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There is no such thing as absolutes in social policy. Every situation has an edge case, a grey area. Something will always come up where you will have to balanc

by cowpig 3y ago

There is no such thing as absolutes in social policy. Every situation has an edge case, a grey area. Something will always come up where you will have to balance an interpretation of a rule. The US has the most extreme version of freedom of speech of any country in the world. There are quite a few versions that are perfectly reasonable and implemented successfully without sliding down a slippery slope into a "ministry of truth". So the slippery slope is a fallacy in this case. The issue of sugary drinks is a false dichotomy. Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke. They get sick and die from drinking tons of it all the time. If you want to draw a line for what kind of speech puts people in imminent danger, sugary drinks are definitively not over that line, while spreading a potentially lethal disease is clearly over that line. > So I feel like the harm caused by trying to filter social media messages by the government is greater than any potential benefit. What evidence are you basing that on? In the past the government granted licenses to broadcast networks on TV, and had strict requirements on the kinds of things they could say on air. Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen?

prepend 3y ago
> Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke. They get sick and die from drinking 100k cokes over their life due to watching lots of ads. No one gets sick from just one exposure to misinformation either. They sick from thousands and thousands that change their behavior. Ads for coke impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death. Ads for opioid painkillers impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death. Much more so than any Covid misinformation. That’s why I compared them. If the goal is to protect people, then we should restrict ads of “unhealthy” things. Right? Have that ministry of truth review what products are healthy or unhealthy. And just have them review all ads for if they are healthy or unhealthy. It’s exactly a slippery slope argument. I think applied correctly because if the government does this for some topics they will do them for more. Especially if they apply your logic of whether they should reduce harm. > Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen? This is an unprovable statement. But other countries had better outcomes. Perhaps the government’s actions resulted in more deaths than otherwise. Maybe only 900k would have died instead of 1.1M if government hadn’t restricted information flow.

by cowpig 3y ago

prepend 3y ago

> Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke. They get sick and die from drinking 100k cokes over their life due to watching lots of ads. No one gets sick from just one exposure to misinformation either. They sick from thousands and thousands that change their behavior. Ads for coke impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death. Ads for opioid painkillers impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death. Much more so than any Covid misinformation. That’s why I compared them. If the goal is to protect people, then we should restrict ads of “unhealthy” things. Right? Have that ministry of truth review what products are healthy or unhealthy. And just have them review all ads for if they are healthy or unhealthy. It’s exactly a slippery slope argument. I think applied correctly because if the government does this for some topics they will do them for more. Especially if they apply your logic of whether they should reduce harm. > Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen? This is an unprovable statement. But other countries had better outcomes. Perhaps the government’s actions resulted in more deaths than otherwise. Maybe only 900k would have died instead of 1.1M if government hadn’t restricted information flow.