Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

You missed that I was drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the market place of ideas - in which rational discourse and honest debate enables people to learn, compare, agree and disagree, find greater truths, learn, etc etc - and the spread of misinformation based on falsehood, often perpetuated for profit.

We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate. We can debate until the cows come home about what it means, whether any opinions should be drawn or any action taken, but motivated lies are just not on the same footing as factual information.

> "Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship.

You assume bad faith here, again. I think there’s a lot can be done by way of giving access to scientific information in accessible ways.

> I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated

Well firstly Because that decision affects more than just those individuals, and puts others (including the already vaccinated and those who cannot be vaccinated) at risk. And secondly because some of those making the decision not to vaccinate, and putting themselves at risk, have done so armed with bad information.

The nature of the problems may not be new, but the scale and severity seem to be.

The problem here is that there is not some clear-cut answer to "what is to be done" about climate change, and unless you restrict yourself to the benign observation that "the climate changes", everything else can be categorized as "misinformation" if you have a political objective. Agree that climate change is happening, but don't agree with a massive spending project to address it? Too bad, you've just committed misinformation.

>Nobody loves this solution, but the alternative is letting one third of the population doom the other two thirds by obstructing the kind of actions we need to survive.

I just don't get this at all. What doom? Are you implying the vaccine doesn't work and you can still catch COVID if a bunch of other people don't take it?

And do you remember when they were called onto the carpet by repeated congressional committees for…

Allowing copyright violations?

Allowing terrorists’ messages?

Allowing misinformation relating to elections?

Allowing hate speech?

Now censoring misinformation?

Do you remember when you were incensed by the inaction of media companies and demanded action, and now are dismayed that they are acting?

Facebook doesn’t prevent you from using Twitter, or Reddit or a small new network. All kinds of people can and do engage with multiple networks, big and small, at their own inclination. All of the platforms are accessed on the same internet using the same protocols and clients, and it’s trivial — completely trivial — to find alternate content or all kinds (at least in the US).

People aren’t abandoning the big platforms in droves because they generally like those big platforms. (Probably almost nobody thinks they are great, but that’s not the standard. The standard is better than the alternatives.)

As the article points out, the marketplace of ideas is leading Twitter to more flexible moderation mechanisms that let users choose their own level.

Seems crazy to change the rules, force companies to break their business models, when the system is working fine.

Doctorow (and others) may not like it, but many, many people like Facebook and Twitter a lot more than they dislike them.

Protective regulation should come into play when the affected populace is not in any position to consent to (or decline) the situation. E.g., because alternatives aren’t available, or because the issue requires special expertise to understand, etc. But generally this doesn’t apply here. (I do think there needs to be recourse for people who are banned or otherwise lose access to something they’ve invested in.)

During the 1980's early internet, white supremacist groups were among the first[0] to being using the new medium for organization and information purposes. They used it then to publish among other things a list[1] of "race traitors" etc including name, address, phone number, promulgate misinformation, gaslighting established norms and history (ex: Holocaust Denialism), and develop strategies for what can really only be described as terrorist indoctrination in many respects.

Some of the group involved killed a man with automatic weapons and hijacked an armored car with millions in cash to finance a separatist uprising. One of these was Louis Beam[2] who was a quite violent seditionist, and developed the "lone wolf" militia cell structure which is familiar today. Beam used these telecommunication/internet networks to create and distribute a lot of white separatist information. His activity goes on and on, it is quite vile in all respects. He has been charged and acquitted of sedition.

In this academic piece by sociologist Chip Berlet[3], he recounts attempting to counteract the white supremacy BBS with an anti-racist BBS at an Anti-Klan symposium. The understanding of BBS was quite poor at the time. By the 1990's the white-supremacist BBS network had grown quite a bit, distributing newspapers and operating file transfer and messaging services into a national network of neonazi BBS including Stormfront[4], which is of course still in operation, and is quite influential. They successfully transitioned to the ordinary internet and also AOL, using them as very effective recruitment tools.

Neonazi/white supremacist/separatist/seditionist groups have used the internet very effectively pretty much from the beginning. Perhaps this is an effect of Johnathan Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[5] as well as some kind of operationalized Poe's Law--race rallys thrive in protective shade. KKK marches and the like are routinely confronted by anti-racist counter-protests, but the current nature of online discourse continues to provide an asymmetric advantage to these types of activities. The old "Filter Bubble" doesn't lend many opportunities for normal people to insert themselves in the radicalization process...this could possibly be better than worse.

The literature on this is vast, exploring how a normal person can become radicalized into a racist white separatist is a strange rabbit hole to descend.

There exists a kind and inspiring man named Daryl Davis[6] who is pretty good at converting KKK/supremacists (he has many surprising success stories) away from this kind of behavior, but notice how his methodology requires a personal touch and much compassion. How many "more people saw that and immediately criticized the neonazis who wouldn't have seen them before?" is not a very good discriminator for this activity at all. Effectively, "None" is the real answer to your question.

The fact of the matter is that toxic memes and divisive trolling are consumed by people while on the can, idle-ly (or perhaps compulsevly) skimming social media and whatnot. The uncritical ingestion of this kind of thing simply habituates people to these kind of beliefs. I don't think a person who has fallen for this stuff is necessarily bad at first blush, and surely have many possibilities for redemption, but the effort required is really not the kind that is easily rallied.

It's a complicated notion, but it boils down to the fact that you have to fight Hate with Love.

[0] - https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e9167...

[2] - https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/15/us/computer-network-links...

[3] - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.552...

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)

[5] - (original source unavailable) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade#%22Greater_Intern...

[6] - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/18/daryl-davis-bl...