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>Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defen
by nobody9999 3y ago
>Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?
Not GP, but the short answer is 'yes'. Because it is a slippery slope. I'm not in the EU and I can still reach rt.com. Presumably archive.org isn't banned in the EU, they can likely access such content if they wished to do so.
rt.com absolutely is a propaganda outlet for the Russian government, thinly disguised as a new site. But, IMHO, blocking them sets a terrible precedent as it's always the most reprehensible/unpopular/awful stuff that comes under fire first by the censors.
And if you allow that, what happens when those with power deem your expression to be unacceptable?
What's more, freedom of expression doesn't mean bad people can spew evil lies and we just have to suck it up. Rather, it means that we should have a robust debate and discussion, not because the liars/hate peddlers/etc. are right, but because defeating such garbage requires actually putting in the effort to rebuke and debunk it.
As Justice Brandeis put it[0], much more eloquently than I did, nearly 100 years ago:
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to
avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more
speech, not enforced silence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes
- dralley 3y agoThe trouble is that at scale, in a world where people's attention spans are already stretched to the breaking point and any kind of bullshit can be amplified to tens or hundreds of millions of eyeballs in minutes, the bullshit asymmetry principle comes into play. I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain.
- mdekkers 3y ago> I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain. I don’t know either, but I know it shouldn’t be censorship