Comment by stctw
1 year ago
There is, in principle, no difference between controlling what people are allowed to say and controlling what people are allowed to hear, including controlling any middlemen who are involved in propagating speech.
In the USSR, you could say what you wanted inside your own home, to your own family, but were you to speak it where others could hear it, or publish it so others could read and share it...
So, no, you are wrong: the ideas are not different at all, and if you are against one, you are against the other. You judge yourself to be worthy of deciding what others are allowed to hear. Would you allow me to judge what you are allowed to hear? If you would, I would feed you a steady diet of history and philosophy until you discarded such ideas, ideas which enabled much oppression and suffering in the 20th century.
I’m not saying we should control what people are allowed to hear, and even if I were, banning people from posting garbage on social media hardly rises to that level. I think you’ve got this part drastically wrong, but maybe I didn’t explain myself well enough, so I’m sorry for that.
I’m specifically against the amplification of radical content through profit-driven social media algorithms, which has no analogue in the 20th century or indeed any other time in human history. There is no historical or philosophical context that I’m aware of that you could share with me that would be equivalent.
This is what I mean by “free reach” — radical content keeps eyeballs on apps/websites, so it gets amplified so that shareholders can make more money via advertisements. The algorithms that do this need to be banned and/or heavily regulated, and until they are I am in favor of banning/silencing entities who use those algorithms to their advantage to spread dangerous content.
Any of the above-mentioned entities is free to post whatever content they want on their own sites, blogs, or social media that isn’t profit/algorithm-driven. Therefore, no “free speech” (ugh, again, I hate that term in this context) rights are lost, nor is anyone being deprived of the right to hear something.