131–140 of 602 posts
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Yes but we have made the judiciary the judge of what goes further than free speech, not the legislative. And that is key. PREEMPTIVE censorship is always a mistake because it only relies on power ideologies.
Remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad? Good times.
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I've noticed that there is a common belief amongst Democrats and Progressives that people are duped into holding conservative viewpoints because of Fox News. Whenever I have asked people on the left why they think Republicans and Conservatives believe what they believe, the conversation always includes references to Fox News and the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. So in that sense I can understand why so many Democr…
I agree that many people think that, but it gets the chronology precisely backwards. CNN has been on the air since 1980. Fox News didn't even exist until 1996, and didn't become popular until 2000. Fox News is a response to media bias,[1] not the other way around. [1] And by "bias" I don't necessarily mean open bias. CNN wasn't partisan in the 1990s like it is today. But it still provided news filtered through a libe…
Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. Why must fight all censorship. Because once you allow "a thing" to be censored, it becomes possible to censor "any thing". Things in the past which were labeled misinformation and would have been suppressed for even longer (or forever) under current social attit…
Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.
Flagged. Lol. Because the letters didn't use the exact words "demand", "censor". Haha.
You broke the site guidelines with that title, which was neither accurate nor neutral (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240472 ). Using titles to editorialize isn't "haha", it's against the rules and will cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. That goes double for divisive, inflammatory topics like this one. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking t…
Disgraceful.
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Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.
>Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people You disagree with letting censorship be decided on democratically?
This is how you get people shouting about how a democratically elected president, who was given, by a democratically elected congress, powers to operate a regulatory department, is acting undemocratic-ally [1], when he appoints someone those people don't like to head that department.
What those people forget is that in a democracy, you can't in good faith cherrypick outcomes as 'undemocratic'. You can only ensure that the process for making changes is democratic. If the people you elect decided to turn your country into a police state, well, that sucks, but that's a democratic decision that they've made - and as long as you can vote them out, it can be democratically reversed. Prohibition was reversed, after all, communist witch hunts eventually ended, it's no longer illegal to ride in a train car while black, people in the US are no longer jailed for writing pro-German newspaper articles, and we no longer round up entire ethnic groups, and concentrate them in a camp (Which are all hallmarks of a police state. They are no longer present in our society, thanks in part to a democratic process. Other hallmarks still are, but if enough people care, we'll eventually get around to them.)
[1] Despite neither the constitution, the law that brought that department into existence, the judiciary, nor years of precedent requiring that the department must be ran by an elected official, or that the department's every decision [2] must be voted on by Congress.
[2] As it turns out, it's quite democratic for an elected official to defer decision-making to an un-elected underling. That's fine. What makes this democratic, is that you can punish the elected official, if the underling behaves poorly, by voting them out. As long as all power flows from an elected office, this thing works. What is not fine is if the un-elected underling is not appointed, or fire-able by an elected office, or by an agent of an elected office. That's where the difference between democratic, and undemocratic lies.
"How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel ." Does this strike anyone else as a nakedly partisan move?
It pretty much is and is a chilling attempt at limiting speech. Free press, is free press. CNN and MSNBC both spread their share of misinformation. You need to be able to watch multiple news sources with different takes in a free society, to determine whose wrong or whose omitting key facts in an attempt to frame the news.
"How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel ." Does this strike anyone else as a nakedly partisan move?
Worse than that, it is an attempt at intimidation. Given today's climate, it would not surprise me if it works. Look at it this way. The capital riot on 6-Jan was planned and discussed on Youtube, facebook, and twitter. Apparently, barely a mention on Parler. Yet Parler was excoriated and deplatformed for it, and for not policing its comment sections. Yet Youtube, facebook, and twitter have faced no consequences for…
No, pretty sure it's now. This is a dystopian society we live in today.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/house-democrats-targeting-r...
I think the crux of the issue is not freedom of speech, but rather determining what counts as harmful disinformation. I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed; the point of contention is precisely where we should draw the line. The violent, seditious sentiments present in America today are a direct result of people being permitted to pander dangerous lies with no consequences, lies which have cause…
I don't agree with that. I think the problem is precisely those who think they get to decide what is and isn't disinformation and who gets to choose to curb it.
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"The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws. Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" i…
Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable. Allowing misinformation to spread serves that goal nicely and all they have to do is sit back and do nothing. Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because experts hur…
Which is kind of a weird whiplash, because it was not all that long ago that that was the standard attack of the Right against the “postmodern” Left.