> On an entirely unrelated note, I'm starting a subreddit dedicated to telling people seatbelts and speed limits are a violation of their civil liberties, because apparently I can.
Yes, that's a point of view. Considering the sarcasm; I assume that the author will actually be advocating for society wide, extra legal penalties for known speeders; perhaps insisting on a public registry of those known to have had traffic citations, so those people can be denied services at restaurants etc...
These people aren't even really calling for censorship; they just want there to be no one that disagrees with them. Whatever their position is today.
>perhaps insisting on a public registry of those known to have had traffic citations, so those people can be denied services at restaurants etc...
Speeding isn't infectious. If you get a traffic ticket I don't magically start getting them if we sit next to each other at a restaurant. "These people" are tired of "my opinion is just as valid as your science", and I don't blame them.
completely agree! right now there's news headlines about how terrible the 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (locally relevant to me) was as a "superspreader" event, because people are getting positive PCR tests after the fact. however, there's been 0 covid deaths resulting from the 2021 Rally, while there was the usual single-digit (4 this time) traffic deaths. (when you take into account the sheer number of attendees and the sheer amount of drugs and alcohol consumed during the event, this is actually a shockingly low number!)
This is not true. Using the U.S. as an example, there have been over 70,000 COVID deaths since April (previous 5 months). Yearly auto accident deaths typically are between 30,000 and 40,000. COVID has killed twice as many people in less than half the time, even during a period of widely available vaccines.
The fallacy is that auto accidents are neither tremendously infectious nor adaptive.
Covid-19 is both.
Even with the relatively limited consequence of automobile accidents, societies collectively take numerous measures to reduce risks, from highway engineering, traffic laws, and safety equipment to requiring individuals to participate in specific practices --- wearing seatbelts, using child safety seats, and not driving whilst impaired, amongst them.
"These people are wrong, so they should be silenced" ... would you say that's a fair summation of your position?
Have you never been wrong? How did you correct your error? Was some form of communication involved? Wouldn't you like others to have that chance too, of correcting an error?
Has the "settled science" not been found to have nuances and complications that might be worthy of further discussion?
I personally have been saved from likely severe injury by seatbelts. I require passengers in my car to wear them, (absent real reason not to). I still don't think the government has any right to mandate their use nor fine people for failing to wear them. I cannot imagine what positive use would be served by attempting to silence debate on the issue. Negative results of such dogmatic approaches are well documented and often repeated.
>"These people are wrong, so they should be silenced" ... would you say that's a fair summation of your position?
These people are intentionally spreading lies to the detriment of society as a whole. Allowing the lies to spread increases their location in search results and starts giving people who are technically illiterate a misguided belief that because it's on a popular site or shows up high in a search ranking that somehow makes the lies more likely to be truth. I've seen it first hand via a friends younger sister who has gone off the deep end and points to "reddit wouldn't allow something like this if it weren't true" when providing such facts as: vaccines have mercury in them so that the government can control your mind through electromagnetism.
>Have you never been wrong? How did you correct your error? Was some form of communication involved? Wouldn't you like others to have that chance too, of correcting an error?
The people in question have had over a year to have their incorrect beliefs corrected and are still regurgitating provably false statements. It's well past the point of "they just didn't have access to the proper information".
>Has the "settled science" not been found to have nuances and complications that might be worthy of further discussion?
The people in question aren't talking nuance. The people in question are claiming viruses don't exist, that science has fabricated it all. What discussion are you planning on having with someone who denies basic reality? There's no nuance to "viruses exist".
>I personally have been saved from likely severe injury by seatbelts. I require passengers in my car to wear them, (absent real reason not to). I still don't think the government has any right to mandate their use nor fine people for failing to wear them. I cannot imagine what positive use would be served by attempting to silence debate on the issue. Negative results of such dogmatic approaches are well documented and often repeated.
"The government" isn't some faceless beast, it is made up of representatives that you and I elect. The majority of people felt that a seat belt law was appropriate, so we have one. If you don't like it, try to convince your fellow citizens to vote for people who are willing to get rid of it. Or if you have the financial means to do so, move to another country in which the majority of the population aligns closer with your belief system if this one doesn't.
As for not being able to imagine what positive results could come from silencing debate: there's no debate occurring. There's a subset of folks who refuse to believe subject matter experts and cast aside any scientific study as fake. You're trying to bring logic and reason to a table at which they aren't just unwanted, they are actively ignored.
> I assume that the author will actually be advocating for society wide, extra legal penalties for known speeders; perhaps insisting on a public registry of those known to have had traffic citations, so those people can be denied services at restaurants etc...
You're so close and yet so far.
There is a registry of traffic citations, too many and you can't drive. Too many and you are forced to take classes.
The reason the penalties don't apply to restaurants is because your reckless driving has nothing to do with restaurants, it doesn't affect others in restaurants. It does affect others on public roads which is where the restrictions are placed.
Conversely, I don't expect anti-vaxxers to be denied driving licenses because their driving doesn't affect me. Their behavior does affect me in a restaurant because of an insanely contagious disease and one would imagine restrictions ought to be applied there instead.
Vaccination is a great thing, but vaccinated people can also spread the virus to you. Small children aren't eligible for vaccination so should they be banned from restaurants?
At this point the Delta variant is so contagious that all of us will probably get infected eventually no matter what precautions we take.
In many localities, even in the USA, it's been illegal to be outside of your home unless going to or from approved activities. That includes going for a scenic drive in your own car with no actual destination (cruising).
At some point personal responsibility has to come into play, right? I certainly don't want everything curated for me by someone else before it hits my senses.
I believe this is a shift in mentality that has occurred ever since smartphones and social media became ubiquitous. before that, in the early-to-mid 00s and earlier, it was assumed that the Web would contain tons of disinformation—possibly moreso than actual information—because anyone could make a website and put whatever they wanted on it, and this was well-understood and acknowledged by basically everyone who used the Web at this time. then smartphones happened and suddenly everyone was on the Web, and social media happened, shunting all these new Web users into walled-garden information silos. thus, it makes sense that these people who mostly began using the Web in earnest in this social media age would expect, nay demand ultra-locked-down content-controlled ideological safe spaces. of course, then, these massive social media corporations are more than happy to acquiesce to these implicit demands, because they can then tout their ultra-locked-down ideological echo-chambers as being a feature of their service compared to the others—don't worry, you won't see anything untoward here, on our service!
this cultural shift in attitude toward the Web was probably inevitable and we probably won't ever go back to the way things were before, which is unfortunate, but here we are.
Maturation to adulthood of Millennials and GenZ. Generations who were helicoptered and snowplowed out of knowledge of "how the real world works" especially in terms of how messy and uncontrolled it is. If you are used to authority figures micromanaging your life, you will come to expect that as an adult. You will also be deemed insufferable to everyone else who understands reality.
Scale matters. The early Internet was elitist and small. It had a fairly strong influence on those it reached but that was a small group. Influential, to a degree.
And even in the very earliest days there was both resistance and propaganda online. One of the earliest books I have addressing this is John S. Waterman's The Matrix, published in 1990, about the then-extant "conferencing systems" worldwide. Its forward mentions what was a then-breaking develoopment: the 4 June 1989 Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, and the consequent flood of messages via fax and telephone by the student protesters.
What happened over the course of the aughts and teens is that the Internet achieved mass global reach. The Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsap logos are probably the most-widely reproduced symbols on the planet, each having 2 billion or more active users. Mobile internet means that this contact is continuous throughout the day and limited to highly-emotive content.
And now the misinformation and disinformation is mainstream. State-level actors --- Russia and China, yes, but also India, Israel, the US, and others --- are engaged in propaganda of various forms. Commercial interests do so through advertising and influencers. Politics are now online not merely in California and the US, but globally. The bottleneck isn't the network, it's the public's ability to perceive and sort through the bullshit and manipulation, much of which is exceedingly adept.
Media changes societies. It always has, going back to speech. And the changes we're living through now will have profound and long-lived consequences.
Yeah. But Reddit already censors the shit out of its communities, both with thousands unnecessary subreddit bans and a comically incompetent “Anti-Evil Operations” site wide censorship team staffed by barely literate Zambians or something that randomly removes benign comments and suspends people for ridiculous reasons.
This is going to be a controversial opinion, but I agree with the mods who wrote the petition. The 'fire in a crowded theater' analogy is overused, but it seems applicable here.
Additionally, those who moderate these subs (nnn especially) have repeatedly, and seemingly intentionally, failed to enforce site wide content policies. One needs look no further than r/covidvaccinated for proof of vote brigading.
I have no problem with reasonable discussion, but Reddit is not where it happens anymore. Not with the gish-gallop it has become inundated with.
1: Regardless of its original context, the analogy does seem reasonable to me. "Shouting fire," assuming there is no fire, is disinformation. "A crowded theater" represents a scenario in which disinformation presents a clear and present threat to others.
2: Better late than never. ICUs are reaching capacity again, especially in areas with low vaccination rates. There is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but we are still in the tunnel.
Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
That flourish — now usually shortened to “shout fire in a crowded theater” — is the media’s go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it’s empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court’s strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment.
In practice I don’t think banning NoNewNormal now matters much. I prefer unbanned because I don’t like censorship, but this isn’t a slippery slope problem, Reddit has long been free falling into the latrine pit. I’ve had to go offsite with my old Reddit community. Efforts can be made, but I think the entire process here is useless.
As to your first point, I don't disagree. The analogy has been used frequently in bad faith. That is not what I am doing here, and I think Homles' statement, regardless of his intent, is still fundamentally correct. We can discuss what responses to take freely, but uncomfortable facts are facts. I don't think allowing communities explicitly dedicated to denial of those facts brings us anything of value.
The Supreme Court case in which this saying originated was one where someone advocated protesting the draft. He spoke truths, and gave advice and opinions. He did not spread disinformation.
Regarding your second statement, deplatforming works to an extent. People do not change their minds, but they do lose influence over the larger conversation.
That said fire in a crowded analogy is terrible, it refers to a legal standard that was overturned and was about jailing people for pacifist literature during WW1
It seems pretty controversial sometimes. It probably is not nearly as divisive as it feels, but the HN crowd is pretty libertarian-leaning based on my years of lurking
>Additionally, those who moderate these subs (nnn especially) have repeatedly, and seemingly intentionally, failed to enforce site wide content policies.
Let's not pretend that "we just want NNN to enforce these policies and we're fine" is going to satisfy the critics here. This seems to be a boilerplate complaint that is lodged against any sub that is attacked for obvious political reasons.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that it was the main issue here. It's just a small piece of a much larger issue with reddit-style moderation in general, and with nnn especially
Props to Reddit for not caving to this. I really do not understand anyone that calls for this kind of heavy-handed moderation. I certainly understand the impulse to want it, but upon thinking for like, 30 seconds about the precedent it sets and what the long term effects might be I realize it’s a pretty bad idea. Next time around, it might be the speech that they DO agree with that other people are wanting to clamp down on, and I don’t think they’ll just roll over and take it. That tells me a shocking number of people are not doing the basic due diligence of thinking through an idea even a little bit before jumping to support it.
I 100% agree, while it drives me nuts seeing vaccine disinformation, I think banning people only solidifies their views. It's best to keep the debate open so people can point out why they're incorrect.
Personally I just want this Pandemic to be over as soon as possible, thus I want vaccination rates to go as high as possible, but I don't think banning disinformation will achieve that, it will only put fuel to the fire. Plus I remember when discussing the possibility of a lab leak was considered misinformation. Banning people who don't support the narrative or excepted wisdom could be abused to suppress people blowing the whistle on actual conspiracies.
My hot take about this is that banning this stuff before it spread would have tamped down on all the stupidity going around, but once people know about it doesn't really make a difference to ban it.
Banning what though? What is "misinformation"? Today's misinformation might be tomorrows facts.
This whole thing is really a group of people trying to jam their opinion down everybody else's mouth holes.
It is truly frightening to me how many people are so eager to shut down any kind of debate. The science around covid and it's mitigations are far from settled.
Why does that stuff need to be blocked or deleted? Most people, even very skeptical people, are smart enough to realize that stuff is BS.
I mean what is all this clickbait outlier crap the media feeds everybody about that one poor sick covid kid who died? Then everybody thinks that kids are dying all over the place when that isn't even close to true.
Not saying it should be. I prefer no censorship at all, including threats of violence, gore, naziism, pedo RP, etc. But giving an example of the sort of thing people are wanting removed.
>Why does that stuff need to be blocked or deleted? Most people, even very skeptical people, are smart enough to realize that stuff is BS.
Define "most"? 20% of Americans believe the covid vaccine contains a microchip so they can be tracked. There are so many reasons that is even worse than thinking that it could cause you to be sterilized that I think anyone trying to claim "people know better" aren't being honest with themselves.
"We won't stop people from spreading known misinformation because if we did maybe in the future we might possibly stop people from spreading known factual information" is such a terrible argument.
The fact that a slippery slope can be identified within a premise does not mean that it exists, and straining at flies while you let a camel pass is an issue that has plagued humanity for thousands of years, and still we are no closer to recognizing it or solving it than we were back then.
I think you have that backwards? For thousands of years, you were only told what the people in power wanted you to know. With the invention of the internet, free information flow became the default. I think this may be the first time in history that an average person can come to their own conclusions. The problem is that we've never had free speech to this extent before. It's a new problem that hasn't been solved yet. I just don't think that censorship is the answer but a regression to the old ways.
The internet isn't a new thing under the sun. It's just the same old things faster and more widespread.
There have always been liars and manipulators who enjoy subverting expectations and undermining honest people. They've mastered the art of seeming perfectly reasonable while demanding the impossible.
They say things like, "For thousands of years, you were only told what the people in power wanted you to know" and "I think this may be the first time in history that an average person can come to their own conclusions", and other such seemingly reasonable poppycock.
The paradox of tolerance is mentioned quite often, in that a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance as otherwise the intolerant will destroy the tolerant.
In the same way, there is a paradox of information, that for information to be reliable and free flowing, it must be verifiable from trustworthy sources, and unverifiable and untrustworthy information has to be dammed off from the flow of information.
If untrustworthy news is allowed to flourish, then liars and connivers will flourish as well, with Machiavellian intentions to profit off of the lies and confusion they sow along the way.
It's happening now and if you don't believe me look at how many people have proudly proclaimed their desire to know untrue information as their right as a citizen of the internet, and how much distrust they have towards people like the CDC who gain nothing from lying to the population.
They hold the innocent guilty until they prove themselves innocent and beyond reproach while the people investing in whatever the next quack covid treatment of the week will be they laud and sing praises for them, becoming their enlisted personal army.
It's madness and it's all because we allow every lying huckster who can spin a good tale to keep on babbling and dogpile anyone who disagrees with this practice.
This isn't a terrible argument, it's the entire reason we have free speech. If you set precedent that silencing stupid opinions is OK (assuming that the opinion is, in fact, stupid) then you have to trust that the people determining which opinions are stupid will continue to A) be correct and B) continue to act in good faith. Historically this is a pretty much guaranteed fail on a long enough timeline.
So we can't make anything better because eventually it might get worse. Got it.
This is like telling someone not to treat a broken arm because everyone dies eventually.
What it should be looked at is like jump-starting a dodgy engine. You give it some fuel and some spark and it spits and sputters and dies. You tinker with it and do it again.
If we tinker with the engine of truthfulness long enough, giving it enough fuel and enough spark, eventually we could work out the kinks and get it running. Sure, there will be a lot of false starts and backfires, but it can be made to work.
That is worthwhile, and that's what I'll keep advocating for. Too bad you and others like you refuse to be on my side, it would make it a lot easier.
The problem is, who gets to decide what is misinformation?
If you declare misinformation as a reason for banning something, you really just create an arms race to declare anything you don't like as misinformation in order to ban it.
Misinformation is fought in the market of free speech and ideas and critical thinking. Not by banning it. That's just might makes right.
Truth gets to decide what is misinformation. This is a divisive and absurd response to a simple statement. The truth is knowable quite easily when lies aren't allowed to survive.
To me this is a naïve and overly-charitable view of the institutions we rely on to tell the truth about things we don’t directly observe. I’m fine leaving this as a disagreement, though, and honestly hope you are right.
Spin it around: who gets to decide what information and messages are amplifed?
Because Reddit is not an unbiased information repository. It amplifies some messages and suppresses others, by numerous mechanisms. Some of those are under direct admin control, some subreddit moderators, some the collective hivemind of users, and a large portion through direct manipulation and gaming by various sources.
The platform is already tilted. The question isn't "who" or "how", but what should it tilt towards: bulshit or truth?
I received the full two doses of an mRNA vaccine and I’ll get a third if it’s recommended. I’m confident it’s safe and effective.
I still take issue with your inclusion of “known misinformation” and “known factual information”. Sure, in the case of the vaccines, the known facts and misinfo seem to be pretty clear cut and that in this particular case, the people spreading the misinfo are wrong. That doesn’t mean that at some point in the future we won’t face a situation where the facts are less clear and the debate IS legitimate. We saw this with lab leak, and we even saw this with the use of masks early on.
And even now it is highly debatable that masks worn by most people are effective. And even if they are effective, do they need to be mandated? And even then, what about kids?
There was a point in the pandemic (very early) where saying people should be wearing masks would have been considered misinformation compared to official statements from the CDC. That should be the only argument against this required.
Also early on, for way too long, human to human transmission was officially not happening per the WHO.
Science isn't a pursuit of some ideological or traditional purity. It's a seeking of knowledge and truth. When evidence and understanding change, so does science.
What you're advocating for is a group of voices who seem collectively alligned at precisely opposing whatever the weight of evidence demonstrates at any given point in time. And I can assure you that this is a poor guide to truth.
Reddit has already implemented mass arbitrary censorship of subreddits for no good reasons. Stuff like gun subs, r/shoplifting (which I mention not because I like shoplifting, but because it was legitimately informative to learn what they do and why they do it), all sorts of politics subs, plenty of satire subs, and even r/wateriniggas just for the soft nword. They’re ridiculously strict and while it’s good to not ban one, let’s not act like they’re good faith actors here.
Oh of course not. My comment was only meant to say I think they did the right thing in this situation. I’m aware of Reddit’s actions in other situations and agree with you that they are inconsistent.
They left it up. It’s fine. We’ve all had a year to evaporatively cool our Covid beliefs into whatever they are and the learning rate has decreased by a factor of ten. Everyone there is already insane
What props they made a pretty obviously wrong choice here.
Banning antivax nonsense during a pandemic is no brainer. It is light moderation not heavy. I assume you have no objection to spam or troll moderation, how is this any heavier.
If you think about it for a couple more minutes the weakness of your position may become more clear to you
Users are currently being banned for even asking legitimate questions about the vaccine. Nonsense is nonsense, but labeling anyone who even questions vaccine safety as “promoting vaccine hesitancy” is overreacting and arouses suspicion.
>I certainly understand the impulse to want it, but upon thinking for like, 30 seconds about the precedent it sets and what the long term effects might be I realize it’s a pretty bad idea.
Unfortunately, I'm sure the powermoderators behind this would love to set the precedent that they can use their leverage to demand censorship and other changes to site policies. The pendulum will never actually swing the other way on Reddit, which is really the territory that they care about.
Working on a little script that determines who the moderators are for the top X subreddits and auto bans all of them because /r/all is ruined for a couple days every single time these mods get uppity.
The default sub mods are capricious and irritable. Check out r/undelete for an updated stream of mod removed posts that top r/all, or r/longtail for less popular removed posts. To say nothing about the literal 100s of thousands of comments they remove to make the site wholesome and nice, or just for abstruse personal vendettas. It’s terrible.
Noam Chomsky advocated for conspiracists to be allowed to talk freely.
Who really cares? I bet plenty of people who believe in those conspiracies vaccinated anyway.
Conspiracy is mostly a illness of belief. It doesn't really matter, it's just kids expressing pointless things, but I'm the end those kids will obey and do the good thing.
72 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadYes, that's a point of view. Considering the sarcasm; I assume that the author will actually be advocating for society wide, extra legal penalties for known speeders; perhaps insisting on a public registry of those known to have had traffic citations, so those people can be denied services at restaurants etc...
These people aren't even really calling for censorship; they just want there to be no one that disagrees with them. Whatever their position is today.
Speeding isn't infectious. If you get a traffic ticket I don't magically start getting them if we sit next to each other at a restaurant. "These people" are tired of "my opinion is just as valid as your science", and I don't blame them.
If we want to solve problems most efficiency, it must be by selecting causes in Pareto ranked order thus cars should come before COVID regardless.
Covid-19 is both.
Even with the relatively limited consequence of automobile accidents, societies collectively take numerous measures to reduce risks, from highway engineering, traffic laws, and safety equipment to requiring individuals to participate in specific practices --- wearing seatbelts, using child safety seats, and not driving whilst impaired, amongst them.
Have you never been wrong? How did you correct your error? Was some form of communication involved? Wouldn't you like others to have that chance too, of correcting an error?
Has the "settled science" not been found to have nuances and complications that might be worthy of further discussion?
I personally have been saved from likely severe injury by seatbelts. I require passengers in my car to wear them, (absent real reason not to). I still don't think the government has any right to mandate their use nor fine people for failing to wear them. I cannot imagine what positive use would be served by attempting to silence debate on the issue. Negative results of such dogmatic approaches are well documented and often repeated.
These people are intentionally spreading lies to the detriment of society as a whole. Allowing the lies to spread increases their location in search results and starts giving people who are technically illiterate a misguided belief that because it's on a popular site or shows up high in a search ranking that somehow makes the lies more likely to be truth. I've seen it first hand via a friends younger sister who has gone off the deep end and points to "reddit wouldn't allow something like this if it weren't true" when providing such facts as: vaccines have mercury in them so that the government can control your mind through electromagnetism.
>Have you never been wrong? How did you correct your error? Was some form of communication involved? Wouldn't you like others to have that chance too, of correcting an error?
The people in question have had over a year to have their incorrect beliefs corrected and are still regurgitating provably false statements. It's well past the point of "they just didn't have access to the proper information".
>Has the "settled science" not been found to have nuances and complications that might be worthy of further discussion?
The people in question aren't talking nuance. The people in question are claiming viruses don't exist, that science has fabricated it all. What discussion are you planning on having with someone who denies basic reality? There's no nuance to "viruses exist".
>I personally have been saved from likely severe injury by seatbelts. I require passengers in my car to wear them, (absent real reason not to). I still don't think the government has any right to mandate their use nor fine people for failing to wear them. I cannot imagine what positive use would be served by attempting to silence debate on the issue. Negative results of such dogmatic approaches are well documented and often repeated.
"The government" isn't some faceless beast, it is made up of representatives that you and I elect. The majority of people felt that a seat belt law was appropriate, so we have one. If you don't like it, try to convince your fellow citizens to vote for people who are willing to get rid of it. Or if you have the financial means to do so, move to another country in which the majority of the population aligns closer with your belief system if this one doesn't.
As for not being able to imagine what positive results could come from silencing debate: there's no debate occurring. There's a subset of folks who refuse to believe subject matter experts and cast aside any scientific study as fake. You're trying to bring logic and reason to a table at which they aren't just unwanted, they are actively ignored.
Agreed! As a general principle. Which applies to all sorts of stuff, and people, that I disagree with. They get to do the same.
> trying to bring logic and reason to a table at which they aren't just unwanted, they are actively ignored.
Again, agreed!
You're so close and yet so far.
There is a registry of traffic citations, too many and you can't drive. Too many and you are forced to take classes.
The reason the penalties don't apply to restaurants is because your reckless driving has nothing to do with restaurants, it doesn't affect others in restaurants. It does affect others on public roads which is where the restrictions are placed.
Conversely, I don't expect anti-vaxxers to be denied driving licenses because their driving doesn't affect me. Their behavior does affect me in a restaurant because of an insanely contagious disease and one would imagine restrictions ought to be applied there instead.
At this point the Delta variant is so contagious that all of us will probably get infected eventually no matter what precautions we take.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
this cultural shift in attitude toward the Web was probably inevitable and we probably won't ever go back to the way things were before, which is unfortunate, but here we are.
And even in the very earliest days there was both resistance and propaganda online. One of the earliest books I have addressing this is John S. Waterman's The Matrix, published in 1990, about the then-extant "conferencing systems" worldwide. Its forward mentions what was a then-breaking develoopment: the 4 June 1989 Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, and the consequent flood of messages via fax and telephone by the student protesters.
What happened over the course of the aughts and teens is that the Internet achieved mass global reach. The Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsap logos are probably the most-widely reproduced symbols on the planet, each having 2 billion or more active users. Mobile internet means that this contact is continuous throughout the day and limited to highly-emotive content.
And now the misinformation and disinformation is mainstream. State-level actors --- Russia and China, yes, but also India, Israel, the US, and others --- are engaged in propaganda of various forms. Commercial interests do so through advertising and influencers. Politics are now online not merely in California and the US, but globally. The bottleneck isn't the network, it's the public's ability to perceive and sort through the bullshit and manipulation, much of which is exceedingly adept.
Media changes societies. It always has, going back to speech. And the changes we're living through now will have profound and long-lived consequences.
Could start with yourself but you’re using a throw away account so you obviously aren’t very confident in your opinions.
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/264449/
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2013/03/04/please-s...
It’s a bit late to delete these subs anyway it’s been two years of Covid almost.
2: Better late than never. ICUs are reaching capacity again, especially in areas with low vaccination rates. There is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but we are still in the tunnel.
Edit: de-amped versions of the above links
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2013/03/04/please-s...
Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
That flourish — now usually shortened to “shout fire in a crowded theater” — is the media’s go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it’s empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court’s strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment.
https://www.thefire.org/popehat-on-the-medias-most-common-pr...
In practice I don’t think banning NoNewNormal now matters much. I prefer unbanned because I don’t like censorship, but this isn’t a slippery slope problem, Reddit has long been free falling into the latrine pit. I’ve had to go offsite with my old Reddit community. Efforts can be made, but I think the entire process here is useless.
The Supreme Court case in which this saying originated was one where someone advocated protesting the draft. He spoke truths, and gave advice and opinions. He did not spread disinformation.
Regarding your second statement, deplatforming works to an extent. People do not change their minds, but they do lose influence over the larger conversation.
That said fire in a crowded analogy is terrible, it refers to a legal standard that was overturned and was about jailing people for pacifist literature during WW1
Let's not pretend that "we just want NNN to enforce these policies and we're fine" is going to satisfy the critics here. This seems to be a boilerplate complaint that is lodged against any sub that is attacked for obvious political reasons.
Personally I just want this Pandemic to be over as soon as possible, thus I want vaccination rates to go as high as possible, but I don't think banning disinformation will achieve that, it will only put fuel to the fire. Plus I remember when discussing the possibility of a lab leak was considered misinformation. Banning people who don't support the narrative or excepted wisdom could be abused to suppress people blowing the whistle on actual conspiracies.
This whole thing is really a group of people trying to jam their opinion down everybody else's mouth holes.
It is truly frightening to me how many people are so eager to shut down any kind of debate. The science around covid and it's mitigations are far from settled.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/federal-judge-claims-... Stuff like this, and worse
I mean what is all this clickbait outlier crap the media feeds everybody about that one poor sick covid kid who died? Then everybody thinks that kids are dying all over the place when that isn't even close to true.
Should we ban all clickbait?
Define "most"? 20% of Americans believe the covid vaccine contains a microchip so they can be tracked. There are so many reasons that is even worse than thinking that it could cause you to be sterilized that I think anyone trying to claim "people know better" aren't being honest with themselves.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx54yn/a-shocking-number-of-...
And you can get any percent you want with bad low sample size polls. Come on.
What kind of misinformation are people being fed to be so very far off? Why aren’t we doing anything about that?
https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
Tempting...
(I'm still anti-censorship, but that's quite a carrot to offer.)
The fact that a slippery slope can be identified within a premise does not mean that it exists, and straining at flies while you let a camel pass is an issue that has plagued humanity for thousands of years, and still we are no closer to recognizing it or solving it than we were back then.
The internet isn't a new thing under the sun. It's just the same old things faster and more widespread.
There have always been liars and manipulators who enjoy subverting expectations and undermining honest people. They've mastered the art of seeming perfectly reasonable while demanding the impossible.
They say things like, "For thousands of years, you were only told what the people in power wanted you to know" and "I think this may be the first time in history that an average person can come to their own conclusions", and other such seemingly reasonable poppycock.
The paradox of tolerance is mentioned quite often, in that a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance as otherwise the intolerant will destroy the tolerant.
In the same way, there is a paradox of information, that for information to be reliable and free flowing, it must be verifiable from trustworthy sources, and unverifiable and untrustworthy information has to be dammed off from the flow of information.
If untrustworthy news is allowed to flourish, then liars and connivers will flourish as well, with Machiavellian intentions to profit off of the lies and confusion they sow along the way.
It's happening now and if you don't believe me look at how many people have proudly proclaimed their desire to know untrue information as their right as a citizen of the internet, and how much distrust they have towards people like the CDC who gain nothing from lying to the population.
They hold the innocent guilty until they prove themselves innocent and beyond reproach while the people investing in whatever the next quack covid treatment of the week will be they laud and sing praises for them, becoming their enlisted personal army.
It's madness and it's all because we allow every lying huckster who can spin a good tale to keep on babbling and dogpile anyone who disagrees with this practice.
This is like telling someone not to treat a broken arm because everyone dies eventually.
What it should be looked at is like jump-starting a dodgy engine. You give it some fuel and some spark and it spits and sputters and dies. You tinker with it and do it again.
If we tinker with the engine of truthfulness long enough, giving it enough fuel and enough spark, eventually we could work out the kinks and get it running. Sure, there will be a lot of false starts and backfires, but it can be made to work.
That is worthwhile, and that's what I'll keep advocating for. Too bad you and others like you refuse to be on my side, it would make it a lot easier.
This is a classic strawman. It also ignores the entirety of history where the same wrong claim was made.
If you declare misinformation as a reason for banning something, you really just create an arms race to declare anything you don't like as misinformation in order to ban it.
Misinformation is fought in the market of free speech and ideas and critical thinking. Not by banning it. That's just might makes right.
Because Reddit is not an unbiased information repository. It amplifies some messages and suppresses others, by numerous mechanisms. Some of those are under direct admin control, some subreddit moderators, some the collective hivemind of users, and a large portion through direct manipulation and gaming by various sources.
The platform is already tilted. The question isn't "who" or "how", but what should it tilt towards: bulshit or truth?
I still take issue with your inclusion of “known misinformation” and “known factual information”. Sure, in the case of the vaccines, the known facts and misinfo seem to be pretty clear cut and that in this particular case, the people spreading the misinfo are wrong. That doesn’t mean that at some point in the future we won’t face a situation where the facts are less clear and the debate IS legitimate. We saw this with lab leak, and we even saw this with the use of masks early on.
And even now it is highly debatable that masks worn by most people are effective. And even if they are effective, do they need to be mandated? And even then, what about kids?
Society needs healthy debate.
Also early on, for way too long, human to human transmission was officially not happening per the WHO.
I'm among them. Not that my own comments have a tremedous reach, but I take not intentionally being wrong very seriously.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/a654bef0b15c01385957002590d8e...
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/3abaa5e03fca0138fcb6002590d8e...
Science isn't a pursuit of some ideological or traditional purity. It's a seeking of knowledge and truth. When evidence and understanding change, so does science.
What you're advocating for is a group of voices who seem collectively alligned at precisely opposing whatever the weight of evidence demonstrates at any given point in time. And I can assure you that this is a poor guide to truth.
Banning antivax nonsense during a pandemic is no brainer. It is light moderation not heavy. I assume you have no objection to spam or troll moderation, how is this any heavier.
If you think about it for a couple more minutes the weakness of your position may become more clear to you
Unfortunately, I'm sure the powermoderators behind this would love to set the precedent that they can use their leverage to demand censorship and other changes to site policies. The pendulum will never actually swing the other way on Reddit, which is really the territory that they care about.
I’m vaccinated, btw.
Who really cares? I bet plenty of people who believe in those conspiracies vaccinated anyway.
Conspiracy is mostly a illness of belief. It doesn't really matter, it's just kids expressing pointless things, but I'm the end those kids will obey and do the good thing.
There is nothing that is fixable about this.
Such a hypocricy... Vaccine fan communities contain disinformation too.
Even their first sentence contains lie: "Everyone on this planet has been affected by the SARS-Cov-2" ( https://old.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/comments/pbe8nj/we_cal... )
Actually not everyone, at least I was affected by covid hystericals only but not by covid.