65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.
From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some “authority” (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
The problem is that today we’re relegating everything to “experts”, or more generally, we’re expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.
If the FCC can regulate content on television, they can regulate content on the internet.
The only reason the FCC doesn’t is the Republican-dominated FCC when Ajit Pai was in charge argued that broadband is an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” which is like the hair splittingest of splitting fucking hairs. It’s fucking both.
Anyway, once it was classified as “information service” it became something the FCC (claimed it) didn’t have authority to regulate in the same way, allowing them to gut net neutrality.
If they FCC changed the definition back to telecommunications, they wouldn’t be able to regulate foreign websites, but they can easily regulate US sites and regulate entities who want to do business in the US using an internet presence.
Slippery slope to what? We have those restrictions for news already. Only reason you still see Fox and such lie on the air and get away with it is they’re classified as entertainment instead of news. Freedom of speech and press are still in tact.
Edit: I wasn’t referring to the Tucker Carlson case, but I did learn that’s not true anyway. Nobody accredits news channels in the first place, and as it turns out, the FCC doesn’t even have any authority over cable.
Right, and it sounds like people want more restrictions. So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate, so if people are already on board then I imagine we’ll get more restrictive speech legislation.
So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate,
…what? American freedom of speech has, if anything, gotten less restrictive over time and it never was restrictive to begin with. you quite literally have to go out of your way to utter something which isn’t protected speech at this point (and the First Amendment has never covered private corporations so nobody is losing a “right” when Twitter tells you that you can’t wish for a second Holocaust)
i think context makes it pretty obvious this is a generalized you (i quite literally say “nobody”, which is an indefinite and plural pronoun), so i’m not sure why you’re taking offense to this as if i’m saying you personally want a second Holocaust. if i thought you wanted that, as an admin i’d just say it to your face and ban you since you wouldn’t be a good fit for here
“we’re losing rights” or some people you don’t like are gaining safety? No rights are lost by combatting disinformation. It’s not like someone is just going to go out with a banhammer and say “I disagree so that’s disinformation, you’re banned”
Neo-Nazi parties are getting ready to take over half of Europe and all of North America as we speak. No, they are not fine. They are very, very far from fine.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
this might be the most obvious non-sequitur i’ve ever seen—laws like “don’t advocate for a second Holocaust” or “don’t spread COVID misinformation” have literally no relation or causation to what far-right authoritarians believe or will do if they take power. the idea that this is what will empower them to smother democracy is on its face completely absurdist.
If they take over it doesn’t matter what laws we have. Currently the republican frontrunner plans to expand the power of the president, and previously he packed the court with garbage. That’s how they win, not by the government or companies working to fight misinformation.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
The power to censor inherently includes the ability to silence its own opposition. Centralizing this power is therefore dangerous, as it is neigh impossible to regulate.
Currently, we can choose our forums - beehaw does a good job, /pol/ silences all but one worldview, and therefore I am here and not there. What happens when that choice is taken away, and one “truth” is applied universally, with no course for opposition?
Perhaps you believe you hold the correct opinions, and will not be affected. Only those who disagree with you will be silenced. Or perhaps you change your opinions to whatever you are told is correct, and therefore you do hold the correct opinions, though only by definition.
Consider that 50% of the country disagrees with you politically. If you follow a third party, it’s 98%. A forced shared truth is only “good” if it goes your way - but the odds of that are so incredibly small, and it gets much smaller when you consider infighting within the parties.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
you’re making an argument for absolutist freedom of speech here, because if you believe nobody can responsibly wield this power the obvious answer is nobody should—but you yourself literally admit by choice that you don’t use absolutist freedom of speech places like /pol/ because of how they are and what they invariably turn into in the absence of censors. does that not tell you something about how self-defeating this position is
No single body can wield this power, and therefore multiple should.
/pol/ self-censors through slides and sages, and even maintains at least some level of toxicity just to dissuade outsiders from browsing or posting - you could call it preventative censorship.
Fortunately, we don’t have to go there. We have the choice to coexist on Beehaw instead.
Even on reddit, different subs could have different moderation policies, and so if you didn’t like ex. Cyberpunk, you could go to lowsodium_cyberpunk.
Freedom to choose communities allows multiple diverse communities to form, and I think that’s the key - that there are many communities.
When the scope of truth arbitration moves from lemmy instances to the us gov, the only alternative choice for any who disagree would be to go to another country.
The beauty of the internet is that there are no countries. Any website could be anywhere - there are hundreds of thousands of choices, from twitter hashtags to irc rooms.
I do not want one hegemony of information. I do not want 5, or one for each nato member. I want as many as possible, so I may find one (or more!) that I like.
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
Iraq has exceptional consistency in thought leadership. There are no drug addicts in Singapore.
Moxie marlinspike has an excellent blog post on “perfect enforcement” - if the law were applied perfectly, we would not have the lgbtq marriage rights we have today. If America had perfect consistency of thought, we would all be protestant catholic.
Consistency is not a world I strive for, and therefore, to return to the start of this thread, I do not believe the us gov should apply censorship to our communications, and I do believe that doing so would be a slippery slope, precisely and purely because censorship may prevent its own regulation.
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
i mean yeah i very much am fine with the government saying “you can’t say this” because i’m not a free speech absolutist and there are inarguable harms caused by certain forms of content being allowed to fester online. i’d personally quite like it if my country didn’t make it legal to explicitly call for, plan for, and encourage people to exterminate all queer people—and i’d quite like it if corporations took that line as well. many countries have a line of this sort with no such problems, even though it is explicitly more punitive than the US model of “say whatever you want”.
I’m honestly shocked at the pushback for “Maybe we shouldn’t let people preach things like ‘X group of people needs to die because my God said so!’ because it leads to unmitigated violence against the X group 99% of the time.”
That literally goes for anything. All systems are subject to risk of abuse. No system is perfect. It’s not as nihilistic as saying “why even have society at all if it’s not perfect?” but it’s approaching that.
Well, for one thing, avoid the comfortable idea that the mere form of government can of itself safeguard a nation against despotism. Germany under President Hindenburg was a republic. And yet in this republic, an aggressive despotism took root and flourished under Adolf Hitler.
When a competent observer looks for signs of despotism in a community, he looks beyond fine words and noble phrases.
The thrust of the film is, obviously, that despotism can happen anywhere, to any kind of government system or any kind of economic system. You’re no safer by saying “restrictions mean we can be restricted!”
That’s why we have three branches of government, a constitution, and state rights. Literally any government in bad hands can be abused. It’s a senseless argument
i mean, if you don’t like the outcomes of absolutist speech but still support it anyways i can really only conclude your position isn’t a rational one and, indeed, the subsequent conversation here has sort of borne that out to me
First off, 50% of the country believes things that actually have no evidence other than people they like saying it. It’s not about different truths, it’s about truth and fiction. All you need to do is try and verify claims from first or second hand sources, and that becomes painfully obvious, but people refuse to accept that or be open to it.
Second, nobody is asking to have a partisan arbiter of truth. The supreme court was once non partisan, and they’re an arbiter of justice. Even conservatives who are actually capable of researching and following truths come to the same conclusions as the left when it comes to facts. Here’s an easy one: Conservatives all over the country claim there was evidence of election fraud. Okay, it’s been years, where is the evidence? No where, they didn’t even fabricate evidence, they literally didn’t submit anything. Any rational person, regardless of their political views, would agree that there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. Trump is going to trial for espionage. Where is the evidence? You can literally listen to some of it on the internet, there are photos, a large investigation with multiple people on both sides of the aisle took place, there were raids and testimony. But there are still people claiming it’s a witch hunt and there’s no evidence.
It’s not even censorship if they just mark things as not true. There’s really no reason doing something about it has to be equivalent to full scale authoritarian censorship, so you’re walling yourself off from actual solutions with a slippery slope argument that leaves us in the hands of disinformation campaigns, which are easily paid for by rich people and foreign governments.
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
The 50% of people who believe false things are going to vote for truth arbiters that we don’t like. Surely it will be amazing when the correct party is in control, but inevitably the wrong party will be in control sometimes too.
The issue is that bad truth arbitration is “sticky”. Once a bad actor is in control, they have the power to silence their own opposition.
In order for this to work, we must either make sure a bad actor never ends up at the wheel - which will eventually fail, or neuter the truth arbitration process to the point of inefficacy.
The risks here are probable and tangible. We may have the techniques to do it eventually, but I don’t think we have them right now.
Thing is, the risks of doing nothing have definite consequences that we’ve already been watching. Should we do nothing and let democracy burn in fear that doing something will be abused in the future?
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
…no? the Supreme Court has always been a politically partisan entity. it quite literally has its most basic power (judicial review) because it usurped that power for itself as part of the political dispute at the heart of Marbury v. Madison. there is fairly compelling evidence that Chief Justice Marshall was seeking a means to enshrine judicial review into law irrespective of its constitutional validity and was not really deciding the case on merits. if the body was ever “non-partisan” then the word is meaningless.
I feel like you’re not exactly talking about the same thing. What you are afraid of is for the government to have the ability to filter out what they see as “false” information, which I also find a horrible idea. A government with this power would be able to change the information flow to whatever works best for them.
But a government can in my mind make specific rules about certain stuff that we as a society agree upon to not say (just as other laws are things we as a society agree to not do). I know that there are lots of wrong laws that need fixing, but the idea of a law in and of itself is quite sound in my opinion. And therefore I also have no problem with the specific law: people shouldn’t advocate for violence against others because of their sexual orientation.
This is not a slippery slope as every one of these laws on speech would be independently created, and opposed if society does not accept them.This is just like how all other laws are constantly in flux, but pushed towards a moral alignment with the people (e.g. allowing LGBTQ+ marriage). The outrage and possible revolution when these laws go opposite ways is what causes them in the end to align further.
These are all my opinions and views, based on my own experiences and ideas. Feel fee to disagree or correct me!
This is an excellent way of looking at it, that is very different from my initial understanding.
This changes the concern profile entirely, from “who decides what is false” (big concern) to “how do we define advocating, how do we define violence, etc” - which are valid concerns, but apply to just about every law.
Off topic, the cyber security world has been wrestling with “unauthorized access” - is there implicit authorization when a device is attached to the internet? Nobody authorized me to use google - are web requests access? Is bypassing authentication access? It’s a mess.
Are they an admin? The account seems to be registered on another instance. But in any event what they said is a super common misconception about the case. I guess you could make an argument that it’s spreading misinformation, but only if you’re being very literal and ignoring what most people think of when they hear “spreading misinformation”.
Ok got it. I assumed you were, but did figure there was a small chance you were referencing something else which is why I phrased my comment the way I did. Thanks for clarifying!
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