Live data from Hacker News

Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

on.substack.com

1–10 of 606 posts

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#3
The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. Once that trust is broken I don't know how you rebuild it.

Hell people I commonly talk to still believe a police officer was beaten to death on 1/6 and that people, other then the women shot for trying to enter the chambers, died directly due to the riot. All because of that what the news reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#4
No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions. But you've really got your head up your own ass if you convince yourself that you are protecting people by deciding the information that is appropriate for them to be exposed to. I just don't understand the shortsightedness, the naivete, or the willingness to discard the principle of free speech.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#5
Wait.. what? Society has a trust problem? Implying we should trust people in power (economic and state) that have repeatedly and shamelessly acted for their own benefit against the interest of the public while they control the media (tv and online) to censor and/or shaddow-ban criticism and alternate views?

Yes, if that's what you mean. We have a trust problem because there are people in power who are not trustworthy. And yes, their acts of censorship will only make this problem worse.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#7
You could argue that it is just another stage in 'Escape from Freedom'. I am going to simplify a lot here, but basically the process goes something like this:

-Things are hard; people fight and win some degree of autonomy -Status quo sets in; people believe this is how it always will be -Things get easy and people forget what freedom is -Things get hard..

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#8
I can empathize with this line of thinking but its incredibly unimaginative. Censorship is a symptom of a larger problem and users reliant upon something that intentionally abuses them, like Facebook, is a different symptom of the same problem. To me that larger problem is centralized information ownership and people shouldn't trust it.

This is the compelling motivator of decentralization.

Decentralization isn't blockchain, web3, or whatever. Blockchain is third party storage.

In a decentralization scheme data resides at destinations. Nobody owns it but the destinations. Nobody observes it but destinations. There is no third party censorship.

The only users that have to suffer third party censorship are influencers and broadcasters who don't want decentralization.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#9
One problem I am having is that on the left I thought things were pretty high quality from a facts / science side, and that has eroded. Fair disclosure - I'm a max dem donor and will likely continue to vote 100% dem.

7,000 (!) scientists have signed the John Snow memorandum. It states that "Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection".

https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html

6th paragraph

This is despite the fact that our immune system has shown to work, pretty well, for almost ALL other influenzas and pandemics, that almost all analogous types of infections have LONG lasting natural immunity (MERS / SARS etc) etc.

The CDC director has signed this letter.

So we have a problem. CDC blocks testing, then says masks don't help, then says only vaccines can protect us. All these have (or will likely be) obviously false.

So trust in the left I think is diminishing - too many lawyers? Too many folks focused on politics? Too many public health officials / scientists and not enough hard science folks?

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#10
post #5

Wait.. what? Society has a trust problem? Implying we should trust people in power (economic and state) that have repeatedly and shamelessly acted for their own benefit against the interest of the public while they control the media (tv and online) to censor and/or shaddow-ban criticism and alternate views? Yes, if that's what you mean. We have a trust problem because there are people in power who are not trustworthy…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN