Twitter to ban political advertising

Hooray! This is unequivocally a good thing.

Twitter is admitting it can't police political advertising on the scale that it runs. So it's banning it.

This is a good move.

It's not a strawman for multiple reasons. For one, you have suggested that pointing out outright lies does not suffer from many of the same issues as asserting truth.

"American jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants from Mexico."

Is this a lie? No. But is this disingenuous and misrepresenting much more significant contributors to job loss? Yes. Is it a lie then?

"Transgender women are women."

Is this a lie? Depends entirely on definitions and presuppositions.

Secondly, I think the more important takeaway is that the vast majority of the issues we're having in regards to political discourse have absolutely nothing to do with us not agreeing on facts. Neither side for most of the hard issues are relying on outright incorrect facts.

So not only do I not think that identifying outright lies is as simple and free from bias as you suggest it to be, I also think that the cases in which this could be universally agreed upon would contribute very little to the majority of serious political discussions happening today.

This sounds like a nice, but dangerous idea: who decides what the truth is? Obviously some statements are blatantly false (2 + 2 = 5), but those don't need to be forbidden by a law: just ignore it, or laugh at it, and let the paper editing this lose its readership (or reduce it to the community of 2+2=5- believers).

The actual matter is for controversial statements. I very much prefer those statements to be allowed, discussed, debunked if needed, than outright forbidden. In liberal democracies, the press is generally considered to be a needed counterpower (along with the establish executive, legislative and judicial powers of the state). Putting it under the control of the judicial power kind of weakens it.

Would this centralized body extend to regulating bloggers and YouTube personalities? It's tricky to draw a line based on scope - influencers and personalities will grow ever more popular, and conspiracy rabbitholes will only grow more decentralized.

How would you deal with foreign media that violates the laws? You'd either have to permit them - which opens up the country to foreign meddling, since they can and have spread propaganda - or sanction/block them, like Russia and China (and Australia.)

Also, suppose despite your best efforts, Trump still gets into the White House. He's installed loyal yes-men in many departments already - if they defy him, they'll resign under pressure or be fired. He'd easily gut this Ministry of Truth and weaponize it to quash CNN/NYT or even climate scientists.

I'm quite on the left and not averse to regulation or centralization, but it's wishful thinking to assume this "powerful centralized body" is going to do the right thing.

See, for example, the use of corruption taskforces in many countries to purge political rivals or even honest bureaucrats who won't take your bribes. Corruption should be illegal, allegations should be investigated but things can go very wrong and these checks perverted against their intended function.

> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body

No. It wouldn’t. When that kind of power (arbiter of truth) is placed in a single point, that point will become the highly contested point of control. Eventually, inevitably, the body would end up turned to some ruthless power of the day, and would serve as the most phenomenal propaganda machine.

“The Ministry of Truth is pleased to announce that bootlace production is up a thousandfold this quarter, due to the heroic efforts of the King. You may now cheer.”

Total decentralisation is the only sane route - you build a bulwark out of billions of human minds, and you build inertia into your system such that emotional volatility led by events or propaganda efforts is smoothed out.

This is basically the concept of democracy and electoral cycles - group consensus on what reality is and how it should be responded to, with a temporal buffer (the election cycle length) to smooth out rash decisions.

Our systems need amendment to better smooth our inherent volatility, which has been provoked by our exponentially growing sphere of information - but this can’t come at the cost of handing control over something as fundamental as the idea of truth to some technocratic committee. That’s how you end up with gulags.

Edit/addendum:

Further musing on temporal smoothing of volatile and labile humanity led me to recall the idea of Concents in Anathem - groups are sequestered away for a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium, and are allowed only at those intervals to interact with the outside world. This monkish dedication to record preservation minimises informatic drift within the group, and provides a continual negative feedback factor to the unstable curve of truth, thus preventing the rewrite of the past, and therefore the present and future.