Comment by JumpCrisscross

14 days ago

> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about

Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.

Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.

20 comments

JumpCrisscross

Reply
potsandpans  14 days ago

Accessing information is not a harmful substance or a dangerous activity that requires training.

The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"

I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.

Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.

That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I refuse.

  • StopDisinfo910  14 days ago

    You are putting forward a false equivalence between social networks and accessing information.

    Meanwhile actual studies on the topic show that social network actually creates addiction - who could have guessed when they were literally engineered for engagement - and have deleterious effects on health especially for teenagers.

    This is not a free speech issue. This is a public health issue. This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about, not a library.

    • potsandpans  14 days ago

      > You are putting forward a false equivalence...

      > This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about

      I reject the counter-equivalence you've offered.

      This is not mutually exclusive: I can acknowledge that social media is bad (for everyone) and also advocate for a non-gated free and open internet.

      My argument is more sharp: do not pass laws for- and build a censorship infrastructure to- solve an institutional problem. If we must discuss this, then we should first discuss fining and breaking up the companies and criminally prosecuting the executives that did the harm knowingly. This takes more care to understand: how is it we want to shape our commons, and what are the steps that we'll take as citizens to enforce it.

      But that can't be packaged into a short quip.

      If this is a meaningful debate, then we should avoid sloganeering. Your last sentence is a nice soundbite, but it disregards all nuance. It's exactly the kind of content that creates harm on social networks: optimized for being being catchy and divisive. Something someone can go repeat and remain uninformed. Funnily enough, the construction is also a tell-tale marker of something written by an LLM. (To be clear: I'm not accusing you of writing this with an LLM, just noting how prevalent this rhetorical device is).

      2 replies →