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Private platforms can choose not to amplify hateful shit.
who gets to decide what is "hateful shit" ?
Just to make sure I understand this — the argument is that in order to combat authoritarianism, Silicon Valley companies should censor more content?
No worries, this time it's the good guys who want to censor you. We'd never abuse such power. We're just saving you from the bad guys. Pinky swear.
I always knew the day would come for Google. I just never imagined how things changed under Tim Cook.
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Systemic lopsided moderation (i.e. censorship) of one political viewpoint is absolutely denying people the right to participate in the democratic process. Just because we disagree with their viewpoint does not make censorship justified, nor does it take away from the fact that it is currently happening.
Can you plese define what that political viewpoint is you're talking about? Is it saying that the government should be smaller and not involved in everyday life, or is it doing things like claiming an election was stolen, which has led to real world harm (poll workers receiving death threats), or calling for violence?
Aren't governments (especially Germany and Australia for what they are doing at the moment) way more scarier than big tech? I am not scared of Google or Facebook at all. I am, however, scared of governments. Especially seeing how the pandemic was handled and how little resistance the handling got from the citizens.
This issue is so complicated. Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them. The alarming thing are the calls for censorship. Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally pu…
How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The problem is, everyone thinks they've become an epidemiologist and virologist over the last 18 months, people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want - some of the trials that claimed to show Ivermectin as a wonder drug were plagued with badly designed trial…
The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study.
> If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored")
And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
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Can you plese define what that political viewpoint is you're talking about? Is it saying that the government should be smaller and not involved in everyday life, or is it doing things like claiming an election was stolen, which has led to real world harm (poll workers receiving death threats), or calling for violence?
These are the same social media companies that allowed, nay promoted, a Russia truther narrative that Vladmir Putin personally stole the 2016 election to install his sleeper agent in the US presidency. The same truther narrative whose architects have since been arrested for propagating it.
And didn't the GOP helmed investigation find that there was a concerted disinformation campaign waged by Russia, as well as numerous links between people in the Trump campaign and Russian operatives?
Edit: and there are plenty of people on one side of the spectrum claiming that Biden is "in bed with China", which haven't been removed.
If they were going to give their award to a truly deserving recipient it would have been the tortured and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange who is an advocate of free speech and an independent media and voices. Instead they gave the awards deliberately to censorship advocates. It's the journalistic equivalent of giving war criminals and killers of children Nobel Peace Prizes like Kissinger and Obama. https://www.h…
I don't understand why one would be surprised at the recipients of the Peace Prize. Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil. Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
That was the same "authoritarianism" that saved us from a violent insurrection and another Donald Trump presidency.