Comment by homeonthemtn
5 months ago
You are on a platform that polices speech. It is evidence that policing speech helps establish civility and culture. There's nothing wrong with policing speech, but it can certainly be abused.
If you were on the early Internet, you were self policing with the help of admins all the time. The difference was you had niche populations that had a stake in keeping the peace and culture of a given board
We broke those boundaries down though and now pit strangers versus strangers for clicks and views, resulting in daily stochastic terrorism.
Police the damn speech.
For inciting violence. Sure. Free speech isn’t absolute.
But along with fringe Covid ideas, we limited actual speech on legitimate areas of public discourse around Covid. Like school reopening or questioning masks and social distancing.
We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.
(And I believe those experts actually did about as best they could given the circumstances)
Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.
More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.
I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.
When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.
In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.
Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.
If I were trying to govern during a generational, world stopping epoch event, I would also not waste time picking through the trash to hear opinions.
I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.
I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.
Letting fringe theories exist on YouTube does not stop you from accessing the WHO or CDC website.
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Luckily, it is possible for you to just listen to those you trust. No need for you go pick through other people's opinions.
I don't see how that turns into you needing to mandate what I read and who's opinions I hear.
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Really?
Experts have a worse track record than open debate and the COVID censorship was directed at even experts who didn’t adhere to political choices — so to my eyes, you’re saying that you’d give in to authoritarian impulses and do worse.
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The "debate" ended up doing nothing but spreading misinformation.
Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.
> We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.
We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.
Really, discussion was limited? Or blatant lies were rightly excluded from discourse?
There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.
If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?
It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.
Blatant truths were excluded as well, and that's the main problem. See replies to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353884
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> Police the damn speech.
What happens when the “police” disagrees with and silences what you believe is true? Or when they allow the propagation of what you believe to be lies?
Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?
>Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?
This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.
Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.
Policing speech for civility or spam is very different than policing speech for content that you disagree with. I was on the early internet, and on the vast majority of forums policing someone's speech for content rather than vulgarity or spam was almost universally opposed and frowned upon.
Depends who is doing the policing. In this case, White House was telling Google who to ban.
I think it was even slightly worse. The White House was effectively delegating the decision of who to ban/police to the NIH/NIAID, an organization that was funding novel coronavirus research in Wuhan.
It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.
Did I miss somewhere in the article or Google's statement that the NIH was involved?
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You've missed the point entirely.
It’s not if Google can decide what content they want on YouTube.
The issue here is that the Biden Whitehouse was pressuring private companies to remove speech that they otherwise would host.
That's a clear violation of the first amendment. And we now know that the previous Whitehouse got people banned from all the major platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.
The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
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Thankfully the constitution explicitly forbids that in the US.
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There is no mass Marxist movement in the USA. There is a left wing crippled by worse than useless identity politics.
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