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I do loathe to make the comparison because it’s lazy, but humor me: if, back during the rise of the third reich, someone were able to silence Hitler and keep hi

I do loathe to make the comparison because it’s lazy, but humor me: if, back during the rise of the third reich, someone were able to silence Hitler and keep him from gaining the spotlight and eventually becoming Germany’s chancellor, would it not have been a good idea to do that? Do you not believe in the possibility that some people just are _bad_ for the world and maybe should not be heard? Has history not shown enough that such people have and do exist? I’m not sure I believe in free speech for everyone. I think some people are simply too powerful to be able to say whatever they want.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Free speech is a trade off between being able to criticize the powerful and allowing room for demagogues, racism, lies, falsehoods and misinformation. I wish more people would understand that.
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  All of the things you consider truth were once labeled misinformation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
  - krapp 3y ago
    And yet, despite that, Jewish space lasers don't actually cause forest fires.
    - hotdogscout 3y ago
      Probably because you're cherry picking the most absurd example.
      - krapp 3y ago
        No, I'm picking an obvious example. I could pick many more less obvious examples, particularly around COVID or politics, but most other conspiracies or systems of disinformation have enough adherents here that it would only cause unnecessary rancor. Simply opposing the common narrative that all censorship is evil, truth doesn't exist and facts are newspeak is controversial enough. The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. This is the same category of argument made in defense of conspiracy theories - MKUltra was real so how can you deny the possibility that ${CONSPIRACY} is also true? Obviously this line of reasoning (although it's really a politically motivated argument,) is faulty. Actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases. That there is so much effort, in the name of "free speech," to muddy the waters and normalize fear of "truth itself" as the only real cognitive hazard is itself telling.
        hotdogscout 3y ago
        >it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases How? What do you say of the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID?
        krapp 3y ago
        There is no "lab leak hypothesis" for COVID. There are a number of different theories, ranging from "Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab" to "it was accidentally released," from it being entirely natural to a bioweapon, that all get lumped together under that banner, all treated as equally credible, only having an aggressive opposition to the mainstream narrative in common. I won't say more because I'm aware of the motivated reasoning behind bringing it up. Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet. Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    If you have to go back hundreds of years to find an example, something tells me it's not really all that relevant. But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.
    - hotdogscout 3y ago
      Considering the "COVID lab-leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory" discourse was literally a conspiracy by Nature and China to prevent criticism and on a month-by-month basis more evidence of it is coming out I'm very skeptical of blindly trusting scientific institutions to accurately label misinformation from the politically-inconvenient truths. https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-republicans/ https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
      - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
        This is not going against science. Where are the peer-reviewed papers? What experiments were made? This is criticising authorities, which is the flipside of the trade off I wrote about before. Free speech working as intended. Note that no-one benefited from spreading the lab-theory, so odds are higher it should be at least allowed to enter the public discourse.
        hotdogscout 3y ago
        How can you have peer-reviewed papers about classified information? China allowed a small team to analyze a glimpse of data while leaks show that team constantly referencing the Nature editorial and "China" not allowing dissent from a natural origin conclusion. Even after the paper was published the team was scared for their careers because at any moment a whistleblower could come out. The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-must-be-retracted https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-mu...
- natch 3y ago
  The WHO spokesperson not being allowed to utter the word Taiwan is an interesting case that I think was instrumental in making a lot of hairs on a lot of necks stand up at the beginning of COVID, alerting people with good demagoguery radar that the flow of lies was top down.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    I would not expect PRC to conform to any notion of freedom, so it's not terribly surprising or relevant to the discussion.
    - natch 3y ago
      The WHO spokesperson was not a PRC national.
thfuran 3y ago
But whoever has the power to decide what the powerful are and aren't allowed to say probably has too much power.
cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
"...If, back during the rise of the third reich..." Before the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic, which did have vigorous suppression of speech: 'As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”' 'A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.' 'Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.' [0] [0] From: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would-censorship-have-stopped-rise-nazis-part-16-answers https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
natch 3y ago
Yes if there has been a platform where his views could have been freely countered, like Elon’s Twitter / X, that would have been great and probably would have nipped him in the bud. So your fears are exactly backward. It’s the suppression, not the expression, that is the problem.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  You don’t think that’s a bit naive? We don’t have any “countering” of views today. There’s no back and forth or debate. It’s one man amplifying the xenophobia of the most ignorant sector of our populace and as far as they’re concerned, everyone who doesn’t agree with them are the “enemy”.
  - natch 3y ago
    I see this view a lot from people who have opted to refrain from gathering facts for themselves. Speaking from actual observation there is plenty of countering and debate happening on that platform. And we can see a healthy cohort of anti-Trump Republicans have emerged there for example. Not that this makes them right on any issues, but it’s a start.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago

Free speech is a trade off between being able to criticize the powerful and allowing room for demagogues, racism, lies, falsehoods and misinformation. I wish more people would understand that.

hotdogscout 3y ago
All of the things you consider truth were once labeled misinformation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
- krapp 3y ago
  And yet, despite that, Jewish space lasers don't actually cause forest fires.
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    Probably because you're cherry picking the most absurd example.
    - krapp 3y ago
      No, I'm picking an obvious example. I could pick many more less obvious examples, particularly around COVID or politics, but most other conspiracies or systems of disinformation have enough adherents here that it would only cause unnecessary rancor. Simply opposing the common narrative that all censorship is evil, truth doesn't exist and facts are newspeak is controversial enough. The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. This is the same category of argument made in defense of conspiracy theories - MKUltra was real so how can you deny the possibility that ${CONSPIRACY} is also true? Obviously this line of reasoning (although it's really a politically motivated argument,) is faulty. Actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases. That there is so much effort, in the name of "free speech," to muddy the waters and normalize fear of "truth itself" as the only real cognitive hazard is itself telling.
      - hotdogscout 3y ago
        >it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases How? What do you say of the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID?
        krapp 3y ago
        There is no "lab leak hypothesis" for COVID. There are a number of different theories, ranging from "Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab" to "it was accidentally released," from it being entirely natural to a bioweapon, that all get lumped together under that banner, all treated as equally credible, only having an aggressive opposition to the mainstream narrative in common. I won't say more because I'm aware of the motivated reasoning behind bringing it up. Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet. Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  If you have to go back hundreds of years to find an example, something tells me it's not really all that relevant. But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    Considering the "COVID lab-leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory" discourse was literally a conspiracy by Nature and China to prevent criticism and on a month-by-month basis more evidence of it is coming out I'm very skeptical of blindly trusting scientific institutions to accurately label misinformation from the politically-inconvenient truths. https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-republicans/ https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
    - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
      This is not going against science. Where are the peer-reviewed papers? What experiments were made? This is criticising authorities, which is the flipside of the trade off I wrote about before. Free speech working as intended. Note that no-one benefited from spreading the lab-theory, so odds are higher it should be at least allowed to enter the public discourse.
      - hotdogscout 3y ago
        How can you have peer-reviewed papers about classified information? China allowed a small team to analyze a glimpse of data while leaks show that team constantly referencing the Nature editorial and "China" not allowing dissent from a natural origin conclusion. Even after the paper was published the team was scared for their careers because at any moment a whistleblower could come out. The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-must-be-retracted https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-mu...
natch 3y ago
The WHO spokesperson not being allowed to utter the word Taiwan is an interesting case that I think was instrumental in making a lot of hairs on a lot of necks stand up at the beginning of COVID, alerting people with good demagoguery radar that the flow of lies was top down.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  I would not expect PRC to conform to any notion of freedom, so it's not terribly surprising or relevant to the discussion.
  - natch 3y ago
    The WHO spokesperson was not a PRC national.

thfuran 3y ago

But whoever has the power to decide what the powerful are and aren't allowed to say probably has too much power.

cheaprentalyeti 3y ago

"...If, back during the rise of the third reich..." Before the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic, which did have vigorous suppression of speech: 'As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”' 'A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.' 'Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.' [0] [0] From: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would-censorship-have-stopped-rise-nazis-part-16-answers https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

natch 3y ago

Yes if there has been a platform where his views could have been freely countered, like Elon’s Twitter / X, that would have been great and probably would have nipped him in the bud. So your fears are exactly backward. It’s the suppression, not the expression, that is the problem.

dclowd9901 3y ago
You don’t think that’s a bit naive? We don’t have any “countering” of views today. There’s no back and forth or debate. It’s one man amplifying the xenophobia of the most ignorant sector of our populace and as far as they’re concerned, everyone who doesn’t agree with them are the “enemy”.
- natch 3y ago
  I see this view a lot from people who have opted to refrain from gathering facts for themselves. Speaking from actual observation there is plenty of countering and debate happening on that platform. And we can see a healthy cohort of anti-Trump Republicans have emerged there for example. Not that this makes them right on any issues, but it’s a start.