Has Online Disinformation Splintered and Become More Intractable? (yahoo.com) 455
Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times.
"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....
The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.
With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.
"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....
The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.
With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.
whose disinformation is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The government often puts out disinformation, for example about wars (WMD in Iraq the best documented example). So who is to say what is disinformation if the government that has been caught disseminating it? The entire concept of disinformation forces us to the conclusion that free speech should not be impeded. Let the ideas compete in the open. Anything else is censorship.
Lies are lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you bring up censorship because you don't want people calling out lies and demanding the people don't lie to our faces.
Ironically this is the standard right wing answer whenever anyone calls them on their bullshit. Whether it's trickle down economics, "intelligent" design, lies about climate change, ignoring the science on gender or the history of American slavery.
What's ironic is that you're parroting a right wing talking point given to you by a handful of centralized think tanks in an article about those think tanks losing their power over you.
You're demonstrating that the central thesis of the article is wrong, and that the people spreading various lies are very much still in control.
Good job I guess?
Somebody's got mod points (Score:5, Insightful)
We restrict free speech all the time. You can't lie to people in obvious ways. If I sell water and tell you it'll cure cancer than I get in trouble (unless I'm a televangelist, but baby steps people).
Democracy won't win out over fascism in a "market place of ideas" because that market place isn't free. The wealthy tend to favor fascism (let's not forget one of the big elements of fascism: melding state and corporate interests) and they put their thumb on the scale.
And like George Carlin said: Picture how stupid the average person is and realize that half of 'em are dumber than that.
So yes, we do need to control lies (I'm not calling it "misinformation", we're not dealing with that, we're dealing with lies).
Right now the best way to do it would be for a large scale gov't adverting program to teach critical thinking in a non-partisan way... except one party is clearly opposed to critical thinking (no guesses on which one, we all know which, and they've got mod points so read this comment while you can before they mod it down).
In extreme cases, like Germany and the Nazis, they had to go so far as banning the expression of Nazi ideology. Where's the line? Simple: When an ideology is an active threat to democratic institutions. That's the line.
Fascists will use Democratic institutions to destroy democracy. If your institutions are strong (and understand, higher education & critical thinking ARE INSTITUTIONS) then you can let the fascists swim a bit.
When you institutions are weak though, you need to crack down. The alternative is losing democracy and any market place of ideas. The alternative is a North Korean style dictatorship. Or Russian.
And right about now a bunch of folks who look at Russia fondly are reaching for that mod button. Go head boys, what use is Karma if you're not gonna spend it?
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If you're going to make a good point can you please do it without all the "I'm going to get modded down for this" theatrics. It's annoying and here you are as of my post modded 4, Insightful.
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One party is opposed to critical thinking? No, it's definitely both parties, and they are both very selective about what requires critical thinking. They both have dogma that is unquestionable and target issues that are flogged beyond reason. While your ideals may align with one party or the other, you won't find a righteous position with either. You may say that this is a nihilist view, and I'm saying nothing useful, but my brand of idealism still hopes for people to calm the fsck down and get a larger
Re:Somebody's got mod points (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an entire television network devoted to he idea that rich people have more rights than you. In addition, we have Alex Jones (Info wars) monetizing conspiracy theories and Tucker Carlson wilfully lying about the problems in US government (which are never caused by rich people, of course).
Nixon and Reagan weakened the power of the people, while Bush junior and Trump signaled the rise of a US plutocracy. Some US politicians now demand their ideology at any cost. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade wasn't just about removing privacy and the independence of women. It's a tool for a war against the people, similar to 'war on drugs' and 'tough on crime' but lacking the blindness of the majority versus a minority.
Added to that, are the zealots demanding 'my beliefs overrule your facts/experience', turning party politics into a religion: There's no room for compromise or discussion.
Re:Somebody's got mod points (Score:4)
He is certainly complicit but his choices didn't cause the damage other US leaders did and didn't entrench the power of his own party. I don't understand your reference to Carter.
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Fascists will use Democratic institutions to destroy democracy.
This is no joke. This is happening today, right out in the open. I see nonsense like "we are not a democracy, we're a republic" and endless calls to restrict voting "the way our founding fathers intended".
I'd change that "will use" to "are using".
Re:whose disinformation is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the ideas compete in the open.
Please. In the marketplace of ides, your bullshit already lost. You just refuse to accept it. No, you don't want competition, you want special treatment. You want is to force people to quietly listed to your bullshit and not allow any dissent. That's why you call someone pointing out your lies "censorship".
Drinking industrial bleach is not a treatment for any disease. Neither will copious amounts of horse dewormer do anything to prevent or treat Covid-19. There was not widespread voter fraud in 2020. Your orange hero is not secretly fighting a cabal of Satanic cannibalistic pedophiles.
Oh, no! I'm censoring your sincerely held beliefs!
Re:whose disinformation is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, liberties have to be balanced against other liberties. Your freedoms should not infringe upon my freedoms, and when they do we need an arbiter (usually a judge). An example with free speech is speech that harms: fraud and scams for example, which when boiled down also includes false advertising, and that is usually restricted even in the most libertarian of governments. Also speech that harms: encouragements to kill or harm others, either through pay or coercion; or deceit to cause others to harm themselves.
Now when certain groups are pissed of that their restricted free speech must be broadcast by social media, they have to realize that there are limits to the free speech. If you want to promote anti-vax then you need very strong proof first, and the bar is very high here because the evidence is high that vaccines work and are effective and there is no credible evidence. If someone has a religious view on some items, such as being opposed to vaccines, then present this as a religious argument rather than lying to create false evidence.
Re:triggered this lib (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this is the same people (Score:2)
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What anti democratic mother fucker modded this up? Get out of here you fucking Russian hack. "Countries where you have the right to vote for anyone you want are clearly as undemocratic as countries where you can only vote for the state approved choices". Give me a break you fucking hack.
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Hahaha, pot calling the kettle black. You enjoy historically unrivaled freedom to choose your own government and you go "Duh, votes don't matter, we live in a plutocracy".
If you honestly believe that then stick to your convictions and don't vote. We need less idiots voting anyways.
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Eh, the OP was a bit too strong with the choice of words but they're not incorrect.
Democracy in the US is extremely fucked up. All sorts of disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the house limit, the supreme court, the whole damn senate, FPTP voting, etc.
You can check the research for the effects this has. The policy outcomes aren't correlated with what the majority of the population needs, only the top 10-20%.
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If you consider Belarus to be democratic, then I can only conclude that you have a very low standards. Imprisoning leaders of new parties, and shutting out independent organizations from the political process, and censoring journalism from reporting on either ought to worry anyone who thinks democracy is important aspect of national governance. And I'm picking on Belarus from your examples because it's the best one.
It's the western nations in general that evaluate democracies around the world, not simply th
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Education - The misinformation vaccine (Score:4, Insightful)
Even the most advanced AI / machine-learning tools will never be able to address misinformation because misinformation is a complex yet subtle problem spanning multiple dimensions, often heavily grounded in personal beliefs and very commonly spread through back channels from one person to another. In other words, it's like a virus, and we should address it as such. What companies should focus on instead is vaccinating the society against misinformation through education and raising people's awareness on common issues of today. Misinformation would then naturally die out like any other virus.
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Ok, I'll bite.
You said "That's what the critical race theory attacks or about. " and I know that you meant to say "That's what the critical race theory attacks are about."
I'm not sure of that because I don't know what 'critical race theory' actually is.
Then you say "Famously the GOP platform out of Texas explicitly condemned critical thinking until they were called out on it."
Is 'critical thinking' at all related to 'critical race theory'?
The problem with teaching school children how to think and how to det
Tracking is ths root problem (Score:2)
Tracking for ads feeds the promotion of echo chambers.
It was always like this (Score:3)
There’s a reason why Farrakhan wields absolutely zero power outside an extremely small group of black people. The rest of society has recognized that he’s a wingnut and simply not yo be trusted. A reputation like that spreads slowly, but it DOES spread, and a bad reputation is quite persistent. When he speaks out on a topic, most people think “ah, so the smart opinion is the opposite of that guy”
Outside of a few thousand people roughly my age, any mention of Lyndon Larouch causes eveyone in the room to eyeroll. By the mid 90s, he exerted absolutely no influence over anything important. Most youngsters probably would have to google him to figure out who he was.
Now for something that will get me downmodded, Trump is likely in this same category, and it wont be long before ANYTHING posted on Parler will be viewed the same. Oh, you’re on Parler? Time to defriend and block you. That’s a corral for idiots.
Re:It was always like this (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet didnt invent little pockets of unfortunate idiots and willful idiots.
But it did help connect them, and provided them with a force multiplier effect. Its now far easier for them to have an outsized impact on public discourse, whereas in the past they'd never gain any traction for their ramblings.
Re:It was always like this (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet didnt invent little pockets of unfortunate idiots and willful idiots.
No, what it did is let the village idiot in every village communicate and normalize their beliefs with all the other village idiots and when enough of them got to together they were able to create the façade of normalcy to lure others in. Now we have a third of our nation blindly accepting that our last election was rigged despite the fact that there isnt a shred of valid evidence to support that conclusion.
Re:It was always like this (Score:4, Funny)
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No evidence of fraud is the evidence that there is no fraud. What supposed evidence there was went through the courts and was shown to be pretty much entirely fabricated with some lawyers pushing the false evidence being threatened with disbarment because they're claims we're so clearly false.
The US already closely monitors it's elections and small scale fraud is caught every single election. Some accidental, some purposeful but none has been found in great enough quantities as to effect the results of an e
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Government (Score:2)
Um.. no (Score:5, Interesting)
Rich, powerful people are paying folks to spread lies. As long as there's money to be made fooling people because we refuse to teach critical thinking in schools that's going to be a thing. And that means there's going to be a top/down approach to spreading lies.
Maybe just accept the truth. (Score:2)
It always was. (Score:3)
And those who try to "fight it" are fucking morons.
Because the ONLY solution is unbridled censorship.
Which is orders of magnitude worse than the problem.
And you're not going to save the stupid people who buy in anyhow.
As such, stop slamming your dicks in a door.
Give up, and offer the reigns to users. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's impossible for anyone to police the internet completely. Even if they did, it's too easy to pretend to be someone else. And any kind of justice or proof (scientific studies) cost dollars, lots of them.
I'd rather let anyone say whatever they want, and let people filter it out easily. But that would let people filter out advertising ($$$ lost), so it may never happen in my lifetime.
Also I want support for an internet wide identity. But everyone loses their minds at the thought of how.
Simple (Score:2)
""Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies"
Because these people are "The Man" and the disinformation are conspiracy theories regarding "The Man". So this is why disinformation prevails.
Think. Evaluate. Decide. (Score:3)
People need to re-learn how to think critically and evaluate what they read. Just because it's online doesn't mean it's true.
And, of course, the usual. All too often disinformation is anything a particular group doesn't like. With the Overton Window so far to the left these days it doesn't take much to be branded disinformation.
...laura
No. Disinformation is intentionally harmful. (Score:5, Insightful)
Misinformation is just inaccurate and/or mistaken presented with no intent to harm.
Disinformation and misinformation are not synonymous.
Every person every day all day spreads misinformation because our source of information is often inaccurate or comes with mistaken premises.
To equate misinformation with disinformation is a false equivalency. To intentionally equate them is to intentionally mislead.
United Nations Universal Declaration Of Human Righ (Score:3, Informative)
United Nations Universal Declaration Of Human Rights
Ratified 10 December 1948
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions with- out interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Lies are free speech.
"Misinformation" is free speech.
"Hate speech" is free speech.
If you don't like the speech, the remedy is not censorship, it is **more speech.**
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a struggle to even get average people to understand what is and is not censorship.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Interesting)
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that non-Government censorship is still censorship.
Any institution with sufficient authority to block speech can commit censorship. If the laws are just then it is illegal for them to do so. If your laws are unjust then some entities are allowed to commit censorship and others are not. I wouldn't bother splitting hairs between illegal versus legal censorship, because it doesn't really get you anywhere ethically.
On the other hand if I go on a forum and get banned because I said something unpopular with the admins. Assuming I can go to any other of thousands
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Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Informative)
First, not all countries share US legal code to the letter.
Second, the broad concept of free speech is applied outside of the US constitution. Yes, 1A only protects you from government censorship, and private censorship is legal, but private censorship is still censorship.
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Truth is like gold. Falsity burns away in the fire of free debate leaving only the truth. Shovel in more bs, and it burns away except maybe the kernel of truth it may have had The minute you try to favor some information over other information you are participating in a lie. Indeed the ONLY reason to suppress information true or false is to obscure and support a lie.
NOBODY is qualified to a-priori deterimine truth. Even experts and authorities deserve to be challenged, even by people who are wrong. Only free debate and experiment can separate what is true and what is false. ALL sacred cows should be slaughtered and replaced by regular cows.
Semi-related here's a vid about some censorship:
https://odysee.com/@ChinaUncen... [odysee.com]
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Falsity burns away in the fire of free debate leaving only the truth.
Well clearly it doesn't because your post is being modded as "insightful". The garbage fire of covid conspiracies, election conspiracies and climate change denialism are all still smouldering away just fine.
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> covid conspiracies
Such as what, that Eco Health Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked on gain of function research, at the same location where the COVID was discovered, or that the vaccines were not really as effective and had more side effects than were initially admitted
> election conspiracies
Such as the successful lawsuits against states which had dead voters who cast ballots, and who settled the lawsuits against them in federal court, but because of a secret ballot system we can ne
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"The field of intellectual ideas"'that's delusional, frankly.
There are still plenty of places you can go and argue with morons impervious to reason, facts or ever the slightest shred of good sense. Here for example.
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What actually happens on the internet is there is a mountain of BS that no fire of truth can ever hope to consume, and as it slowly gets burned away there are truckloads more of it being delivered.
It's made worse by engagement algorithms that figure if you liked this bullshit, you will probably also like this other fake news. It never bothers to show you the debunking posts, the fact checking.
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People are great at filtering bs
Evidence suggests this is not the case.
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The only cure for a well planned web of lies is free speech. Otherwise you guarantee someone crafts a well planned web of lies. The only way the worst can use it as a weapon *and win* is with censorship.
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The only cure for a well planned web of lies is free speech. Otherwise you guarantee someone crafts a well planned web of lies. The only way the worst can use it as a weapon *and win* is with censorship.
The well planned web of lies. The well planned web of lies that demands an end to free speech because it has free speech to use in order to end free speech.
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Insightful)
What we are seeing form is a partly planned partly emergent web of coercion designed to support a partly planned partly emergent web of lies supporting the power of those doing the coercing. Anyone who wants to lie might have reason to support this if they think their lie is going to be the protected lie.
Absolutely. Those wo would love to eliminate free speech likely find a delicious glee in using free speech to destroy it.
The problem with all 'isms. Any pure ism will destroy itself, because they make fatal assumptions.
Something related - the free market. This sounds like an exceptionally fair, self regulating mechanism. When in fact, the first group that grows large enough will then move to destroy the free market. This is because all pure 'isms make the assumption that all people are intelligent, moral, honest and unselfish.
Like it or not, pragmatism, and the understanding that if you allow and promote evil, you are doomed.
It isn't some widespread suppression of anything you don't want said, it is understanding that people who do want that suppression are going to demand you placate them.
Like I've said before, so called free speech outlets like parler, Truth Social, and Musk wanting to buy twitter presumptively to install frre speech while suppressing anyone who doesn't agree with him are the exact mechanism I speak of.
All of which allows me to make a fairly informed judgement of the people in here who demand that all speech is somehow equal and sacred. That giving out the home address of your enemy and swatting them is not only allowable, but that by now allowing it you are depriving the person who wants the person doxxed and swatted, even killed is performing some sort of sacred freedom ritual that must not be interfered with, that any abridgment is a fall into tyranny. When tyranny is their objective.
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Curious to know, what are the options to handle obviously false information?
The remedy to false speech is correct speech.
It's not even particularly hard, Twitter and Facebook are already automatically tagging posts with a link to "correct" information. I like the idea of posting a video to the exact logical fallacy found in a particular post, but no one has done that yet.
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Obviously false information rarely needs handling, precisely because it's obviously false.
Just curious: who won the 2020 US presidential election, in your opinion?
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The entire reason for the existence of section 230 of the communications decency act, is that when you use a telephone, the internet, or a internet social media platform, the company hosting "your speech" is not liable for what you do, precisely because it is not "their speech".
Not quite.
I mean it's close, but the fundamental error in your understanding belies the mistake you're about to make.
S.230 prevents an [internet person/place/thing] from being held as an accessory to defamation, or some other tort.
The United States Court of Appels for the 5th circuit, has already decided that platforms do not have a first amendment right to censor its users, and the state of Texas has to power to force companies to host your (legal) speech, just as the California Constitution has the right to force private malls to host others speech (the case Pruneyard Shopping vs Robbins).
The 5th circuit decision conflicts directly with established jurisprudence. It'll either be overturned, or the Supreme Court will overturn Citizen's United (unlikely)
The alleged "russian interference" in the 2016 election, is the allegation that they were behind the hack of the DNC servers and john podesta, which resulted in the american public discovering that A) the democratic party rigged the primary against bernie sanders B) that Hillary Clinton was involved in peddling influence C) that Hillary clinton was funneling money / weapons from libya to "syrian rebels" in a series of clandestine regime change operations.
Nope.
The alleged "russian interference" is in reference to the massive attempt by the Russian State [senate.gov] to spread di
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When you make a policy for censorship, you must always answer the question, "What if my enemy gets in charge of enforcing these policies?" Because sooner or later, they will. Probably sooner.
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Insightful)
When you make a policy for censorship, you must always answer the question, "What if my enemy gets in charge of enforcing these policies?" Because sooner or later, they will. Probably sooner.
It really isn't that difficult, and sometimes a throttle is the only way to keep an engine from blowing itself up.
For all of the moaning and gnashing of teeth that the Slashdot libertarians and anarchists make, people can say some pretty inflammatory things without repercussion.
The downfall of Usenet is a good example of how completely unfetter free speech is a very destructive force.
We had some fascinating characters in the groups. I'll use rec.radio.amateur.policy as an example. There was a group who were always attacking each other, completely unrelated to the group. Some of these had some pretty severe psychosexual issues, treating us to some wild descriptions of their enemies behavior. There was a lot of doxxing, a hella lot of malicious projection.
The Usenet's shakers and movers just told us "filter them. Make a killfile or bozo bin or whatever you want to call it." Yeah. I tried that. But especially after a couple of them figured out that making new email addresses, and making them at a fast clip, they'd be seen.
In the meantime, normal users who were there for a constructive purpose just drifted away. Often to a group where they could actually discuss what they wanted to discuss, not something about what some guy was planning on doing to some other guy's wife, using Crisco vegetable shortening.
In the end, I gave up as well. I figured the noise to signal ratio was about 99:1, and my major activity was adding to my killfile.
The kooks? They just moved on to a new group, killing it as well.
In fact, they were gaining as much enjoyment out of imposing on normal people as they were with their infighting.
One of the problems with absolutist's definition of free speech is that they give people who don't believe in free speech the tools to destroy free speech by using free speech.
The ability to speak our minds is precious. Do we hand it over to people who plan on abolishing it as their right?
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1A only protects you from government censorship
Pedantic nitpick: The 1st Amendment only protects Americans from federal censorship. We are protected from state and local government censorship by the 14th Amendment.
1st Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ..."
14th Amendment: "... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; ..."
(My grammar checker thinks the U.S. Constitution is poorly written.)
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You are conflating "free speech" with a strict adherence to the 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Umm, I very specifically referred to the US constitution, not any other, so yeah. Except I wasn't "conflating" anything. Y'all should look up what "conflating" means. Perhaps you meant confusing, although there was no confusion - As I wasn't referencing anything other than the US law.
Yes, 1A only protects you from government censorship, and private censorship is legal, but private censorship is still censorship.
Right, any disallowance of anyone to say what they want to say, is defacto censorship. But deciding there is no barring of any speech? It doesn't end well.
The loudest and boldest and most willing to lie always win that war
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Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:3)
That's what you're talking about?
Then no, there is no free speech at my home, my place of business, or internet servers.
Not surprisingly, there's no freedom of assembly in my home, my place of business either, or internet servers.
You want to talk about fundamental rights outside the context of government authority, FINE, but saying things like when has censorship ever been right, knowingly outside that context? Total dumbassery when private property is involved, and I think you know that.
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There are what are obvious exceptions, such as you cannot disclose classified information or sell it, nor can you yell fire in a crowded theater to cause panic and havok.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You're wrong.
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There are what are obvious exceptions, such as you cannot disclose classified information or sell it, nor can you yell fire in a crowded theater to cause panic and havok.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You're wrong.
Inciting rebellion is not the same thing as intentionally causing panic.
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I don't care, I refuse to let you put your message into my Christmas letter! I don't care how strongly believe in the big lie, how fervent you are about spreading the word about the flat earth religion, or how insistent you are that you put your add for snake oil there.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not matter if the government or a board room does it.
Oh yes, it does matter.
If Facebook censors me, I go to Twitter or Parler.
If the government censors me, I go to jail.
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Technically the 2nd Amendment never made the requirement that you have to be a citizen in order to bear arms. Those 2nd Amendment junkies that love to quote it and ignore centuries of court precedent should be defending the right for illegal aliens to also carry firearms. Unless those gun nuts are a bunch of hypocrites that want guns for themselves but not for anyone else, hrmmmm.
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You do not have a universal right to free speech. That's a laughable fiction.
The government cannot pass laws restricting your speech- that much is a fact.
If you think your right to speak is universal, I encourage you to go tell a Judge how you feel about the matter in their court room.
The fact is, while on private property, you have no government protected right to free speech, period. End discussion. Lacking the right, you cannot be ce
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What the fuck? American's is the grammatically proper way to refer to something that belongs to Americans https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] . If you don't know how English works don't lecture others on it and certainly dont suggest others were dropped on their head as a baby as you clearly were.
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Now that's what I call... getting owned. :)
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What the fuck? American's is the grammatically proper way to refer to something that belongs to Americans
...which isn't what was happening in the post that the GP replied to:
"For example, if American's have the right to bear arms. Why didn't the American slaves just use those arms to free themselves?"
There is no possession of any kind in that sentence. A possessive must be followed approximately immediately by the thing that is possessed (e.g. an American's right to bear arms), ignoring intermediate adjectives, adverbs, and phrases acting as adjectives or adverbs that modify the thing that is being possessed. If the noun is followed by "have", the noun is never possessive (unless it is part of some very, very strange hyphenated multi
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had people who can actually tell information from bullshit, I would agree with you. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of a population. We have a population that learned only to believe someone telling them something. They never learned enough to even have the necessary knowledge for the ability to differentiate between facts and bullshit. Because that was never ever required from them. At school, the only thing we teach our kids is to believe whatever the teacher tells them as "the truth" and that's that. Questioning that or even asking for proof is at best ignored, usually punished as insubordiation. How DARE you question what I tell you, you snooty little brat!
So they grow up, without ever learning how to test and verify what they're told. Eventually, though, they notice that they have been bullshitted by "the system". That the whole story of "the system" being here for them and them benefiting from it being bunk. But what should they do now? They don't believe "the system" anymore but they also never learned how to actually search for what is and what is not true. So they look around for someone else to tell them what is "the truth". And there is no shortage of bullshit peddlers that want to tell them their version of the truth. And since they don't want to believe A anymore, they turn around and believe B now. For the same reason they originally believed A: Fuck all.
There is no "cure" to that, there is no way to counter that. You built that. You wanted people who have no way to verify the bullshit story you told them, and now they found out it's a bullshit story, so now you have people believing another bullshit story without any way to find out that it's bullshit.
Sorry, we lost.
The best you can possibly do is to give their kids the ability to debunk bullshit. Consider that generation now lost and try again with the next.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Critical thinking is not instinctual. It must be learned. And there are large groups of people who have reason to prevent that. For example, religious parents don't want their kids coming home from school questioning their faith. And they absolutely exercise influence over the curriculum.
But the facts remain: We cannot stop people from lying. Any efforts at blocking disinformation, no matter how noble, will devolve into censorship eventually. It's just human nature.
The only option is to fight false facts via the presentation of actual facts, and valid reasoning. Critical thinking, however difficult it may be to instill, it the only true weapon we have against disinformation.
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Pretty much this. As long as people in power have more to lose than to gain from people being able to see through their bullshit, we won't see any change in this.
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'Critical thinking is not instinctual.'
given the aggravation that the average 2-4 year old can cause by asking annoying questions, I'd argue that it IS instinctual, but our present education system destroys it; asking smart arse questions in class does not go well.
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You know something? We *used* to have this thing called a formal education, which prepared the masses to grow up armed with the tools they needed to figure out the facts from the B.S. and to teach them as much as we could of all of the basic knowledge building-blocks needed to be productive members of society.
Lately, I feel like schools are utterly failing at accomplishing this, while they spin their wheels arguing over all of this LGBTQ stuff and everything coming out of it by extension. (EG. Am I allowed
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posting to undo mod-misclick, should have been +1
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Informative)
I frankly have not enough information about the Hunter Biden laptop story to make any decision about it. And frankly, I can't really be bothered to find out. At this point, it is very likely quite time consuming to differentiate between bullshit and information, and I doubt that it really matters enough to me to invest that amount of time.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5)
I frankly have not enough information about the Hunter Biden laptop story to make any decision about it. And frankly, I can't really be bothered to find out. At this point, it is very likely quite time consuming to differentiate between bullshit and information, and I doubt that it really matters enough to me to invest that amount of time.
It's very important that we get his laptop. It has all of Hillary's missing emails, tthe plans for the Democrat conspiracy at Benghazi! Bill Clinton's plan to murder his State Police guards at Waco, and proof that FDR conspired with Japan to drag the US into WW2.
Oh, and that FDR was gay.
Oh, and proof that Trump is innocent of all accusations.
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I frankly don't care whether FDR was gay. Aside of that, the rest could have some impact on your politics, so I guess that may be of relevance to the US.
Dunno if I could get worked up over it, though.
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I had assumed that Ol Olsoc's post was satirical, but now I realize that I don't know. Is he repeating stupid conspiracy theories for a "Funny" mod? Or is he summarizing things that he believes could be true?
I have no easy way to find out. Fans of "disinformation" would be delighted.
Re: Has censorship ever been right? (Score:2)
The goid old magic laptop of damning information. What would we ever do without ye?
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Sorry, still don't care.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few things: First, the people making the claims are not trustworthy at all. Second, I couldn't care less about what any president's kid does unless they're also in a position of power.
Oh, and I'm absolutely certain that a great deal of this non-story was completely made up. Consider the source.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Informative)
And then he used that position to get classified info and sell it to the Saudis for $2 billion ... no, wait, that was Jared Kushner, who thanks to Trump was ACTUALLY IN GOVERNMENT.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Interesting)
So were you one of the ones saying the Hunter Biden laptop story was made up? I would assume not since you have such discernment
I suspect most people couldn't give two f**ks about Hunter Biden's laptop, for several reasons:
So even in the absolute best-case scenario for the Republicans, they still had nothing. And realistically, it didn't matter if it was his laptop, because it wasn't Joe Biden's laptop, and nobody gives a f**k what his son did or did not do.
To that, I would add that trying to get a candidate's son into legal trouble to distract the father from the campaign is just about as low as a political party can sink, which is why I cannot in good conscience vote Republican in the foreseeable future (and yes, I have occasionally done so in the past). They went too far as a party, and now that taint means that I won't vote for even highly qualified individuals who still choose to associate with such a train wreck of a party.
Except Liz Cheney. If she runs for president, it's going to be a tough call. I don't agree with her politics in a lot of ways, but she has more character than most of the rest of the Senate and House combined, and we need more people like that in our federal government. Want to really cause Democrats to question everything? Start a Liz Cheney / Meghan McCain ticket. Just saying.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a mistake, and it was rolled back as soon as it was realized that it was.
Social Media companies saw the story as fitting well with the pattern of disinformation injected into their streams during the 2016 election to polarize the country, and responded accordingly.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Informative)
Except the details of the laptop having been given to FBI months earlier, and to this day FBI has no clue where the laptop is, nor acted upon information retrieved from it in any way.
And what exactly was the FBI supposed to have done with the laptop?
Arrest Hunter Biden for having his (possibly stolen) laptop abandoned at a repair shop?
If all the emails were legit then the most scandalous thing was him trying (and failing) to get his dad (who was a private citizen) to join him in a business venture. Hardly a thing for the FBI to act on.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:4, Insightful)
The information being censored was actually factual
Such as? Horse dewormer never had any effect on covid. There was no "fraud" in the 2020 election. The people on January 6th who used bear mace and fire extinguishers on police weren't "tourists". The list goes on.
State one lie which was "censored" which was true.
Re:Has censorship ever been right? (Score:5, Informative)
So yeah there's a whole lot of censorship going on it's just all coming from the right wing. Which is pretty typical. A common tactic of the right wing, invented by Nazis and perfected by a republican by the name of Karl rove, is to accuse your opponent of whatever crimes you're doing. This forces the opponent to defend themselves and distracts from the very real crimes you're committing.
Donald Trump just did it with those classified documents he was hiding in Mar-A-Lago by accusing other presidents of doing the same thing. It's a verifiable fact that the other presidents didn't do what Trump did but now instead of discussing the crimes Trump committed we are talking about the crimes other presidents didn't do.
If we could teach people critical thinking they'd see through this pretty obvious trick which again is why so much billionaire cash is flooding into school districts elections. Take over the schools and prevent people from learning basic critical thinking skills and you'll have a populous that's easy to rule over..
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And yet you keep repeating the same propaganda, "horse dewormer".
Yes, it's also used for deworming horses. Guess what? Lots of human medication c
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Social media companies will never implement effective censorship. It would upset their share-holders if they ever did. What they do have to do, however, is give t
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Censorship means the government. In the US and many other countries, only the government is forbidden to restrict free speech or direct free speech. This include mandating that private citizens or organizations be required to carry the speech of others! It violates my free speech if I am forced to speak your words just as it violates a company's free speech to be forced to carry your words. To require speech infringes upon liberty!
Arguments that these social media companies are so powerful that they're
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Why would propaganda, swastikas, or dangerous social media challenges fall outside the realm of free speech? Even if you are only speaking about first amendment protections, all of those things would be protected.
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Precisely. And this information also is censored, cancelled, labeled as disinformation.
The truth is the first casualty of war.
TIL: censorship didn't exist before cancel culture (Score:2)
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Congratulations, after years of lurking, you inspired me to create an account just to reply to this.
Every one of those questions have been asked. And answered.
Briefly:
1. Yes, though some allegations were sufficiently poor that "investigated" means "there's no way this could be answered, give us something concrete to look into next time".
2. Yes, but they're relatively insignificant compared to human causes. Yes, if you include the error bars and the probable scenario modelling.
3. More-or-less. Certainly much