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

on.substack.com

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

#91

Post by kolanos »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #40
gtsop wrote: 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…

I reckon it's a human condition issue, bare metal type shit. People, in general, simply can't possess the merits of blind trust and must be scrutinized. This striated opinion on a spectrum of trust, and in time resolution in to facts. Dialectics of account. Naive interventions only stand to exacerbate the condition, by my reckoning, and I don't suspect there is a real way to make smart interventions at scale. I think…

> Will the former be able to excuse himself, despite bad calls?

Apparently yes. For example, here's what Dr. Fauci was saying about HIV/AIDS in the 80's. [0]

[0]: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/fla...

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

#92

Post by throwawaygh »

nickff wrote: post #81
numtel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions. I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets. Capitalism is a symptom of power and information asymmetries. A few years ago, Zuckerberg said that all problems would be solved if everybody told the truth all the time. It's not that simple though.…

> "I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets." Profit is definitely one motivation for censorship, but there has been plenty of censorship in non-profit-centric situations. Communist countries and other government actors have been leaders in censorship, with no obvious profit motive.

OP is clearly referring to censorship in the "admin bans you from their website if you say things they don't like" sense, not the "government throws you in jail if you say wrong thing" sense. These conversations tend to become unproductive and devolve when folks conflate these two senses of the word censorship.

IMO, we should use "content moderation" for the former and "censorship" for the latter, congruent with historical usage. But people who are against content moderation will claim I'm being biased, even though I view the whole debate as a bit of red herring that distracts from the real issues. So I'd settle for "private-sector censorship" and "government censorship".

But in any case it's almost always counter-productive to conflate the two, to the point that it's a logical fallacy which should be named.

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

#93

Post by mattnewport »

zipswitch wrote: post #42

>we allow people to sound what alarms they want and patrons to decide for themselves what to pay attention to I think the above alteration throws the dilemma into a little sharper relief. We live in a complex society which requires a degree of deference to "expert authority" in order to function. Our collective ability to agree on how to determine who (or what) qualifies as such an authority is not working well. I do…

> I do not have any answers in which I am confident, just Socrates line on the beginning of wisdom.

Socrates who was censored by being executed because he said things the authorities of the time didn't like? That Socrates?

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

#94

Post by throwawaygh »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #30
ziroshima wrote: post #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.

>that is appropriate for them to be exposed to. Once the idea of dangerous speech becomes aknowledged, censorship just becomes a game of degrees.

This isn't at all true. Many free speech absolutists will happily concede the existence of dangerous speech and dangerous ideas.

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

#95

Post by AceJohnny2 »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #12

We don’t have a trust problem. We have a lack of trustworthy people in positions of power problem. I see how one can be easily confused. But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders because they have show repeatedly they’re not worthy of trust.

> But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders

Part of the problem is bad grouping. I trust some politicians, and some business leaders on some topics.

But it's too easy to raise your idols on pedestals where they can do no wrong and you trust them on everything. (Conversely, of vilifying an entire class)

I've watched it happen to a significant proportion of the US population. Ironically, in those cases I've personally observed, it actually started from a distrust of the "establishment".

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

#96

Post by nomel »

millzlane wrote: post #68

It's always funny to see uncensored writers talk about censorship.

A writer seeing the problems in the world slowly being censored, who hasn't been censored yet, is like a soldier writing about a war, who hasn't been killed yet. It doesn't seem that strange.

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

#97

Post by throwawaygh »

rdiddly wrote: post #23

It's sad that Substack has to sit there and explicitly explain that "Here is where you go when you want no censorship and to have all different views in a big melting pot where it's up to you to sort them out through rational interrogation, thought and/or debate." Even in my lifetime I seem to recall that place was usually just called "society." Granted I was young and am partly remembering what I was told the world…

Meh. It's consistent with their business model. And talking publicly about it is also consistent with their business model. The entire debate is a red herring.

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

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

timoth3y wrote: post #59

Too many people are confusing "censorship" and "content moderation". Content moderation is when you determine what is published on your platform. Censorship is when someone else tells you want can be published on your platform. Substack is probably making the right business decision, but the claim in this article is completely backwarrds. Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted be…

> Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted because they exercise extremely tight control over what gets published.

Editorial endorsement and evaluation of content can be entirely decoupled from publishing. This is what "overlay journals" based on repositories like ArXiV do: they provide independent endorsement of papers published elsewhere.

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

#99

Post by rhaksw »

Moderation should be fully reviewable. I made a site to do this for reddit [1]. As of this hour, user pages [2] work best because the archive service is down. Subreddit history pages [3], which show where the community and mods have disagreed the most, also still work.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq

[2] https://www.reveddit.com/y/rhaksw

[3] https://www.reveddit.com/v/worldnews/history

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

#100

Post by rootusrootus »

As a little exercise, about once a day I take a pass through CNN or NPR, and then another through Fox News. Just to get a high level idea of what each side believes reality to be. It is fascinating how little overlap there is. For the most part I don't think people are really arguing with each other, they're just arguing with a straw man they have constructed to represent the opposition.
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