Most Americans say the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.
65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
I certainly favor this and I hope online platforms will continue to remove misinformation and hate speech extremely vigorously.
I am also definitely okay with the government passing a law that requires online platforms to moderate themselves.
I don’t believe this impacts anyone’s freedom of speech. If you must make a Nazi website online, you are welcome to do so (assuming you can find a platform that doesn’t immediately remove it). But Facebook and Twitter should take down links and advertisements to your site, and even ban your account if you continue to talk about it.
Your freedom of speech is intact. No one is arresting you for what you are saying. But you aren’t guaranteed a platform on which to say it.
Big tech should be doing so, but they already get pressure from advertisers to moderate that away. For the smaller ones like the insane right winger sites, let them spew nonsense, since it sets a dangerous precedent for everyone else if they’re not allowed to shit out misinformation and bigotry.
That’s where the internet should very much be made free. There’s too many cases of legitimate websites that can be shut down through these means. We need to correct misinformation with correct information.
This seems a rather naïve point of view unfortunately.
People are persuaded and misled by misinformation all the time, even relatively smart people. Correct information being available does not mean that people will be able to choose correctly between correct information and misinformation; or, if already misinformed, that they will suddenly realize they’ve been misled and abandon their false beliefs.
The way to combat it is not to present correct information and pray that people make an informed decision, it’s to stem the spread of bad information before it can gain converts. We already do this for some information we deem simply too harmful for society (child porn, terrorism). Given, say, COVID misinformation cost thousands of lives and millions of dollars, I would say it certainly should be added to that list.
Absolutely not, it’s a slippery slope. It’s one of those “think of the children!” arguments where we decide what words are too harmful.
If they wanted to actually go and block misinformation on the web, why would they not also ban e2ee communication? It’s clearly a loophole where they could potentially be spreading misinformation that is ungoverned!
I entirely disagree it’s a slippery slope. We already have child pornography and anti-terrorism laws that platforms must follow, and yet we have somehow failed to fall down any further slopes (and in fact these are illegal even with e2ee communication). Yet e2ee communication and Facebook and Twitter continue to exist.
Why would adding misinformation to this list cause that to change?
Secondly, your argument can be used, exactly as you are making it, to say that child pornography and terrorist content on the Internet are fine actually. Why not simply allow its publication but tell people it’s bad and not to pay attention to it?
So since this is already happening, where exactly does your slippery slope objection come in? Why is this information germane to this specific argument?
You rang the alarm bell about this being a slippery slope that will lead to attempts to ban e2ee, but as you yourself demonstrated this is already happening, so I’m not sure how anything you’ve said applies to restricting false information online… and how it doesn’t also apply to, say, bans on child pornography, unless you disagree with those too?
We need to correct misinformation with correct information.
my counterpoint to that would be: hasn’t COVID demonstrated how ineffective this actually is versus deplatforming incorrect information to begin with? people did do a lot of that during the pandemic, and yet there are still tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people, who were misled and now believe things contrary to even basic science. i think to a lesser extent the anti-vaxx movement has demonstrated similar limits to this approach against deplatforming.
There’s a lot more reasons that count for that. That became a very big social and political issue, which is a separate issue. I ask you then, how would we enforce this if non megacorps were forced to comply? Should decentralized media like Lemmy be forced to comply as well? Would US be forced to defederate with other country instances in the situation they may not govern their speech? Would encrypted communication that cannot be governed get banned so we can carefully make sure misinformation doesn’t get spread? As soon as you think of the how would this be enforced, you quickly realize how terrible of an idea this is.
Of course it’s easy to say misinformation bad, nobody is disagreeing with you. But actually going into actual practical solutions that maintain freedom and privacy is the hard part.
If the FCC can regulate content on television, they can regulate content on the internet.
The only reason the FCC doesn’t is the Republican-dominated FCC when Ajit Pai was in charge argued that broadband is an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” which is like the hair splittingest of splitting fucking hairs. It’s fucking both.
Anyway, once it was classified as “information service” it became something the FCC (claimed it) didn’t have authority to regulate in the same way, allowing them to gut net neutrality.
If they FCC changed the definition back to telecommunications, they wouldn’t be able to regulate foreign websites, but they can easily regulate US sites and regulate entities who want to do business in the US using an internet presence.
Although suspension of belief is possible (Hasson, Simmons, & Todorov, 2005; Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008), it seems to require a high degree of attention, considerable implausibility of the message, or high levels of distrust at the time the message is received. So, in most situations, the deck is stacked in favor of accepting information rather than rejecting it, provided there are no salient markers that call the speaker’s intention of cooperative conversation into question. Going beyond this default of acceptance requires additional motivation and cognitive resources: If the topic is not very important to you, or you have other things on your mind, misinformation will likely slip in.
Additionally, repeated exposure to a statement increases the likelihood that it will be accepted as true.
Repeated exposure to a statement is known to increase its acceptance as true (e.g., Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992; Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977). In a classic study of rumor transmission, Allport and Lepkin (1945) observed that the strongest predictor of belief in wartime rumors was simple repetition. Repetition effects may create a perceived social consensus even when no consensus exists. Festinger (1954) referred to social consensus as a “secondary reality test”: If many people believe a piece of information, there’s probably something to it. Because people are more frequently exposed to widely shared beliefs than to highly idiosyncratic ones, the familiarity of a belief is often a valid indicator of social consensus.
Even providing corrections next to misinformation leads to the misinformation spreading.
A common format for such campaigns is a “myth versus fact” approach that juxtaposes a given piece of false information with a pertinent fact. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offer patient handouts that counter an erroneous health-related belief (e.g., “The side effects of flu vaccination are worse than the flu”) with relevant facts (e.g., “Side effects of flu vaccination are rare and mild”). When recipients are tested immediately after reading such hand-outs, they correctly distinguish between myths and facts, and report behavioral intentions that are consistent with the information provided (e.g., an intention to get vaccinated). However, a short delay is sufficient to reverse this effect: After a mere 30 minutes, readers of the handouts identify more “myths” as “facts” than do people who never received a hand-out to begin with (Schwarz et al., 2007). Moreover, people’s behavioral intentions are consistent with this confusion: They report fewer vaccination intentions than people who were not exposed to the handout.
There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.
From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some “authority” (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
The problem is that today we’re relegating everything to “experts”, or more generally, we’re expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.
I don’t think this is really about censorship. You can say and advertise whatever you want, but after this if it can be proven false you have to pay the price. All it does is make people double check their facts and figures before they go shooting off random falsehoods.
This just another fake poll used to justify the biometrics requirement for internet connection.
quelle surprise that your comment history is full of right-wing, crank, Great Reset (((globalist))) stuff:
Haha it is funny that you oppose only with the arguments you read from fact checkers instead of going to Youtube and see what those globalists says by themselves. In every country the top politicians goes regularly to their meetings who talks harsh things directly and all you know is that all they talked is a conspiracy theory. You always repeat the sentences who nobody actually said, expect fact checkers. Lol
Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.
Let’s hope the successor of Rutte isn’t a WEF muppet and will stop the closure of farms.
Wow I didn’t realize you hollandaises love WEF-puppets, 15 min cities and Rutte’s lies even after he got nailed by Gideon van Meijeren in the parliament. Well, have fun with your 11 200 closed farmlands then. Luckily the puppets haven’t planned that in here, but most likely it’ll happen here too.
15 min cities as a consept was invented in the Soviet Union by Stalin.
So what? You can’t even prove any of your “conspiracy” claims wrong. All you can do is to restrict other peoples freedom of speech.
If you’ve got different opinions, then debate with arguments. Currently all you have capabilities is just very low iq monkey business. But naturally that’s your choice how you want to play. Don’t expect me to give you any credits for that.
I don’t know how things function in the US, but here in Europe it’s already pretty much a standard that average joes has totally the opposite opinion what media claims to be the result.
And when multiple other polls with multiple time more responders shows the opposite result, media is always silent.
Our politicians started to push biometrics / strong identificitation last year or this for every people who connects to internet. That’s just step closer to that “you have no pricacy” conspiracy theory created by conpiracy theorist politicians.
Our politicians started to push biometrics / strong identificitation last year or this for every people who connects to internet. That’s just step closer to that “you have no pricacy” conspiracy theory created by conpiracy theorist politicians.
That’s unfortunate to hear, and I am not here to diminish your lived experience, but I can tell you that they’re not pushing for biometric ID in the US to log on to the internet, and this poll is from a well-respected, well-known to be unbiased research group in the US who does polling data for US households and US issues and has for decades.
So in respect to this thread, your feelings on that have next to nothing to do with this discussion.
Well, that’s good to hear then. Hopefully it stays on that track. EU and US is banning encrypted messaging currently at the same time though. And India already illegalized them, but Indian people says that so far it hasn’t affected anybody by any means.
What worries me is who defines what the truth is? Reality itself became political decades ago, probably starting with the existence of global warming and now such basic foundational facts as who won an election. If the government can punish “falsehood”, what do you do if the GOP is in charge and they determine that “Biden won 2020” is such a falsehood?
It’s all fun and games till well intentioned laws get abused by a new administration. Be careful what you wish for. My personal take is that any organization that is even reasonably similar to a news site must conform to fairness in reporting standards much like broadcast TV once had. If you don’t, but an argument could be made that you present as a new site, you just slap a sizeable banner on every page that you are an entertainment site. Drawing distinctions on what is news and what is entertainment would theoretically work better than an outright ban of misleading content.
At the end of the day it won’t matter what is written unless the regulations have actual teeth. “Fines” mean so little given the billion dollar backers could care less and retractions are too little too late. I want these wannabe Nazi “News Infotainment” people to go to jail for their speech that causes harm to people and the nation. Destroying democracy should be painful for the agitators.
Eh, people are trying to do this already by claiming that queer content in real life and on the Internet are “grooming” kids. We can push back against mis-application of laws without saying the laws themselves shouldn’t exist.
Slippery slope to what? We have those restrictions for news already. Only reason you still see Fox and such lie on the air and get away with it is they’re classified as entertainment instead of news. Freedom of speech and press are still in tact.
Edit: I wasn’t referring to the Tucker Carlson case, but I did learn that’s not true anyway. Nobody accredits news channels in the first place, and as it turns out, the FCC doesn’t even have any authority over cable.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
The power to censor inherently includes the ability to silence its own opposition. Centralizing this power is therefore dangerous, as it is neigh impossible to regulate.
Currently, we can choose our forums - beehaw does a good job, /pol/ silences all but one worldview, and therefore I am here and not there. What happens when that choice is taken away, and one “truth” is applied universally, with no course for opposition?
Perhaps you believe you hold the correct opinions, and will not be affected. Only those who disagree with you will be silenced. Or perhaps you change your opinions to whatever you are told is correct, and therefore you do hold the correct opinions, though only by definition.
Consider that 50% of the country disagrees with you politically. If you follow a third party, it’s 98%. A forced shared truth is only “good” if it goes your way - but the odds of that are so incredibly small, and it gets much smaller when you consider infighting within the parties.
I don’t understand how these questions are germane. We can and have already decided some speech is wrong to spread online and should lead to both deletion and arrest – specifically child porn and terrorism. We can and have successfully defined what those are. What’s wrong with adding misinformation and hate speech to this list? Do you really believe we’d have trouble defining those?
I feel like you’re not exactly talking about the same thing. What you are afraid of is for the government to have the ability to filter out what they see as “false” information, which I also find a horrible idea. A government with this power would be able to change the information flow to whatever works best for them.
But a government can in my mind make specific rules about certain stuff that we as a society agree upon to not say (just as other laws are things we as a society agree to not do). I know that there are lots of wrong laws that need fixing, but the idea of a law in and of itself is quite sound in my opinion. And therefore I also have no problem with the specific law: people shouldn’t advocate for violence against others because of their sexual orientation.
This is not a slippery slope as every one of these laws on speech would be independently created, and opposed if society does not accept them.This is just like how all other laws are constantly in flux, but pushed towards a moral alignment with the people (e.g. allowing LGBTQ+ marriage). The outrage and possible revolution when these laws go opposite ways is what causes them in the end to align further.
These are all my opinions and views, based on my own experiences and ideas. Feel fee to disagree or correct me!
This is an excellent way of looking at it, that is very different from my initial understanding.
This changes the concern profile entirely, from “who decides what is false” (big concern) to “how do we define advocating, how do we define violence, etc” - which are valid concerns, but apply to just about every law.
Off topic, the cyber security world has been wrestling with “unauthorized access” - is there implicit authorization when a device is attached to the internet? Nobody authorized me to use google - are web requests access? Is bypassing authentication access? It’s a mess.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
you’re making an argument for absolutist freedom of speech here, because if you believe nobody can responsibly wield this power the obvious answer is nobody should—but you yourself literally admit by choice that you don’t use absolutist freedom of speech places like /pol/ because of how they are and what they invariably turn into in the absence of censors. does that not tell you something about how self-defeating this position is
No single body can wield this power, and therefore multiple should.
/pol/ self-censors through slides and sages, and even maintains at least some level of toxicity just to dissuade outsiders from browsing or posting - you could call it preventative censorship.
Fortunately, we don’t have to go there. We have the choice to coexist on Beehaw instead.
Even on reddit, different subs could have different moderation policies, and so if you didn’t like ex. Cyberpunk, you could go to lowsodium_cyberpunk.
Freedom to choose communities allows multiple diverse communities to form, and I think that’s the key - that there are many communities.
When the scope of truth arbitration moves from lemmy instances to the us gov, the only alternative choice for any who disagree would be to go to another country.
The beauty of the internet is that there are no countries. Any website could be anywhere - there are hundreds of thousands of choices, from twitter hashtags to irc rooms.
I do not want one hegemony of information. I do not want 5, or one for each nato member. I want as many as possible, so I may find one (or more!) that I like.
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
Iraq has exceptional consistency in thought leadership. There are no drug addicts in Singapore.
Moxie marlinspike has an excellent blog post on “perfect enforcement” - if the law were applied perfectly, we would not have the lgbtq marriage rights we have today. If America had perfect consistency of thought, we would all be protestant catholic.
Consistency is not a world I strive for, and therefore, to return to the start of this thread, I do not believe the us gov should apply censorship to our communications, and I do believe that doing so would be a slippery slope, precisely and purely because censorship may prevent its own regulation.
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
i mean yeah i very much am fine with the government saying “you can’t say this” because i’m not a free speech absolutist and there are inarguable harms caused by certain forms of content being allowed to fester online. i’d personally quite like it if my country didn’t make it legal to explicitly call for, plan for, and encourage people to exterminate all queer people—and i’d quite like it if corporations took that line as well. many countries have a line of this sort with no such problems, even though it is explicitly more punitive than the US model of “say whatever you want”.
i mean, if you don’t like the outcomes of absolutist speech but still support it anyways i can really only conclude your position isn’t a rational one and, indeed, the subsequent conversation here has sort of borne that out to me
First off, 50% of the country believes things that actually have no evidence other than people they like saying it. It’s not about different truths, it’s about truth and fiction. All you need to do is try and verify claims from first or second hand sources, and that becomes painfully obvious, but people refuse to accept that or be open to it.
Second, nobody is asking to have a partisan arbiter of truth. The supreme court was once non partisan, and they’re an arbiter of justice. Even conservatives who are actually capable of researching and following truths come to the same conclusions as the left when it comes to facts. Here’s an easy one: Conservatives all over the country claim there was evidence of election fraud. Okay, it’s been years, where is the evidence? No where, they didn’t even fabricate evidence, they literally didn’t submit anything. Any rational person, regardless of their political views, would agree that there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. Trump is going to trial for espionage. Where is the evidence? You can literally listen to some of it on the internet, there are photos, a large investigation with multiple people on both sides of the aisle took place, there were raids and testimony. But there are still people claiming it’s a witch hunt and there’s no evidence.
It’s not even censorship if they just mark things as not true. There’s really no reason doing something about it has to be equivalent to full scale authoritarian censorship, so you’re walling yourself off from actual solutions with a slippery slope argument that leaves us in the hands of disinformation campaigns, which are easily paid for by rich people and foreign governments.
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
The 50% of people who believe false things are going to vote for truth arbiters that we don’t like. Surely it will be amazing when the correct party is in control, but inevitably the wrong party will be in control sometimes too.
The issue is that bad truth arbitration is “sticky”. Once a bad actor is in control, they have the power to silence their own opposition.
In order for this to work, we must either make sure a bad actor never ends up at the wheel - which will eventually fail, or neuter the truth arbitration process to the point of inefficacy.
The risks here are probable and tangible. We may have the techniques to do it eventually, but I don’t think we have them right now.
Thing is, the risks of doing nothing have definite consequences that we’ve already been watching. Should we do nothing and let democracy burn in fear that doing something will be abused in the future?
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
…no? the Supreme Court has always been a politically partisan entity. it quite literally has its most basic power (judicial review) because it usurped that power for itself as part of the political dispute at the heart of Marbury v. Madison. there is fairly compelling evidence that Chief Justice Marshall was seeking a means to enshrine judicial review into law irrespective of its constitutional validity and was not really deciding the case on merits. if the body was ever “non-partisan” then the word is meaningless.
Ok got it. I assumed you were, but did figure there was a small chance you were referencing something else which is why I phrased my comment the way I did. Thanks for clarifying!
Are they an admin? The account seems to be registered on another instance. But in any event what they said is a super common misconception about the case. I guess you could make an argument that it’s spreading misinformation, but only if you’re being very literal and ignoring what most people think of when they hear “spreading misinformation”.
Neo-Nazi parties are getting ready to take over half of Europe and all of North America as we speak. No, they are not fine. They are very, very far from fine.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
this might be the most obvious non-sequitur i’ve ever seen—laws like “don’t advocate for a second Holocaust” or “don’t spread COVID misinformation” have literally no relation or causation to what far-right authoritarians believe or will do if they take power. the idea that this is what will empower them to smother democracy is on its face completely absurdist.
If they take over it doesn’t matter what laws we have. Currently the republican frontrunner plans to expand the power of the president, and previously he packed the court with garbage. That’s how they win, not by the government or companies working to fight misinformation.
Right, and it sounds like people want more restrictions. So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate, so if people are already on board then I imagine we’ll get more restrictive speech legislation.
So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate,
…what? American freedom of speech has, if anything, gotten less restrictive over time and it never was restrictive to begin with. you quite literally have to go out of your way to utter something which isn’t protected speech at this point (and the First Amendment has never covered private corporations so nobody is losing a “right” when Twitter tells you that you can’t wish for a second Holocaust)
i think context makes it pretty obvious this is a generalized you (i quite literally say “nobody”, which is an indefinite and plural pronoun), so i’m not sure why you’re taking offense to this as if i’m saying you personally want a second Holocaust. if i thought you wanted that, as an admin i’d just say it to your face and ban you since you wouldn’t be a good fit for here
“we’re losing rights” or some people you don’t like are gaining safety? No rights are lost by combatting disinformation. It’s not like someone is just going to go out with a banhammer and say “I disagree so that’s disinformation, you’re banned”
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
But how do you implement such a thing without horrible side effects?
Canadians: First time?
Your comment seems to imply it’s a bad thing. Do you have bad experiences with censorship?
I certainly favor this and I hope online platforms will continue to remove misinformation and hate speech extremely vigorously.
I am also definitely okay with the government passing a law that requires online platforms to moderate themselves.
I don’t believe this impacts anyone’s freedom of speech. If you must make a Nazi website online, you are welcome to do so (assuming you can find a platform that doesn’t immediately remove it). But Facebook and Twitter should take down links and advertisements to your site, and even ban your account if you continue to talk about it.
Your freedom of speech is intact. No one is arresting you for what you are saying. But you aren’t guaranteed a platform on which to say it.
Govenment censorship? No I don’t support it (except the censoring of direct calls to violence, calls to violence should not be allowed)
Tech companies de-platforming you? Hell yea!
If you’re having trouble finding a company that is willing to host your content, maybe your content is the issue.
The key is defining terms like “false” and “violent.”
Big tech should be doing so, but they already get pressure from advertisers to moderate that away. For the smaller ones like the insane right winger sites, let them spew nonsense, since it sets a dangerous precedent for everyone else if they’re not allowed to shit out misinformation and bigotry.
That’s where the internet should very much be made free. There’s too many cases of legitimate websites that can be shut down through these means. We need to correct misinformation with correct information.
This seems a rather naïve point of view unfortunately.
People are persuaded and misled by misinformation all the time, even relatively smart people. Correct information being available does not mean that people will be able to choose correctly between correct information and misinformation; or, if already misinformed, that they will suddenly realize they’ve been misled and abandon their false beliefs.
The way to combat it is not to present correct information and pray that people make an informed decision, it’s to stem the spread of bad information before it can gain converts. We already do this for some information we deem simply too harmful for society (child porn, terrorism). Given, say, COVID misinformation cost thousands of lives and millions of dollars, I would say it certainly should be added to that list.
Absolutely not, it’s a slippery slope. It’s one of those “think of the children!” arguments where we decide what words are too harmful.
If they wanted to actually go and block misinformation on the web, why would they not also ban e2ee communication? It’s clearly a loophole where they could potentially be spreading misinformation that is ungoverned!
I entirely disagree it’s a slippery slope. We already have child pornography and anti-terrorism laws that platforms must follow, and yet we have somehow failed to fall down any further slopes (and in fact these are illegal even with e2ee communication). Yet e2ee communication and Facebook and Twitter continue to exist.
Why would adding misinformation to this list cause that to change?
Secondly, your argument can be used, exactly as you are making it, to say that child pornography and terrorist content on the Internet are fine actually. Why not simply allow its publication but tell people it’s bad and not to pay attention to it?
Actually these exact arguments are already being used to try and ban encryption.
See the UK: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the_United_Kingdom
We’ve already had multiple laws in the US attempting the same: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-ban-end-end-encryption-without-actually-banning-it
Even the UN is trying to get together and ban it in multiple countries: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/international-statement-end-end-encryption-and-public-safety
So since this is already happening, where exactly does your slippery slope objection come in? Why is this information germane to this specific argument?
I’ve said it like three times already
You rang the alarm bell about this being a slippery slope that will lead to attempts to ban e2ee, but as you yourself demonstrated this is already happening, so I’m not sure how anything you’ve said applies to restricting false information online… and how it doesn’t also apply to, say, bans on child pornography, unless you disagree with those too?
my counterpoint to that would be: hasn’t COVID demonstrated how ineffective this actually is versus deplatforming incorrect information to begin with? people did do a lot of that during the pandemic, and yet there are still tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people, who were misled and now believe things contrary to even basic science. i think to a lesser extent the anti-vaxx movement has demonstrated similar limits to this approach against deplatforming.
There’s a lot more reasons that count for that. That became a very big social and political issue, which is a separate issue. I ask you then, how would we enforce this if non megacorps were forced to comply? Should decentralized media like Lemmy be forced to comply as well? Would US be forced to defederate with other country instances in the situation they may not govern their speech? Would encrypted communication that cannot be governed get banned so we can carefully make sure misinformation doesn’t get spread? As soon as you think of the how would this be enforced, you quickly realize how terrible of an idea this is.
Of course it’s easy to say misinformation bad, nobody is disagreeing with you. But actually going into actual practical solutions that maintain freedom and privacy is the hard part.
If the FCC can regulate content on television, they can regulate content on the internet.
The only reason the FCC doesn’t is the Republican-dominated FCC when Ajit Pai was in charge argued that broadband is an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” which is like the hair splittingest of splitting fucking hairs. It’s fucking both.
Anyway, once it was classified as “information service” it became something the FCC (claimed it) didn’t have authority to regulate in the same way, allowing them to gut net neutrality.
If they FCC changed the definition back to telecommunications, they wouldn’t be able to regulate foreign websites, but they can easily regulate US sites and regulate entities who want to do business in the US using an internet presence.
In other news: most Americans disagree on what information is false
Checks out. I wouldn’t want the US government doing it, but deplatforming bullshit is the correct approach. It takes more effort to reject a belief than to accept it and if the topic is unimportant to the person reading about it, then they’re more apt to fall victim to misinformation.
Additionally, repeated exposure to a statement increases the likelihood that it will be accepted as true.
Even providing corrections next to misinformation leads to the misinformation spreading.
The ideal solution is to cut off the flow of misinformation and reinforce the facts instead.
There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.
From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some “authority” (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:
The problem is that today we’re relegating everything to “experts”, or more generally, we’re expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.
I don’t think this is really about censorship. You can say and advertise whatever you want, but after this if it can be proven false you have to pay the price. All it does is make people double check their facts and figures before they go shooting off random falsehoods.
This just another fake poll used to justify the biometrics requirement for internet connection.
quelle surprise that your comment history is full of right-wing, crank, Great Reset (((globalist))) stuff:
Do you still claim I’m wrong? https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text?format=txt&__cf_chl_tk=7hekwl2v7un8laqs_ljluymfbrh4fit9vioaabkj0zq-1690308859-0-ganycgznc3s
So what? You can’t even prove any of your “conspiracy” claims wrong. All you can do is to restrict other peoples freedom of speech.
If you’ve got different opinions, then debate with arguments. Currently all you have capabilities is just very low iq monkey business. But naturally that’s your choice how you want to play. Don’t expect me to give you any credits for that.
A broken clock is right twice a day, though. Being required by law to present real-life ID to use things online has been seriously proposed and is likely to be attached to must-pass legislation.
This statement reads like “I’m angry people don’t want me using botnets to push my agenda.”
Biometrics? Comcast didn’t even ask me for a drivers license. They asked me for a credit card to make a payment.
Also, frankly, last I checked, Pew Research is pretty much unrivaled in social science polling data, so not sure why you’re calling it “fake.”
I don’t know how things function in the US, but here in Europe it’s already pretty much a standard that average joes has totally the opposite opinion what media claims to be the result.
And when multiple other polls with multiple time more responders shows the opposite result, media is always silent.
Our politicians started to push biometrics / strong identificitation last year or this for every people who connects to internet. That’s just step closer to that “you have no pricacy” conspiracy theory created by conpiracy theorist politicians.
That’s unfortunate to hear, and I am not here to diminish your lived experience, but I can tell you that they’re not pushing for biometric ID in the US to log on to the internet, and this poll is from a well-respected, well-known to be unbiased research group in the US who does polling data for US households and US issues and has for decades.
So in respect to this thread, your feelings on that have next to nothing to do with this discussion.
Well, that’s good to hear then. Hopefully it stays on that track. EU and US is banning encrypted messaging currently at the same time though. And India already illegalized them, but Indian people says that so far it hasn’t affected anybody by any means.
What worries me is who defines what the truth is? Reality itself became political decades ago, probably starting with the existence of global warming and now such basic foundational facts as who won an election. If the government can punish “falsehood”, what do you do if the GOP is in charge and they determine that “Biden won 2020” is such a falsehood?
I have no problem with Twitter moderating content. The First Amendment says they can.
But the government moderating it–the First Amendment says they can’t.
It’s all fun and games till well intentioned laws get abused by a new administration. Be careful what you wish for. My personal take is that any organization that is even reasonably similar to a news site must conform to fairness in reporting standards much like broadcast TV once had. If you don’t, but an argument could be made that you present as a new site, you just slap a sizeable banner on every page that you are an entertainment site. Drawing distinctions on what is news and what is entertainment would theoretically work better than an outright ban of misleading content.
At the end of the day it won’t matter what is written unless the regulations have actual teeth. “Fines” mean so little given the billion dollar backers could care less and retractions are too little too late. I want these wannabe Nazi “News Infotainment” people to go to jail for their speech that causes harm to people and the nation. Destroying democracy should be painful for the agitators.
Eh, people are trying to do this already by claiming that queer content in real life and on the Internet are “grooming” kids. We can push back against mis-application of laws without saying the laws themselves shouldn’t exist.
What a slippery slippery slope….
Slippery slope to what? We have those restrictions for news already. Only reason you still see Fox and such lie on the air and get away with it is they’re classified as entertainment instead of news. Freedom of speech and press are still in tact.
Edit: I wasn’t referring to the Tucker Carlson case, but I did learn that’s not true anyway. Nobody accredits news channels in the first place, and as it turns out, the FCC doesn’t even have any authority over cable.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
The power to censor inherently includes the ability to silence its own opposition. Centralizing this power is therefore dangerous, as it is neigh impossible to regulate.
Currently, we can choose our forums - beehaw does a good job, /pol/ silences all but one worldview, and therefore I am here and not there. What happens when that choice is taken away, and one “truth” is applied universally, with no course for opposition?
Perhaps you believe you hold the correct opinions, and will not be affected. Only those who disagree with you will be silenced. Or perhaps you change your opinions to whatever you are told is correct, and therefore you do hold the correct opinions, though only by definition.
Consider that 50% of the country disagrees with you politically. If you follow a third party, it’s 98%. A forced shared truth is only “good” if it goes your way - but the odds of that are so incredibly small, and it gets much smaller when you consider infighting within the parties.
I don’t understand how these questions are germane. We can and have already decided some speech is wrong to spread online and should lead to both deletion and arrest – specifically child porn and terrorism. We can and have successfully defined what those are. What’s wrong with adding misinformation and hate speech to this list? Do you really believe we’d have trouble defining those?
I feel like you’re not exactly talking about the same thing. What you are afraid of is for the government to have the ability to filter out what they see as “false” information, which I also find a horrible idea. A government with this power would be able to change the information flow to whatever works best for them.
But a government can in my mind make specific rules about certain stuff that we as a society agree upon to not say (just as other laws are things we as a society agree to not do). I know that there are lots of wrong laws that need fixing, but the idea of a law in and of itself is quite sound in my opinion. And therefore I also have no problem with the specific law: people shouldn’t advocate for violence against others because of their sexual orientation.
This is not a slippery slope as every one of these laws on speech would be independently created, and opposed if society does not accept them.This is just like how all other laws are constantly in flux, but pushed towards a moral alignment with the people (e.g. allowing LGBTQ+ marriage). The outrage and possible revolution when these laws go opposite ways is what causes them in the end to align further.
These are all my opinions and views, based on my own experiences and ideas. Feel fee to disagree or correct me!
This is an excellent way of looking at it, that is very different from my initial understanding.
This changes the concern profile entirely, from “who decides what is false” (big concern) to “how do we define advocating, how do we define violence, etc” - which are valid concerns, but apply to just about every law.
Off topic, the cyber security world has been wrestling with “unauthorized access” - is there implicit authorization when a device is attached to the internet? Nobody authorized me to use google - are web requests access? Is bypassing authentication access? It’s a mess.
you’re making an argument for absolutist freedom of speech here, because if you believe nobody can responsibly wield this power the obvious answer is nobody should—but you yourself literally admit by choice that you don’t use absolutist freedom of speech places like /pol/ because of how they are and what they invariably turn into in the absence of censors. does that not tell you something about how self-defeating this position is
No single body can wield this power, and therefore multiple should.
/pol/ self-censors through slides and sages, and even maintains at least some level of toxicity just to dissuade outsiders from browsing or posting - you could call it preventative censorship.
Fortunately, we don’t have to go there. We have the choice to coexist on Beehaw instead.
Even on reddit, different subs could have different moderation policies, and so if you didn’t like ex. Cyberpunk, you could go to lowsodium_cyberpunk.
Freedom to choose communities allows multiple diverse communities to form, and I think that’s the key - that there are many communities.
When the scope of truth arbitration moves from lemmy instances to the us gov, the only alternative choice for any who disagree would be to go to another country.
The beauty of the internet is that there are no countries. Any website could be anywhere - there are hundreds of thousands of choices, from twitter hashtags to irc rooms.
I do not want one hegemony of information. I do not want 5, or one for each nato member. I want as many as possible, so I may find one (or more!) that I like.
then you already exist in that world and for most countries a far more punitive model works better than the US’s, so…
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
Iraq has exceptional consistency in thought leadership. There are no drug addicts in Singapore.
Moxie marlinspike has an excellent blog post on “perfect enforcement” - if the law were applied perfectly, we would not have the lgbtq marriage rights we have today. If America had perfect consistency of thought, we would all be protestant catholic.
Consistency is not a world I strive for, and therefore, to return to the start of this thread, I do not believe the us gov should apply censorship to our communications, and I do believe that doing so would be a slippery slope, precisely and purely because censorship may prevent its own regulation.
i mean yeah i very much am fine with the government saying “you can’t say this” because i’m not a free speech absolutist and there are inarguable harms caused by certain forms of content being allowed to fester online. i’d personally quite like it if my country didn’t make it legal to explicitly call for, plan for, and encourage people to exterminate all queer people—and i’d quite like it if corporations took that line as well. many countries have a line of this sort with no such problems, even though it is explicitly more punitive than the US model of “say whatever you want”.
Whether someone likes the outcomes of absolutist speech doesn’t necessarily correspond with whether they support it.
i mean, if you don’t like the outcomes of absolutist speech but still support it anyways i can really only conclude your position isn’t a rational one and, indeed, the subsequent conversation here has sort of borne that out to me
First off, 50% of the country believes things that actually have no evidence other than people they like saying it. It’s not about different truths, it’s about truth and fiction. All you need to do is try and verify claims from first or second hand sources, and that becomes painfully obvious, but people refuse to accept that or be open to it.
Second, nobody is asking to have a partisan arbiter of truth. The supreme court was once non partisan, and they’re an arbiter of justice. Even conservatives who are actually capable of researching and following truths come to the same conclusions as the left when it comes to facts. Here’s an easy one: Conservatives all over the country claim there was evidence of election fraud. Okay, it’s been years, where is the evidence? No where, they didn’t even fabricate evidence, they literally didn’t submit anything. Any rational person, regardless of their political views, would agree that there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. Trump is going to trial for espionage. Where is the evidence? You can literally listen to some of it on the internet, there are photos, a large investigation with multiple people on both sides of the aisle took place, there were raids and testimony. But there are still people claiming it’s a witch hunt and there’s no evidence.
It’s not even censorship if they just mark things as not true. There’s really no reason doing something about it has to be equivalent to full scale authoritarian censorship, so you’re walling yourself off from actual solutions with a slippery slope argument that leaves us in the hands of disinformation campaigns, which are easily paid for by rich people and foreign governments.
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
The 50% of people who believe false things are going to vote for truth arbiters that we don’t like. Surely it will be amazing when the correct party is in control, but inevitably the wrong party will be in control sometimes too.
The issue is that bad truth arbitration is “sticky”. Once a bad actor is in control, they have the power to silence their own opposition.
In order for this to work, we must either make sure a bad actor never ends up at the wheel - which will eventually fail, or neuter the truth arbitration process to the point of inefficacy.
The risks here are probable and tangible. We may have the techniques to do it eventually, but I don’t think we have them right now.
Thing is, the risks of doing nothing have definite consequences that we’ve already been watching. Should we do nothing and let democracy burn in fear that doing something will be abused in the future?
…no? the Supreme Court has always been a politically partisan entity. it quite literally has its most basic power (judicial review) because it usurped that power for itself as part of the political dispute at the heart of Marbury v. Madison. there is fairly compelling evidence that Chief Justice Marshall was seeking a means to enshrine judicial review into law irrespective of its constitutional validity and was not really deciding the case on merits. if the body was ever “non-partisan” then the word is meaningless.
If you’re referencing the Tucker Carlson defamation suit, that’s not a correct reading of the decision.
I wasn’t referencing that actually, but turns out it’s not true anyway. Edited my comment
Ok got it. I assumed you were, but did figure there was a small chance you were referencing something else which is why I phrased my comment the way I did. Thanks for clarifying!
Thanks for existing!
Admin spreading misinformation?
Are they an admin? The account seems to be registered on another instance. But in any event what they said is a super common misconception about the case. I guess you could make an argument that it’s spreading misinformation, but only if you’re being very literal and ignoring what most people think of when they hear “spreading misinformation”.
I wasn’t referring to the case, but turns out I’m wrong anyway. Edited my original comment
Not an admin
there’s also the detail that most countries do not have unabridged freedom of speech and, shockingly, are actually quite fine for not having it, so…
Neo-Nazi parties are getting ready to take over half of Europe and all of North America as we speak. No, they are not fine. They are very, very far from fine.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
this might be the most obvious non-sequitur i’ve ever seen—laws like “don’t advocate for a second Holocaust” or “don’t spread COVID misinformation” have literally no relation or causation to what far-right authoritarians believe or will do if they take power. the idea that this is what will empower them to smother democracy is on its face completely absurdist.
If they take over it doesn’t matter what laws we have. Currently the republican frontrunner plans to expand the power of the president, and previously he packed the court with garbage. That’s how they win, not by the government or companies working to fight misinformation.
Right, and it sounds like people want more restrictions. So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate, so if people are already on board then I imagine we’ll get more restrictive speech legislation.
…what? American freedom of speech has, if anything, gotten less restrictive over time and it never was restrictive to begin with. you quite literally have to go out of your way to utter something which isn’t protected speech at this point (and the First Amendment has never covered private corporations so nobody is losing a “right” when Twitter tells you that you can’t wish for a second Holocaust)
Thanks, yeah, I definitely am the kind of person to wish for a second holocaust. /thread
i think context makes it pretty obvious this is a generalized you (i quite literally say “nobody”, which is an indefinite and plural pronoun), so i’m not sure why you’re taking offense to this as if i’m saying you personally want a second Holocaust. if i thought you wanted that, as an admin i’d just say it to your face and ban you since you wouldn’t be a good fit for here
France here we come!
“we’re losing rights” or some people you don’t like are gaining safety? No rights are lost by combatting disinformation. It’s not like someone is just going to go out with a banhammer and say “I disagree so that’s disinformation, you’re banned”
Most Americans agree that false information should be moderated, but they disagree wildly on what’s false or not.