Think some of the concerns are pretty legitimate. Social Media has been used to coordinate mob violence in multiple Asian countries. How people use social media in different countries is very different.
Language has also been used to coordinate mob violence. So have arms and legs. Public roads have helped in the coordination of violence and human trafficking, and it's time to take roads seriously.
I think what you are saying is true for the US, but if you travel, don't make the mistake of thinking our laws follow you everywhere. Whenever I am in different nations, especially the nations I know have strict laws, such as Cuba, I always leave the idea of the Constitution at the customs desk. You're under their laws. What is legal or illegal, is whatever they say is legal or illegal.
So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death.
I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
> So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death.
>I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
Absolutely. Being caught in the Dubai airport while connecting with drugs. You'll be faced with the consequences of the drug laws of the UAE without being techincally in the country. (Also you can be detained there for violating the laws of the UAE while connecting as well)
Also in Thailand, never step on the currency because it's a disrespect to the king (who is on their money).
Other countries act very differently. It's amazing when people go elsewhere and think "well it's legal back at home" (also the opposite is dumbfounding.. South Korea tries to punish people who smoke weed in canada if the people come back after smoking)
Is it your belief that there has never been any good public policy other than laws criminalizing violence that have ever had any positive effects on how much violence occurs?
I think that there are all sorts of measures you could take to minimize or maximize a single variable. If you want to minimize violence, you could install cameras in every room. Unverifiable rape claims would virtually disappear. Unresolved murders, too. GPS trackers on everyone? Same thing, and we already basically do that one.
If your imagination can't provide you with dangerous scenarios arising from the state controlling what is true, history and fiction would be glad to assist you.
Ah yes, bad, awful, terrible policies to reduce violence abound.
But do you believe there have never been any good public policies balancing public safety against other rights, that you agree with? For example, there are legal restrictions on how much people who work on our nuclear weapons can say about them. This is clearly a restriction of their fundamental human right to freedom of speech. Is it worth it?
Has that actually happened in Singapore though? I usually read about those kinds of incidents in rural communities which are recently and rapidly becoming internet connected. Not in densely populated and highly educated city-states which have been highly connected for decades.
Also this makes it sound like Singapore is less worried about mobs and more about cultural values
> K. Shanmugam, the law minister, warned lawmakers of the dangers of unregulated speech, handing them a list of “offensive song lyrics”, which included hits by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
Densely populated cities filled with mostly educated people are perfectly capable of riots driven by ethnic tensions and dubious claims, but Singapore's last race riot was in 1969[1]. Singapore had legitimate concerns about racial tensions in the 1970s and some of its more illiberal policies were arguably practical responses to those situations, but that was a long time ago when Singaporean society was very different, and this draft policy's clauses about making it illegal to publish material that "might diminish public confidence in a state body" seems to have other priorities.
[1]There was another riot involving Indian construction workers in 2013, but that was a spontaneous [massive over]reaction to a bus driver running someone over, not something planned or stirred up beforehand. And that's every riot in Singapore since 1969...
I suppose that mentioning Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande is just a ploy to enlist trad-con support for the bill. The real reason is that government power very much depends on controlling the official narrative while making sure that alternative ones do not gain much traction. This was so much easier to do when information was primarily distributed through centralized media, such as newspapers, radio, and television. Governments simply had much more power back then. The internet has eroded it. So, either they give up some of that excess power, or else they somehow manage to centralize the internet. The societal control that we inherited from the past is no longer compatible with decentralized distribution of information on the internet. The very fact that we are interactively discussing this topic today, instead of merely swallowing what is supposedly best for us, demonstrates the point actually quite nicely.
Critics of the current bill fear that the executive (which, like in other Commonwealth nations, is formed out of the dominant party in the legislature) would use their new powers on any media which refuses to follow the government's narrative.
That's a pretty broad generalisation over a lot of countries that constitute Asia. Japan and Korea for example are consistently ranked above many west european countries in terms of freedom [1]. And many asian countries are at about the middle in these rankings.
Japan and Korea being highly developed nations with with capital punishment, unlike the developed nations of Europe, seems to support his point. Those were your counter-examples, probably because next to Singapore they look moderate, but they're not even good counter-examples.
I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant, but the US also has capital punishment, in spite of being "developed" and ranking high on the index. And the number of people actually being executed in the US is much higher than Japan or Korea.
Everyone here knows America has the death penalty. That's probably a big part of why you compared Japan to "western european countries" rather than America. Saying that a country has saner law and order than America is considered damning with faint praise.
To reiterate: America executes more people than Japan, but in Japan execution is far more popular than in America. In America, capital punishment is very controversial, but in Japan it enjoys broad public support.
To the original point, per wikipedia:
>"Of the countries/regions categorized as 'very high' on the Human Development Index, 10 countries perform capital punishment: the United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan"
Of those, one is in North America, one in Eastern Europe, five in the Middle East, and three in Asia. It strains credibility to suggest that Asia, moreso than Western Europe, is known for a progressive justice system.
> "I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant"
Because the matter being discussed is "most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance."
Exactly. About 2 years ago Etsy started banning everyone that was selling crystals and also included "promotes good health or luck" And while that's probably fine to do from a trades perspective, I don't like the notion that we had to start leaning this way. If we keep leaning over at what point are we going to make it illegal to believe in UFOs (as in aliens) and ghosts.
There's no scientific evidence to make those concepts not possible. Just evidence to make things we understand possible.
And on top of that, we have some kind of fucked up exception for God. Even scientists are just unwilling to go on a rant to disprove god, but totally happy putting someone in the psych ward for believing in aliens kidnapping them.
(im not talking about ALL scientists - of course you'll find them, but talking about bulk percentages here)
I think a line needs to be drawn. Those are sort of wacko ideas hard to disprove, but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.
That would be the courts. Since libel/slander/defamation is already against the law. It's rather different from being misinformed and retracting the content and doubling down on lying because it's politically expedient. At least it was before this Presidency in the United States. I'm not sure how a purveyor of conspiracy theories being the ultimate enforcer of the law changes that, if at all.
>> but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.
> Why does saying that Hillary Clinton is guilty of something need to stop?
That's a too-literal reading of the comment. The implication was clearly that what needs to stop is lies that claim Hillary Clinton is guilty of something she's not.
I don't think that needs to stop. Each person is responsible for evaluating the information presented to them and deciding what to believe or not. It is nobody's responsibility to compensate for gullibility, or simply lack of critical thinking, by restricting what information reaches people in the first place. That is called censorship.
This is the harder than you think. You might make it illegal to say "Hillary Clinton is guilty of <something>" - it actually is - it's a civil matter and Clinton can sue you for defamation. But, if you make it an opinion or a conjecture by adding enough hyperbole, you'll get away with it. That's not easy to ban. Any attempt to do so infringes on basic rights. It very soon becomes thought police.
The only sane solution to this is to educate the masses, give them the tools to may be verify facts ...etc.
(I'm in favor of banning organized news manufacturing. But I fully acknowledge that it's not practical and leaves a lot of room for bias. If President Trump gets that power, there's nothing stopping him from banning CNN entirely and I'm pretty convinced that he would.)
It's now coming out that Hillary and Obama were up to some serious shenanigans at the very least. In fact your post is a great example of the dangers of this kind of legislation and how easy it is to get wrong. Even Trump doesn't want to go that far and he's the world's biggest victim of fake news.
I agree that the spread of particularly vicious lies is a problem, but that doesn't mean the answer is for a government entity to draw the line.
Maybe the solution to the problem is pressuring Facebook and Google. Maybe the solution is changing tech culture. Maybe the solution is more aggressively demoting fake news and promoting debunking of fake news. Even if you want a governmental component, maybe we should only go so far as a law requiring advertising networks to make it easier/possible for an advertiser to blacklist who gets their money (I know people who have tried, failed, and ultimately gave up on trying to prevent their ads from showing up on Breitbart).
It's only a matter of time before flat earth becomes illegal too. Flat earth has been around for as long as the internet, but in the past year or so the amount of unbridled anger it causes has been increasing disturbing. The "righteous anger at people being wrong on the internet" phenomena seems to be truly intoxicating; it needs to be reigned while we still can.
(And just so we're clear, the earth is round. It's a shame I have to state that, lest the rabid opponents of harmless flat earth nutters get the wrong idea, jump down my throat, and accuse me of all manner of outlandish offenses.)
So why can't we allow people to believe that, and like the market, let less people trust and support them, rather than actually make laws that might put them in jail?
I guess I wasn't clear. I am suggesting that people calm down and temper their anger against flat earthers. I don't believe that it should be illegal, nor to I believe it should make people angry. I think it's unhealthy to be angry about such things.
Do you remember that guy who made a hydrogen peroxide rocket, said that he was going to check if the earth was actually round? Got a lot of support from flat earthers? He also got a ton of vitriol from 'sensible' round earthers too. A LOT of vitriol. People hoping he would die. Why? Because an Evel Knievel wannabe would joke around with internet memes about the earth being flat to fund his stunt? That's cause to wish his death? It was deranged. After he pulled off his stunt, comment threads across the internet about it had people lamenting his survival. People earnestly wanted this man (whom they'd never met!) to die, simply because he said the earth was flat. Even if he were sincere in that belief, which is doubtful, that's not any reason to become angry with him.
If you're familiar with US history, we've had a long and storied history with snake oil salesmen selling incredibly dangerous or downright fake goods to people.
I don't think it's unfair for a site to not want to be associated with scam artists.
The problem that many people have with the bill, as it is, is that it gives the power to Singapore's government ministers to issue "correction" or "stop communication" directions, on the entirely arbitrary grounds of "public interest".
There is a definition of "public interest" in the bill, but it includes a section which contains broad terms like "… to prevent a diminution of public confidence in [the government and its bodies]". The courts have no power to determine whether the public interest need is legitimate.
Second, the bill is procedurally flawed. An entity issued with an order by the minister must comply immediately, or can be charged with non-compliance. If they wish to contest the order, they have to first appeal to the minister, which is not obliged to reply within a fixed period of time. It is only after a minister rejects their appeal that they are allowed to file a case in the High Court (which requires expensive legal representation, unlike the State Courts).
This allows a minister to effectively delay the appeal process indefinitely.
Furthermore, unlike defamation, the minister also has the power to require the given entity to publish a specifically-worded apology (at their own expense).
This is worse than mere censorship — it's giving the government the power to make people say things.
Finally, note that the Singapore government is claiming to have jurisdiction over all media, as long as it is communicated to an end user in Singapore. Content publishers and their intermediaries will also be affected by this law.
Interesting idea - are you more likely to be lied to in a) an authoritarian state with laws against fake news b) a democratic state with laws against fake news, or c) a democratic state without laws against fake news?
If the citizens or elected representatives in a democracy voted to start censoring speech, but continued to empower citizens to vote, it would still be a democratic state in spite of the censorship. An illiberal one, but still democratic.
Your idea is valid in a static, nothing-ever-changes world, with no significant political dynamics to speak of. However, out in the world as we know it, political processes run all the time, the proverbial pendulum swings, and consensus is formed via vocal advocacy and protests.
Right now we have four basic things defined as "political speech": person-to-person conversations; mass communication (press, TV, radio, online videos); peaceful physical actions like assembly and manifestations; and finally donations to candidates, parties and PACs. We protect each and every recognized form of "political speech" exactly because without it the important changes could not happen.
In a world with limited communication, you'd have on one side a small ruling clique, semi detached from daily concerns, a large mass of disenfranchised and zoned out people coasting along in the middle, and on the other side you'd have a small fraction of disenfranchised and either abused or outright persecuted people that can't even raise the wider society's awareness. This is an unstable state, leading to societal collapse in one way or another.
Let people speak effectively, lest they could not protest problems or oppression. Let people speak effectively, lest the wider society couldn't even learn of the problems faced by sub-groups. Being heard is the first, necessary step to having wants and grievances addressed.
I'd like to point out that the incumbent party of the Singapore government has been in power since 1959.
It has 93% of the seats in our legislature, while only having 69% of the popular vote (it was 60% in 2011, but Lee Kuan Yew's death and Singapore's 50th anniversary probably helped boost it a bit).
They have no incentive to improve on the voting system, nor do many people in the electorate care. The government gives out annual cash bonuses of approximately $300 [1] to the majority of the population, which seems to appease them a bit.
Edit: I initially said 1965, but it was actually 1959. [2]
To be clear, I strongly support free speech rights for many reasons, one of which is that I agree with you that they make democracy and society stronger.
But you're being reductive. Countries around the world suppress speech to varying degrees without collapsing or becoming autocracies in a single election cycle. Many European countries have notably less freedom of speech in specific areas than the US but are even still widely considered liberal democracies (praising Nazism is illegal in Germany; UK defamation laws impose some of the highest burden of proof on the defendant in the Western world).
The Yellow Vests in France may disagree - for several weeks they were protesting in large numbers, every weekend, and yet their wants and needs haven't really registered in popular awareness. Why is that?
My point hinges on ability to raise awareness of issues, to break into public consciousness with grievances. That's different from espousing a particular political ideology. That doesn't even technically require a liberal democracy, but specifically requires having proper channels for being heard out, and conduct society-wide negotiations. The political facet of freedom of speech.
We here in Europe aren't in need of propagating authoritarian ideologies; that would not help in the least. However there's a growing need to be able to discuss and form consensus on issues of immigration, taxation, and growing worries over the retirement pension systems in the face of shrinking populations. The subjects effectively became tabu in recent years, up to the point of having developed a wide array of euphemisms. There's growing frustration over them.
Right now the subject of immigration is mostly discussed by far right and far left parties and movements. This causes people interested in the subject to drift towards extremes. It should instead be up for discussion - and negotiations - on the political mainstream. The subject by and of itself is orthogonal to political ideology. Suffices to point out that the major political factions, both in USA and in Europe, have repeatedly shifted back and forth on the subject over the recent decades.
I'm really not sure what point you're making. Are you saying:
• it was inaccurate of me to characterize the UK, Germany, and France as being liberal democracies according to the consensus definition of the term?
• the consensus definition of the term is wrong or bad, and the term should have a different definition that France, or Germany, or the UK wouldn't satisfy?
• something else entirely?
P.S. I also am not sure what it means for the Yellow Vests' wants and needs to have not "really registered". Didn't Macron rapidly rescind the gas tax that initially sparked their anger, and then make a bunch more policy concessions besides?
People tend to think "democracy" = "freedom". But a state can have a massive slave population, and still be a "democracy" as long as a group of citizens vote.
But in order to be a democracy, do you not need the ability for everyone to freely express their political positions as to win over more political allies? If one party controlled all speech then voted that the opposition no longer had any free speech...they would control the entire national conversation. Hardly democratic. North Korea labels itself a "democracy" and holds elections, but no sane person actually believes that claim. The act of voting itself is only one piece of democracy.
To be clear, I strongly support free speech rights for many reasons, one of which is that I agree with you that they make for a better democracy and better society.
But you're being reductive. Of course the act of voting itself is meaningless if state doesn't vest power in it, but countries around the world suppress speech to varying degrees yet are stable, not in any immediate danger of turning into North Korea, and vest enough legitimacy in their elections as to be widely considered democracies, if illiberal ones. Many European countries have notably less freedom of speech in specific areas than the US but are even still widely considered liberal democracies (praising Nazism is illegal in Germany; UK defamation laws impose some of the highest burden of proof on the defendant in the Western world).
To be honest, you are likely to be lied to in any of those nations. And none are any more likely than the others to put forward the truth. (Or, "facts" if you prefer.)
So you can't really judge these different nations based on whether government officials lie to you. They all will, let's just put that on the table and accept it. So you need to judge them based on other things. What other freedoms do you enjoy? How many other freedoms? What is the economic upside? (Lots of freedom with no economic opportunity gets old very fast, just ask the average Kenyan.) etc etc etc.
But, yeah, access to 100% of the facts and truth is not something that most of the world's residents will ever have access to unfortunately.
One thing has been increasingly clear over the last few years: a lot of people are basically OK giving large governments more power and relinquishing what I think of as basic rights.
Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power.
Not sure how to keep rights, honestly. The Constitution and the courts help, but only for so long.
The only thing I can think of is that it could work in a poorer country (or at least relatively poorer) because people would self-select to be there for the freedom, and people who don't care bout freedom would follow money somewhere else.
> Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power.
I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government.
If you care about your rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.
It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem.
Governments can solve problems, but we should limit their tools such that our rights are respected.
If you ask me, a lot of our problems trace back to a lack of identity and culture. When you don't know who you are, you signal that you're part of a group by upvoting lies. When you don't know what our country is about (freedom), you just try to get whatever comforts a politician is promising you. When you don't have philosphical grounding for life, you are easily manipulated.
> It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem.
It's also not wise to let a problem fester because you're too unwilling to take any action against it (or all the actions you're willing to take are ineffective half-measures).
In this case, I think the best solutions are quite a bit more radical than many powerful people (and their followers) are willing to contemplate, so you get bad ideas like this one because they are the solutions that group least opposes. But I don't think that means the advocates of the idea "just don't care about rights."
> You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate?
"Lying online" is your characterization, not mine. Fake news isn't merely "lying online."
And the solution I was advocating was pretty radical: a massive breakup of the tech platforms and social networks that make widespread fake news dissemination much more practical than it ever was.
When you said "radical" I thought you were going to suggest re-education camps or something.
So if you aren't going to criminalize lying, what exactly are we arguing about? I am saying we shouldn't trade away rights -- are you saying that we should trade away rights? If so, which ones?
without removing the basic freedom of speech, here is a law that'll curb it.
When posting on Social Media, you must use
a) Verified Name with a Verified Pic
or
b) Reusable anonymous ID like anonymous-323876 (Generic face profile for all anonymous users).
or
c) Fully Anonymous like anonymous with a common,generic face profile
Sites can only use PII for verification, but must discard everything related to user and cannot tie PII UserID to any logs
What leads you to believe the people spreading fake news on WhatsApp and Facebook, leading to death and violence, aren't already real people using their real names?
In articles like https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... there's no mention of anonymous, fake, or untraceable accounts, just real people being outraged and sharing misleading, sensationalized, or outright fake news, ultimately leading to tragedy.
Not to mention, your proposal is barely different from what Facebook already does.
62 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadViolence is illegal, not the potential pathways.
So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death.
I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
>I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
Absolutely. Being caught in the Dubai airport while connecting with drugs. You'll be faced with the consequences of the drug laws of the UAE without being techincally in the country. (Also you can be detained there for violating the laws of the UAE while connecting as well)
Also in Thailand, never step on the currency because it's a disrespect to the king (who is on their money).
Other countries act very differently. It's amazing when people go elsewhere and think "well it's legal back at home" (also the opposite is dumbfounding.. South Korea tries to punish people who smoke weed in canada if the people come back after smoking)
Finally someone with sense on hacker news!
If your imagination can't provide you with dangerous scenarios arising from the state controlling what is true, history and fiction would be glad to assist you.
But do you believe there have never been any good public policies balancing public safety against other rights, that you agree with? For example, there are legal restrictions on how much people who work on our nuclear weapons can say about them. This is clearly a restriction of their fundamental human right to freedom of speech. Is it worth it?
Also this makes it sound like Singapore is less worried about mobs and more about cultural values
> K. Shanmugam, the law minister, warned lawmakers of the dangers of unregulated speech, handing them a list of “offensive song lyrics”, which included hits by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
[1]There was another riot involving Indian construction workers in 2013, but that was a spontaneous [massive over]reaction to a bus driver running someone over, not something planned or stirred up beforehand. And that's every riot in Singapore since 1969...
Singapore is more worried about publications which undermine confidence in the government.
A few months ago, a website was blocked for alleging that the government ministers were threatening war against Malaysia over a border dispute: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/singapore-herald-webs...
Critics of the current bill fear that the executive (which, like in other Commonwealth nations, is formed out of the dominant party in the legislature) would use their new powers on any media which refuses to follow the government's narrative.
[1] https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new
In 2014, 80% of adults in Japan supported capital punishment, making it far more popular in Japan than it is even in America: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_pun...
To reiterate: America executes more people than Japan, but in Japan execution is far more popular than in America. In America, capital punishment is very controversial, but in Japan it enjoys broad public support.
To the original point, per wikipedia:
>"Of the countries/regions categorized as 'very high' on the Human Development Index, 10 countries perform capital punishment: the United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan"
Of those, one is in North America, one in Eastern Europe, five in the Middle East, and three in Asia. It strains credibility to suggest that Asia, moreso than Western Europe, is known for a progressive justice system.
> "I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant"
Because the matter being discussed is "most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/world/asia/cannabis-canad...
There's no scientific evidence to make those concepts not possible. Just evidence to make things we understand possible.
And on top of that, we have some kind of fucked up exception for God. Even scientists are just unwilling to go on a rant to disprove god, but totally happy putting someone in the psych ward for believing in aliens kidnapping them.
(im not talking about ALL scientists - of course you'll find them, but talking about bulk percentages here)
Thought police are coming.
> Why does saying that Hillary Clinton is guilty of something need to stop?
That's a too-literal reading of the comment. The implication was clearly that what needs to stop is lies that claim Hillary Clinton is guilty of something she's not.
The only sane solution to this is to educate the masses, give them the tools to may be verify facts ...etc.
(I'm in favor of banning organized news manufacturing. But I fully acknowledge that it's not practical and leaves a lot of room for bias. If President Trump gets that power, there's nothing stopping him from banning CNN entirely and I'm pretty convinced that he would.)
Maybe the solution to the problem is pressuring Facebook and Google. Maybe the solution is changing tech culture. Maybe the solution is more aggressively demoting fake news and promoting debunking of fake news. Even if you want a governmental component, maybe we should only go so far as a law requiring advertising networks to make it easier/possible for an advertiser to blacklist who gets their money (I know people who have tried, failed, and ultimately gave up on trying to prevent their ads from showing up on Breitbart).
(And just so we're clear, the earth is round. It's a shame I have to state that, lest the rabid opponents of harmless flat earth nutters get the wrong idea, jump down my throat, and accuse me of all manner of outlandish offenses.)
Do you remember that guy who made a hydrogen peroxide rocket, said that he was going to check if the earth was actually round? Got a lot of support from flat earthers? He also got a ton of vitriol from 'sensible' round earthers too. A LOT of vitriol. People hoping he would die. Why? Because an Evel Knievel wannabe would joke around with internet memes about the earth being flat to fund his stunt? That's cause to wish his death? It was deranged. After he pulled off his stunt, comment threads across the internet about it had people lamenting his survival. People earnestly wanted this man (whom they'd never met!) to die, simply because he said the earth was flat. Even if he were sincere in that belief, which is doubtful, that's not any reason to become angry with him.
I don't think it's unfair for a site to not want to be associated with scam artists.
Singaporean here. This is the bill that was proposed in Singapore's parliament on 1 April (PDF): https://www.parliament.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-do...
The problem that many people have with the bill, as it is, is that it gives the power to Singapore's government ministers to issue "correction" or "stop communication" directions, on the entirely arbitrary grounds of "public interest".
There is a definition of "public interest" in the bill, but it includes a section which contains broad terms like "… to prevent a diminution of public confidence in [the government and its bodies]". The courts have no power to determine whether the public interest need is legitimate.
Second, the bill is procedurally flawed. An entity issued with an order by the minister must comply immediately, or can be charged with non-compliance. If they wish to contest the order, they have to first appeal to the minister, which is not obliged to reply within a fixed period of time. It is only after a minister rejects their appeal that they are allowed to file a case in the High Court (which requires expensive legal representation, unlike the State Courts).
This allows a minister to effectively delay the appeal process indefinitely.
Furthermore, unlike defamation, the minister also has the power to require the given entity to publish a specifically-worded apology (at their own expense).
This is worse than mere censorship — it's giving the government the power to make people say things.
Finally, note that the Singapore government is claiming to have jurisdiction over all media, as long as it is communicated to an end user in Singapore. Content publishers and their intermediaries will also be affected by this law.
If the citizens or elected representatives in a democracy voted to start censoring speech, but continued to empower citizens to vote, it would still be a democratic state in spite of the censorship. An illiberal one, but still democratic.
Only through the first election cycle [1].
Your idea is valid in a static, nothing-ever-changes world, with no significant political dynamics to speak of. However, out in the world as we know it, political processes run all the time, the proverbial pendulum swings, and consensus is formed via vocal advocacy and protests.
Right now we have four basic things defined as "political speech": person-to-person conversations; mass communication (press, TV, radio, online videos); peaceful physical actions like assembly and manifestations; and finally donations to candidates, parties and PACs. We protect each and every recognized form of "political speech" exactly because without it the important changes could not happen.
In a world with limited communication, you'd have on one side a small ruling clique, semi detached from daily concerns, a large mass of disenfranchised and zoned out people coasting along in the middle, and on the other side you'd have a small fraction of disenfranchised and either abused or outright persecuted people that can't even raise the wider society's awareness. This is an unstable state, leading to societal collapse in one way or another.
Let people speak effectively, lest they could not protest problems or oppression. Let people speak effectively, lest the wider society couldn't even learn of the problems faced by sub-groups. Being heard is the first, necessary step to having wants and grievances addressed.
--
[1] tiptoeing around Godwin's law
> Only through the first election cycle.
I'd like to point out that the incumbent party of the Singapore government has been in power since 1959.
It has 93% of the seats in our legislature, while only having 69% of the popular vote (it was 60% in 2011, but Lee Kuan Yew's death and Singapore's 50th anniversary probably helped boost it a bit).
They have no incentive to improve on the voting system, nor do many people in the electorate care. The government gives out annual cash bonuses of approximately $300 [1] to the majority of the population, which seems to appease them a bit.
Edit: I initially said 1965, but it was actually 1959. [2]
[1] https://www.gstvoucher.gov.sg/Pages/Cash.aspx
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Action_Party
But you're being reductive. Countries around the world suppress speech to varying degrees without collapsing or becoming autocracies in a single election cycle. Many European countries have notably less freedom of speech in specific areas than the US but are even still widely considered liberal democracies (praising Nazism is illegal in Germany; UK defamation laws impose some of the highest burden of proof on the defendant in the Western world).
The Yellow Vests in France may disagree - for several weeks they were protesting in large numbers, every weekend, and yet their wants and needs haven't really registered in popular awareness. Why is that?
My point hinges on ability to raise awareness of issues, to break into public consciousness with grievances. That's different from espousing a particular political ideology. That doesn't even technically require a liberal democracy, but specifically requires having proper channels for being heard out, and conduct society-wide negotiations. The political facet of freedom of speech.
We here in Europe aren't in need of propagating authoritarian ideologies; that would not help in the least. However there's a growing need to be able to discuss and form consensus on issues of immigration, taxation, and growing worries over the retirement pension systems in the face of shrinking populations. The subjects effectively became tabu in recent years, up to the point of having developed a wide array of euphemisms. There's growing frustration over them.
Right now the subject of immigration is mostly discussed by far right and far left parties and movements. This causes people interested in the subject to drift towards extremes. It should instead be up for discussion - and negotiations - on the political mainstream. The subject by and of itself is orthogonal to political ideology. Suffices to point out that the major political factions, both in USA and in Europe, have repeatedly shifted back and forth on the subject over the recent decades.
• it was inaccurate of me to characterize the UK, Germany, and France as being liberal democracies according to the consensus definition of the term?
• the consensus definition of the term is wrong or bad, and the term should have a different definition that France, or Germany, or the UK wouldn't satisfy?
• something else entirely?
P.S. I also am not sure what it means for the Yellow Vests' wants and needs to have not "really registered". Didn't Macron rapidly rescind the gas tax that initially sparked their anger, and then make a bunch more policy concessions besides?
But you're being reductive. Of course the act of voting itself is meaningless if state doesn't vest power in it, but countries around the world suppress speech to varying degrees yet are stable, not in any immediate danger of turning into North Korea, and vest enough legitimacy in their elections as to be widely considered democracies, if illiberal ones. Many European countries have notably less freedom of speech in specific areas than the US but are even still widely considered liberal democracies (praising Nazism is illegal in Germany; UK defamation laws impose some of the highest burden of proof on the defendant in the Western world).
So you can't really judge these different nations based on whether government officials lie to you. They all will, let's just put that on the table and accept it. So you need to judge them based on other things. What other freedoms do you enjoy? How many other freedoms? What is the economic upside? (Lots of freedom with no economic opportunity gets old very fast, just ask the average Kenyan.) etc etc etc.
But, yeah, access to 100% of the facts and truth is not something that most of the world's residents will ever have access to unfortunately.
Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power.
Not sure how to keep rights, honestly. The Constitution and the courts help, but only for so long.
The only thing I can think of is that it could work in a poorer country (or at least relatively poorer) because people would self-select to be there for the freedom, and people who don't care bout freedom would follow money somewhere else.
On the other hand, for some reason democratic negotiations become harder with no parties willing to make trade-offs
I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government.
If you care about your rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.
Governments can solve problems, but we should limit their tools such that our rights are respected.
If you ask me, a lot of our problems trace back to a lack of identity and culture. When you don't know who you are, you signal that you're part of a group by upvoting lies. When you don't know what our country is about (freedom), you just try to get whatever comforts a politician is promising you. When you don't have philosphical grounding for life, you are easily manipulated.
It's also not wise to let a problem fester because you're too unwilling to take any action against it (or all the actions you're willing to take are ineffective half-measures).
In this case, I think the best solutions are quite a bit more radical than many powerful people (and their followers) are willing to contemplate, so you get bad ideas like this one because they are the solutions that group least opposes. But I don't think that means the advocates of the idea "just don't care about rights."
"Lying online" is your characterization, not mine. Fake news isn't merely "lying online."
And the solution I was advocating was pretty radical: a massive breakup of the tech platforms and social networks that make widespread fake news dissemination much more practical than it ever was.
So if you aren't going to criminalize lying, what exactly are we arguing about? I am saying we shouldn't trade away rights -- are you saying that we should trade away rights? If so, which ones?
without removing the basic freedom of speech, here is a law that'll curb it.
When posting on Social Media, you must use a) Verified Name with a Verified Pic or b) Reusable anonymous ID like anonymous-323876 (Generic face profile for all anonymous users). or c) Fully Anonymous like anonymous with a common,generic face profile
Sites can only use PII for verification, but must discard everything related to user and cannot tie PII UserID to any logs
In articles like https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... there's no mention of anonymous, fake, or untraceable accounts, just real people being outraged and sharing misleading, sensationalized, or outright fake news, ultimately leading to tragedy.
Not to mention, your proposal is barely different from what Facebook already does.