YouTube creators kicked off the platform for “repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies” will have an opportunity to “rejoin” in line with revised policies that allow “a wider range of content” on those subjects, its parent Alphabet told the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday. Issued in response to committee subpoenas in February 2023 and […]
Yeah, it wasn’t a perfect solution so let’s just give misinformation a microphone and a spot on the 6 o’clock news!
People will believe whatever they want to believe, you cannot suppress whatever you believe is misinformation. There are lots of things for which there is no apodictic certainty that gets passed of as fact and no one questions it or calls it misinformation.
Also it’s not that it wasn’t a perfect solution. It’s that it is not a solution at all. It actively made things worse in fact.
People in the streets say crazier shit every day, are you also gonna stop them from saying it? Fuck that man, the audience is the one that needs to learn to be discerning.
Fuck outta here with this fuckhead logic.
Explain how it made things worse. That’s nonsense.
It gave them the excuse to build their own platforms in which their ideas could spread uncontested and at the same time made them more alluring to the masses because “forbidden” knowledge is so alluring to humans that perhaps the most famous myth in history is about how our species lost the perfect existence because of it.
You cannot make anything forbidden and expect that by doing so it won’t spread because it is forbidden. As long as there is a demand for it it will continue to spread and if the Streisand effect holds it will spread exponentially. This applies to ideas, drugs, guns, and pretty much everything. If the people want it they will get it. Alcohol is the perfect example: we tried to make it illegal and all it did was increase crime, violence and people kept drinking as much if not more than before. Fast forward to today people drink less than ever because they have learned the health effects of it. Give people the tools to tell right from wrong, correct from incorrect instead of trying to bubble wrap their world and then act surprised when they feel betrayed because someone told them there is another point of view (false as it may be). Let them see both point of views and let the very absurdity of the opposite view discredit itself.
If we cannot trust that people can make the correct decisions why then would we insist on democracy?
Pre-Musk Twitter and current X is a good example of what happens when a platform completely drops its policies on misinformation. It is an order of magnitude worse now than it ever was before, and much more harmful to society.
If we’re worried about far-right idiots crying censorship, then we might as well fold to all their other demands and then the lunatics will truly be running the asylum.
If I’m to believe that I need to protect people from “bad” ideas and that they are not capable of discerning right from wrong, false from truth, them I will also have to believe that democracy itself is wrong because clearly we cannot allow these monkeys to make any decisions. Now while my heart of hearts might believe this to be true, I do not have apodictic certainty in that and instead I truly believe that education can make people take better decisions and help them discern right from wrong. As such I can never believe in labeling speech as allowed or not allowed, rather I would like to invest my energies into fostering curiosity, truth seeking and knowledge as perhaps the highest human virtues. So instead of burying speech we should be educating kids.
Also X kind of proves my point, the platform is alive but much less relevant than before. This is the bad ideas discrediting themselves in action.
We need to be the ones willing to teach them.
I don’t know that I believe in that sort of paternalistic attitude what I do know is that Google et al have no business dictating what is or isn’t misinformation. It’s a double edged blade.
Breathing bleach, very bright light in veins, horse worm paste to fight covid.
Oh fuck right off.
This isn’t a grey area “Oh Mike’s car sounds louder so it’s faster” information. There are objectively factual truths at play and these flat earth worm paste eating fuckwits want to play Don’t Look Up in real life.
It’s not about the factuality of the information though, it’s about the subjectivity of the label. Harmful, hateful, etc are not objective measurable labels and so they can be used to shut down any sort of speech. The paternalistic position that we need to protect people from falsehoods or harmful ideas is frankly condescending. Like I said elsewhere if I cannot believe that people are capable of separating truth from fact, then I must also believe that they are fundamentally incapable of making decisions and therefore I need to take away any ability for them to make any kind of significant decision. I will not follow this line of thought in my life or politics, because then who gets to decide who is capable of making decisions? The experts in their ivory towers? The only experts with apodictic knowledge are physicists and mathematicians, everyone else operates on degrees of certainty, they can be wrong. And furthermore who decides who are the experts? This is a return to aristocracy or monarchy, but instead of divine authority it is credentialist.
If we want to stop people from believing stupid shit the solution is not to attempt to bubble wrap their world as it were, but rather to give them the tools to discern good information from bad information.