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Rowan is a staunch defender of Free Speech in Comedy. When it looked like the UK government were going to legislate against it, he delivered this amazing speech

Rowan is a staunch defender of Free Speech in Comedy. When it looked like the UK government were going to legislate against it, he delivered this amazing speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU

teawrecks 4y ago
This is a great video, and a great outlook on free speech to hold, but it also seems elementary in a world where information travels as quickly as it now does. Should the law still do nothing in the face of literal automated machines pumping out false information to the masses that is impossible to distinguish from real, thinking, free speech having humans? It's a catch-22: without rampant misinformation campaigns we would gladly love to let everyone speak their mind freely, but without control on speech we get rampant misinformation campaigns. The optimist in me says these are growing pains, one day humans will get used to the internet and we will live in a world where people understand how to think critically about new information. The pessimist in me says a sucker is born every day, we will always have unrest caused by confusion of propaganda, and we will inevitably see our society and internet destroyed. I don't know what the solution is.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  > This is a great video, and a great outlook on free speech to hold, but it also seems elementary in a world where information travels as quickly as it now does. Should the law still do nothing in the face of literal automated machines pumping out false information to the masses Governments and their corporate media partners have done this for a long time. They lied and pumped out false information to go to war in Iraq, for example. Let's wait until the people have the ability to censor and shut down dangerous government misinformation before worrying about giving those governments more power to censor the people.
  - teawrecks 4y ago
    Yes, propaganda is not the thing that is new, it's the speed of information exchange and the automation of propaganda creation that is new. Whereas 100 years ago, a lie could travel around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes, today a million lies can travel to the moon and back whereas disseminating the truth still requires the same amount of leg work (pun intended). The problem is orders of magnitude worse.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    The media didn't purposely pump out false information to go to war in Iraq. Anonymous conspiracy mongers are incapable of suffering reputational damage and can lie with impunity.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      They are complicit in colluding with government to construct narratives that support their agenda, whatever it may be (wars, intervention, persecution of real journalists, supporting dictatorships, etc), by mass distribution of misinformation. Of course they are very careful to try to maintain the veneer of plausible deniability, so while they do get caught out in some big lies, often they can say "well ACTUALLY we didn't really lie we just published something as fact and added a 'sources say' at the end". But the net resulting damage to society is no less than if they had left out the weasel words. So again, until we have a mechanism to censor and punish the worst offenders (governments and their media corporations), let's not hand them any more power to censor us. They've shown time and again (recently with covid) that they'll even use these censorship powers against the truth, or scientific questions if they decide it.
    - patrec 4y ago
      > The media didn't purposely pump out false information to go to war in Iraq. Of course not, no one in the media would ever dream of doing such a thing. Did you know that the US only lost war in Afghanistan because Putin paid a head bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed? > Anonymous conspiracy mongers are incapable of suffering reputational damage and can lie with impunity. I can well remember how former luminaries like Tom "Give War A Chance" Friedman, Bill "The war in Iraq was right and necessary, and we won it" Kristol and David "Axis-of-evil" Frum or Stephen "The Connection" Hayes lost their lucrative careers over advocating catastrophic policies that cost the US tax payer trillions of dollars and resulted in the loss of hundred of thousands of lives. They are now all relegated to such fringe outlets as the New York Times or NBC, which admittedly is nothing compared to what happened to Clapper for perjuring himself in front of congress -- he now partly has to make a living as CNN's national security analyst.
      - 4y ago
- rastignack 4y ago
  This law was criminalizing insult. And giving an overly vague definition of it. It is not a general lecture about free speech. It’s more about the right to offense someone.

teawrecks 4y ago

This is a great video, and a great outlook on free speech to hold, but it also seems elementary in a world where information travels as quickly as it now does. Should the law still do nothing in the face of literal automated machines pumping out false information to the masses that is impossible to distinguish from real, thinking, free speech having humans? It's a catch-22: without rampant misinformation campaigns we would gladly love to let everyone speak their mind freely, but without control on speech we get rampant misinformation campaigns. The optimist in me says these are growing pains, one day humans will get used to the internet and we will live in a world where people understand how to think critically about new information. The pessimist in me says a sucker is born every day, we will always have unrest caused by confusion of propaganda, and we will inevitably see our society and internet destroyed. I don't know what the solution is.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
> This is a great video, and a great outlook on free speech to hold, but it also seems elementary in a world where information travels as quickly as it now does. Should the law still do nothing in the face of literal automated machines pumping out false information to the masses Governments and their corporate media partners have done this for a long time. They lied and pumped out false information to go to war in Iraq, for example. Let's wait until the people have the ability to censor and shut down dangerous government misinformation before worrying about giving those governments more power to censor the people.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  Yes, propaganda is not the thing that is new, it's the speed of information exchange and the automation of propaganda creation that is new. Whereas 100 years ago, a lie could travel around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes, today a million lies can travel to the moon and back whereas disseminating the truth still requires the same amount of leg work (pun intended). The problem is orders of magnitude worse.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  The media didn't purposely pump out false information to go to war in Iraq. Anonymous conspiracy mongers are incapable of suffering reputational damage and can lie with impunity.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    They are complicit in colluding with government to construct narratives that support their agenda, whatever it may be (wars, intervention, persecution of real journalists, supporting dictatorships, etc), by mass distribution of misinformation. Of course they are very careful to try to maintain the veneer of plausible deniability, so while they do get caught out in some big lies, often they can say "well ACTUALLY we didn't really lie we just published something as fact and added a 'sources say' at the end". But the net resulting damage to society is no less than if they had left out the weasel words. So again, until we have a mechanism to censor and punish the worst offenders (governments and their media corporations), let's not hand them any more power to censor us. They've shown time and again (recently with covid) that they'll even use these censorship powers against the truth, or scientific questions if they decide it.
  - patrec 4y ago
    > The media didn't purposely pump out false information to go to war in Iraq. Of course not, no one in the media would ever dream of doing such a thing. Did you know that the US only lost war in Afghanistan because Putin paid a head bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed? > Anonymous conspiracy mongers are incapable of suffering reputational damage and can lie with impunity. I can well remember how former luminaries like Tom "Give War A Chance" Friedman, Bill "The war in Iraq was right and necessary, and we won it" Kristol and David "Axis-of-evil" Frum or Stephen "The Connection" Hayes lost their lucrative careers over advocating catastrophic policies that cost the US tax payer trillions of dollars and resulted in the loss of hundred of thousands of lives. They are now all relegated to such fringe outlets as the New York Times or NBC, which admittedly is nothing compared to what happened to Clapper for perjuring himself in front of congress -- he now partly has to make a living as CNN's national security analyst.
    - 4y ago
rastignack 4y ago
This law was criminalizing insult. And giving an overly vague definition of it. It is not a general lecture about free speech. It’s more about the right to offense someone.