, but AFAIK that has never had an adverse affect on our ability to directly communicate with one another.
    - handrous 5y ago
      > The internet is already flooded with spam, but AFAIK that has never had an adverse affect on our ability to directly communicate with one another. It ruins email inboxes over time, without active management, and lots of people no longer answer phone calls from numbers that aren't already in their contact list, to pick just two examples. Are those not adverse effects? If there's more total communication but a given person requires 20% (just to pick a number) more time for the same amount of communication as before, is that more free? It means that person's max theoretical amount of daily signal-not-noise communicating is lower than it had been, and that they have to give up more time that could have been spent on other things, to maintain the same amount of communication.
      - commandlinefan 5y ago
        > people no longer answer phone calls from numbers that aren't already in their contact list It's worth noting that nobody - nobody - is doing anything to address that. They are working overtime to prevent Nicki Minaj from sharing a story about somebody she knew who had a side effect from the Covid vaccine. So not only are the beneficent censors shutting down arbitrary conversations, they're also not working on the actual nuisances that everybody might agree would have been worthwhile.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Presumably because of the 100-fold increase in communication? The parent comment's point is that the term freedom doesn't mean "the optimal balance of restrictions", it means "fewer restrictions". It may be the right move to restrict the behavior of specific actors, but that doesn't mean that restricting their actions increases "freedom". I get that it's in vogue to redefine every word (violence, freedom, harm, etc) to pretend that policy choices don't have trade-offs, but it's a dishonest strategy that's more useful for advocacy than for understanding.
    - handrous 5y ago
      There's a big difference between "what I'm allowed to do" and "what I'm actually able to do". Either could be called freedom. Personally, I tend to favor the latter, if I have to choose between the two, much as I'd rather hold an ordinary deed to an acre of land a mile from my house than hold the absolute and eternal title of God King of some galaxy a billion light years away.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > there's five people shouting in my and your ears So, accepting your absolute scenario, we have two diametrically opposed possibilities: one in which it's up to me to slog through the noise to find the signal and another (the one you're proposing) where somebody else does that for me. By now, I think it's pretty obvious that nobody - not you, not me, and definitely not an unpaid "moderator" - can be trusted to filter out just "noise" and not inject their own biases. So, yes, given just those two options I'll absolutely take the option where I have to do the work of filtering out spam myself than trusting some unaccountable partisan to do my thinking for me.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Then I'll just pile more freedom spam on, until you won't have enough hours in the day to do that work.
      - CivBase 5y ago
        What does spam even have to do with proliferation of misinformation to begin with?
        vkou 5y ago
        It's a lever that pries open the non-qualified 'more speech = more freedom' argument, by demonstrating very succinctly that in order to maximize freedom, we, ironically, have to restrict it.
        CivBase 5y ago
        What? Who is arguing more speech = more freedom? Speech restrictions limit the subject matter if speech, not the sheer volume of speech overall. You also seem to be conflating the freedom to say what you want with the right to be listened to.
  - fouric 5y ago
    This comment made me think a bit about the natures of freedom of speech and spam (where "spam" partially includes the scenario that you're referring to). I've come to the conclusion that they're two completely separate problems. You can have spam with no freedom of speech, freedom of speech with no spam, or anything in-between, depending on implementation. The problem with conventional spam is that e-mail accounts aren't usually tied to real identities (although that's arguably a good thing), and phone numbers aren't authenticated at all, and you don't need any sort of permission to call someone or send someone an email. This isn't the case with social media platforms (and their analogous "spam"), either existing ones or theoretical ones. Signups are throttled and somewhat tied to a real identity - although even if they weren't, you can easily design a system where, say, you can't send someone a message without their permission (which some platforms e.g. Instagram do), or accounts are un-discoverable by default unless you make them visible. Additionally, virtually every social media platform in existence gives you the ability to block users (and, very few, if any, people claim that "free speech" means that arbitrary users on a platform can't block you - almost everyone focuses on bans from the platform itself - and you're conflating the two). Therefore, the virtual equivalent of "five people shouting in my and your ears" is not an issue because there's no virtual equivalent to "blocking" someone IRL, which trivially fixes this problem. You're conflating "forcing everyone to hear me" (which very few people think is a good idea) with "having a presence on a platform" (which is the issue actually under contention). In short, the issue that you're describing can be pretty trivially dealt with even when a platform has "perfect free speech" and does not remove any content that it is not legally required to. ...and, because the issue is a non-issue, it doesn't reduce freedom.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    If you have a voluntary choice of whether you want to filter out, or not filter out, what you are calling "noise", then in that situation you would be more free, yes. The solution to "noise" is give people the choice of if they want that info or not. And to allow people to choose if they want to see it, or choose if they don't want to see it.
- titzer 5y ago
  Legislative body passes a law "granting the freedom to" slap anyone in the face who utters the word "y'all". Suddenly, southerners find life a lot less free. Freedoms can be opposed to each other. In fact, it's more the norm than the exception; different freedoms are in constant conflict with each other.
  - CivBase 5y ago
    Southerners would be no less free. They would have fewer rights. Rights != Freedom Freedom is the absence of restraint. A right is an entitlement. They often conflict with one another. We have many laws which sacrifice our freedoms in exchange for various rights. Depending on the trade, that can be a very good thing. 100% freedom is not desirable.
- acchow 5y ago
  What about non-government groups organizing continuous DDOS attacks against certain websites with certain views effectively taking them down indefinitely. Is that more or less internet freedom?

halfjoking 5y ago

I think this organization is a part of opposite world. - More censorship of things we don't like == Freedom - Required reporting of every bank transaction == More security - Vaccine mandates == Civil rights

voldacar 5y ago

You have to learn to read NGO/thinktank language. Freedom = people do things we approve of Democracy = people vote for policies we approve of