151–160 of 367 posts
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Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.
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If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
And that makes it ok? What about threats? Are they also ok?
Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…
I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it alw…
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I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation. Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. [1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.
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I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it alw…
In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction. I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted. The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies we…
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I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.
Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!
But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.
And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.
It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
Shameless plug: you can use services like Twitter Archive Eraser ( https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser/ ) to selectively delete old tweets and in bulk. Many of us identify with the author and most content created on social media years ago have no reason to stay around.
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That point of view works in a perfect world, but there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table. Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.
>there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set? Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's cr…
Congrats on your new political maturity, but no mention or reflection on the deeply sexist language you used makes me think that you haven’t grown at all.