Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism

As if, facebook and twitter would not have banned him if he used their platform?

I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now. Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'. Both are unacceptable in sustainable society.

Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly result in killing other people?

> 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off.

"It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:

"High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380

Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807

High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271

Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte

Krosch [1974] QdR 107

ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13"

https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/

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On Australia's ranked choice implementation:

Some people (including me) see Australia's system as the forcing of an appearance of consent for the election of the same two parties. Within that system, you're not only not allowed to find all of the candidates unacceptable (and/or not to care about the outcome), but even further you're forced to rank all of the candidates. Albert Langer tried to get people to rank both major parties equally last, rather than accepting being forced to show a preference between them, and was jailed.

"During his incarceration, Albert Langer was deemed by Amnesty International to be a 'Prisoner of Conscience.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer

Australia managed to create a system even worse than FPTP. It annihilates small parties, and with their aggressive defense of it, this is obviously an intended effect. I think they just need proper runoffs if they honestly want to record people's preferences. At the absolute least, allow people to abstain from endorsing every candidate (but one, practically speaking.) Instead, millions of people who despise both the Labor and Liberal candidates have their votes recorded for one or the other every single election, under pain of fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote

Australian-style ranked choice reduces to almost exactly what we have now, but additionally artificially inflates the support of status quo incumbents.

Who cares? It's a private platform.

This comment section is a painful read--when it comes to "free speech" this community somehow loses all sense of nuance or introspection.

Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers.

That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable.

With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously.

How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?