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Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
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Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was quite a public display last election about news orgs agreeing to not cover Biden in negative light so as to not hurt his chances. What would you call this?
I don’t know, newspapers support one party or another. The narrative with emphasis makes you sound like a nutjob.
> I don’t know, newspapers support one party or another.
Yea that’s one, extremely light-footed, way to explain it. It doesn’t cover all left biased news sounding near identical though nor does it cover the dangers of group think mentality which we see manifesting now.
> The narrative with emphasis makes you sound like a nutjob.
That's a pretty petty thing to have issue wouldn't you say? But ok, dems now say using italics makes you a nut job, lets ban italics now.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#503Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and or…
Agreed. I think it's a major issue in political discourse when people begin to identify with labels and slogans, and treat them as prescriptive (ideals to be adhered to) rather than descriptive (approximate reflections of one's current general beliefs). Surveys consistently show that most of us agree on far more than we disagree when questions are phrased in politically neutral terms. People quickly realize when they…
I put this to a test over a couple years of business travel.
While bringing up a field service group, I had a period of high travel taking me all over the US. I enjoy politics, culture and people and am frequently frustrated with the left - right, very tribal political discourse myself.
So, what I did was find coffee shops and any other events where people might gather and enjoy conversation and had a bunch of chats avoiding labels while also conveying a strong, no judgement, just interested in perspective from different parts of the nation...
Those looked kind of like a two way interview.
Many of those ended up being long, gratifying conversations too.
Based on these, I would submit the following:
People fear judgement.
People fear "that other tribe"
An awful lot of discourse is fear, blame and shame.
eg: teaching "those other people" a lesson
How could anyone tolerate "that other tribe"
You get the idea.
Outside of those conversations, which all told me the US has poor class awareness and with that, equally poor ability to see others as just peers, instead it is all colored in various ways that amplify differences despite the reality being we are all people who run the same basic way, have the same basic needs, struggles.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government, that is tasked with writing moderation rules? That already exists: governments already have laws limiting some forms of speech e.g. copyright infringements or pornography. Obviously corporations that want to stay in business have to obey the laws. > "the idea of free speech in modern liberal democracies" As I've already pointed out, all states al…
> What I actually want is a world where people don't care whether FB censors things, because it doesn't matter as people can and do use other means to communicate. Fortunately, we already live in this world! We have the internet!
Lol, that has the public square embodied in a few big systems.
If it were me, I would have those regulated to be like utilities. Pre internet, business was done via phone. Deplatforming = not allowed to have a phone, and that basically did not happen.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I actually want is a world where people don't care whether FB censors things, because it doesn't matter as people can and do use other means to communicate. Fortunately, we already live in this world! We have the internet!
Lol, that has the public square embodied in a few big systems. If it were me, I would have those regulated to be like utilities. Pre internet, business was done via phone. Deplatforming = not allowed to have a phone, and that basically did not happen.
Deplatforming doesn't apply to phones because phone communication is fundamentally different from social media.
And prior to the internet, deplatforming still existed: when would you ever hear anyone make neo-nazi arguments on any of the broadcast tv networks?
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations. It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations. It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And t…
We’re talking about who to put in charge. The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything. There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several…
> The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything.
The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldiering. What things were like 200+ years ago has no bearing on how they should be today.
> Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.
One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building? Marx wasn't even in charge of any of those countries. Other people (such as Lenin, a lawyer, and Trotsky, born to a farmer) read his work, went "this shit sounds dope", and tragedy ensued.
I can point you to any number of countries run by "farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers" that weren't as successful as the US. As I already mentioned, Lenin was a lawyer. So was Fidel Castro. I hope I don't need to go through a list various military dictators.
> But I want a farmer actually running the country.
I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country. You can find people like that in every field. I couldn't care less what their background is.
The US succeeded (in part) because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity. George Washington stepped down voluntarily from the presidency after two terms. It seems normal to us but it was unthinkable back then. Everyone just assumed he'd stay in charge until he died.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind providing a source for this "ironclad fact"?
Not OP but a quick google search can get you there, if you’re lazy here’s one going over some stats https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20... I recently stumbled onto a clip on YT of Tucker Carlson using this term “the radical violent left”. The data is clear.. the right is getting far more violent (and far more violent than this “radical left”), I suspect the media is getting ahead of that narr…
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Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowhere in this article does it support what you're saying.
The first is a direct excerpt from the linked article, which is a high level summary of the press conference. The second is a reference to this https://youtube.com/watch?v=IwwwRC2xLC0
Okay, she's clearly talking about misinformation as it relates to public health. Do you think it should be up to the individual companies to discern the same dozen or so identifiable sources of anti-vax propaganda that's getting people needlessly killed?
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re talking about who to put in charge. The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything. There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several…
> The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything. The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldie…
> One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building?
No, that’s just the most egregious example. Circling back to my original point: I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes countries rich and how do you turn poor countries into rich ones. Academicians spend tons of time studying psychology, culture, politics can etc. But I can’t think of any of those theories that has ever been implemented in the real world to help a poor society develop into a rich one. When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.
> I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country.
No. Ideas don’t make countries successful. Integrity, yes, but academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard. And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.
> I couldn't care less what their background is. The US succeeded because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity.
The US succeeded because they were English by culture and departed little from the Anglo system of government and society, which was not created but evolved organically over centuries.
Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.” It ended in disaster and bloodshed.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer the way things are run in countries like France and Germany, where people understand the value of free speech in debating politics and spreading new ideas while also recognizing that some limits are necessary (e.g. limits on speech that promotes a resurgence of nazism).
The problem is, that the sentiment of "limits speech that promotes resurgence of X" is the same that dictatorships like Argentina used against the "subversives" that would promote and bring about communism. When you allow the powerful to define "dangerous speech". Criticism of the government very quickly becomes dangerous when it's successful. We've seen it with everything related to covid where in some countries peo…
That is an absolutist argument. Sure, some countries have used censorship in abusive ways, but I very specifically mentioned Germany. It was widely recognized after World War II that a resurgence of nazism would have been disastrous for Germany, and censorship was imposed to prevent the hundreds of thousands of committed nazi party members from trying to reestablish nazism. Censorship was absolutely necessary because propaganda had been so important in the rise of nazism in the first place, and because nazi ideas and the nazi world view did not simply die when Germany surrendered.
Despite very strict censorship laws related to nazi propaganda, nazi symbolism, and Holocaust denial, Germany ranks much higher than the United States in terms of press freedom and has ranked higher for many years. There is no serious argument that (modern, reunified) Germany is not a free society where people are free to criticize the government. Yes, there are limits to the ideas that are allowed to be publicly promoted or debated, because the same concerns about a resurgence of nazism remain relevant today (it has actually become worse in recent years).
The abuse of censorship laws on the part of dictatorships is not an argument against all censorship, any more than the abuse of the courts by dictatorships is an argument against the rule of law. Expansive censorship is a problem that works against the interests of a free society, but limited censorship is sometimes necessary to promote the interests of a free society.