Censorship is the naive and ineffective non-solution to the problem of coordinated misinformation campaigns.
It’s sort of like torture: even if it worked for the problem it is trying to solve, it would debase us as human beings to try to use it. To top that off, it doesn’t work.
The goal of censorship isn't, usually, to control information as such. It is to enforce certain behaviors. People on Hacker News has the wrong idea about how authoritarian states work, largely based on cold war propaganda. But it's not really a discussion worth having on HN since any attempt at framing it in a way that people could understand would be accused of shilling. You will have to find some other way to get that information.
You're making the mistaken assumption that the people who need to think critically have all of the information or even the right information to do so. Most people are making judgements and coming to conclusions based on less than whole data. They don't have time to exhaustively investigate everything about every topic and make sure that all of their sources are flawless. You're asking for perfection. It's impossible.
This is not reasoning for censorship by the way, its reasoning for systemizing trustable sources of information. Someone will care enough to get it right and fair so we should promote them and ignore the others.
I am absolutely not arguing for censorship, especially since censorship creates it's own blowback, which is often even more helpful to the disinformation.
I am merely arguing that disinformation needs to be fought, especially actively weaponized disinformation.
It looks like this contextualization could be a very good method.
It seems dangerous to be so condoning of censorship. Let people make up their own minds about the validity/importance of the content. The more information that is available the better.
Do your own thinking then and exercise criticism towards all sources of information, mainstream or not.
Free speech isn’t about holding your hand and establishing a standard, it’s about laying out all the information, real or not, and letting you decide for yourself.
If you posit that censorship is an acceptable form of filtering where someone else with their own version of facts and biases does your thinking, then you are entering a very dangerous mindset.
My understanding is that censorship is currently the only known way to tackle untruths leading to violence on a platform that enable viral sharing of information.
In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.
Of course if you can be pinpoint, objectively accurate with your censorship of "calls for violence" then that's great (not being sarcastic). But the world doesn't really work that way.
There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.
One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.
So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).
I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.
"While it may squash some of the stupider and more dangerous ideas floating around right now, it tosses the baby out with the bathwater and harms important discussion about whether those in charge right now do actually have their information right. "
I believe that censorship is more harmful than misinformation.
Censorship is a bottom down initiative. It requires a few bad actors or 'mistakes' to completely change the information landscape. Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread. You also don't create a pretence that all available information is correct.
Censorship carries far larger risks, with small short term gains. It's like picking pennies in front of steamroller.
Completely agree. Simply pointing to someone actually tracking censorship activities. It would be nice to see an inclusive set so we the humans could make our own decisions.
There are some things that - no matter how much "common ground" we have - simply can not be discussed in relative terms. Advocating that we all should be subjected to censorship and silence anyone who speaks against the status quo is one of them.
To think that is okay to have one all-too-powerful entity controlling information channels is stepping into fascism and totalitarianism. This is a lesson that we should have learned already: no possible good comes out of that.
How about letting people simply evaluate the information for themselves?
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