551–560 of 981 posts
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How is newsmax “radicalized”?
They're a firehose of hyper-partisan swill not supported by facts. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/newsmax/ "Overall, we rate Newsmax Right Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as well as numerous failed fact checks. (M. Huitsing 10/8/2017) Updated (11/12/2020)"
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The real danger is that, one day, your own ideas are the ones considered too radical. True. Worse, the acceptable range of opinions within both the US right and the US left have narrowed.
I used to strongly believe this but now I think we've moved beyond having a public discourse and into things that are not protected speech. The president and others inciting violence against people doing their jobs, and those that are megaphoning those claims and calls to action deserve to be shutdown and deplatformed before someone is killed.
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No, they should not be forced. However, YouTube should be shamed for the bans, and everyone should be encouraged to think worse of them for it.
I think YouTube should be applauded for protecting democracy. Why do you think they should be shamed for doing this?
For the sake of novelty, I'll make a different point: I see one way in which YouTube may have promoted democracy: by making their odiousness more clear (and in a public, "everyone knows that everyone knows" way), they may have encouraged quicker production or adoption of alternative platforms. This seems unlikely, because websites like them have done lots of crappy stuff before, without usually causing much effect; but it is possible that this may be seen as enough of a "They've declared war on the entire right wing" to motivate a significant migration. Two partisan platforms is better than one, for democracy and just for competition. (Better yet would be either a platform that has made some kind of enforceable and very-painful-to-break commitment to neutrality, or some kind of decentralized system that no single company or party can decide to censor. We may get there eventually.)
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Why is it that we have to ignore nuances in these arguments? We never had unrestricted free speech in this country. There is a whole Wikipedia article about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex... In addition other democratic states have strict limits on free speech such as Singapore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_14_of_the_Constituti... After all even “democracy” is nuanced here…
What a stupid argument. "Child pornography and obscenity are banned, therefore democracy does not rely on free speech, therefore we don't need free speech at all." Obviously "free speech" comes with the colloquially-understood fact that it doesn't include child pornography.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." [1] Reddit is just a closed system of communities; YouTube is one such community in the larger system of s…
Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit , but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.
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> If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. I mean, the American founders already rejected a lot of ideas about the people governing themselves, because they knew from history that the people often can't check their worst impulses. > Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.…
>Sort of like how radical Athenian-style direct democracy doesn't work, maybe radically giving everyone near-unchecked access to nationwide broadcasting doesn't work, either. Ah yes, because Switzerland is such a hell hole.
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If it gets to the point where we have to fear the government retaliating against us, then that government would have probably already shutdown or blocked the popular social networks.
Do you think this is new or something? The government has a documented history of retaliating against people regarding speech issues. There was a long period, know as "the red scare" in which this happened. There are many forms of "in between" retaliation, that is in between a democracy and an authoritarian government. And it is important to also protect people against these in between consequences, by allowing them…
Joe McCarthy was censured by congress and fell out of political favour. Furthermore, the Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions that greatly reduced the scope of the government's ability to penalise supporters of communism such as: Yates v. United States, Scales v. United States, and United States v. Robel. This is how such matters should be tackled in a free society, rather than coming up with elaborate mechanisms to hide our views from the government.
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Do you honestly believe that these lies that a huge number of people believe in are having a positive or neutral effect on the trust of our elections? If it's neither positive nor neutral, then the only effect it could have is negative.
And yet the solution to a negative can still itself be the cause of equal or greater negatives. Hence why I was asking if you believe it is a NET gain. Because the Government cracking down on speech, even obvious lies, will erode some people's trust in the system as well.
Cracking down on anti-election rhetoric is an obvious net positive, and needs no further explanation.
> Because the Government cracking down on speech, even obvious lies, will erode some people's trust in the system as well.
Too late for that. Dozens of millions of Americans have lost faith in the 2020 election. The only concern from my perspective is to stop the obvious bleeding: we must stop the false anti-election rhetoric before it poisons the minds of even more.
The lies are winning right now. Be it masks, election fraud, mail-in ballots, or whatever. My sister's father in law believes that COVID is a hoax, I have coworkers who don't think masks help and my mom thinks Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. I've seen enough lies, and I've lost faith that these people can have their vision cleared with the truth. My sister thinks the vaccine may hurt more than it may help and is avoiding the vaccine.
Its clear that misinformation is running amok and nothing is stopping it. The naive "debate with them" perspective goes literally no where, have you ever tried?
If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
Likewise, no government should allow for parties that would destroy itself - yet here America is, falling apart.
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You're not engaging with the articles main point, that this censorship and exclusion is not evenly applied, and that it is rather conspicuously applied along political lines. There are many non scientific, ideology driven ideas that have been bullying their way into every facet of communication these days. Labelling people who resist this trend as fringe radicals who should be segregated and monitored is frankly disg…
For example: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019... (AOC: “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change."). This is flat-earth conspiracy theory level falsehood. And it’s a falsehood about an extremely politically and socially important issue that if widely accepted could have massive repercussions. Is YouTube going to censor it?