71–80 of 923 posts
An amusing casualty. Newsweek states: >David Icke, Man Behind Coronavirus 5G Conspiracy Can this be true? Does David Icke have a following that isn't just laughing along with it? I remember his reptilian shapeshifter theory being a running joke from back when I was in high school in 2005! Surely, someone else must have started the whole 5G conspiracy theory, right? Icke just latched on to it?
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Yeah, and just imagine what politicians could get away with if they had laws that allowed them to prevent people from speaking their mind.
This absolutism is unnecessary. Plenty of modern democratic countries have limits on acceptable speech (France, Sweden to give you a couple examples) and they are not less democratic than the US (I would argue they are more). Limiting speech within agreed boundaries is not problematic as long as it's a decision taken with a good criteria and with a good goal in mind. It's no different than any other decision we make…
I'm not a fan of popularity-driven recommendations unless they're from a community like HN that has a high-bar for useful content.
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Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream. If the cockroaches want to crawl under the fridge there's not much you can do to stop them but you can stop them from breeding on the table.
Just be aware that it's a double edged sword. Mass acceptance of censorship makes it easy to stifle societal progress by designating ideas which you disagree with as extremist content. We are lucky that the people currently at the helm of tech industry happen to hold mostly liberal views that we broadly agree with. If that was not the case, the same argument could have been used by them to suppress many left-wing/pro…
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> Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream. Actually, no it hasn't. And for anyone that holds such a viewpoint, I'd strongly suggest reading J. S. Mill's classic, On Liberty [1] -- a foundational document of Western political thought. [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.…
What's wrong with YouTube and Facebook exercising a bit of "benevolent despotism"?
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that person didn't realize the damage propaganda could do with modern tools. Unfortunate reality is our cognitive biases can be exploited, and complete freedom of speech is not in the best interest of the majority of humanity. This is a "loophole" that is exploited over and over again by climate change denialists, cigarette companies, nazis...
I don't think anyone is arguing about the damage of propaganda here. The discussion here is more-or-less Youtube choosing which propaganda it wishes people to see. To use your idea here - the cognitive biases being exploited are being exploited by youtube itself. In this example, Icke is a relatively divisive character even on the right wing. So it becomes important to ask - of the controversial figures that remain (…
If we're not allowed to entertain that one side might simply be wrong enough to need its own correction, then we allow it to continue to march off the cliff. Dragging the overton window down with it.
It is simply not a given that the existence of a piece of propaganda implies that the absence of it (or intolerance of it) is equivalent to propaganda for another side. If I'm corrected from claiming 1+1=2, the other side rests on more than propaganda.
IMO censorship is wrong. To quote someone smarter than me: > I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
It's not censorship by any means; YouTube isn't the government. David Icke and his ilk should feel free to take their lunatic fringe theories to the lunatic fringe corners of the Internet like Breitbart etc. They won't be "censored" there.
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Or we can look at modern evidence, not centuries old political philosophy.
I'd be careful with dismissing the giants whose shoulders we straddle. If it weren't for the Magna Carta, the French and American Revolutions, and the Declaration of Independence, most of us would still be living under despotic rule.
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Or we can look at modern evidence, not centuries old political philosophy.
I'd be careful with dismissing the giants whose shoulders we straddle. If it weren't for the Magna Carta, the French and American Revolutions, and the Declaration of Independence, most of us would still be living under despotic rule.
No one should be beholden to the “giants whose shoulders we straddle”. Note that that phrase is actually applied to scientists who developed evidence based theories rather than old “pure thought” silliness.
As far as despotic rule - England had an elected government at the time of the American revolution (not saying that America wasn’t justified), but it’s also worth noting that a large number of the early English colonists left England because they wanted to enforce religious domination that wasn’t legal in England.
IMO censorship is wrong. To quote someone smarter than me: > I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know people who believe some of this crap and will not listen to reason. At least for them, it would have been better if they never heard this stuff.