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> Below are a couple examples from ChatGPT: Please don't do this.
What’s the preferred way of citing my source? Or are you saying ChatGPT isn’t a valid source?
This whole article is really confusing. It sounds like there were two things: - Covid disinformation - Some nonsense about Hunter Biden and they're being conflated. What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing Covid disinformation? A disease that was estimated to kill up to 30m people worldwide.
If the Federal Government was telling media companies, right now, that they couldn't show video of Trumps' family sexual escapades (that the Trump family took); that would be similar.
Hunter's pedicure was not russian disinformation, and the government knew that when it told media companies it couldn't be spoken of. That is election interference.
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I'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or politics. How do you imagine that would work?
I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes…
It is sometimes easy to say in retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story. But they did and they trusted the US Administration. Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US? Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19? We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work. If we try the Reddit rout…
The problem with Covid censorship (a problem not limited to Facebook) was that Covid was an airborne virus, and the arbiters of allowable speech decided that the truth about Covid was "misinformation" that needed to be suppressed. How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airbo…
Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists.
All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies.
Etc.
The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book.
Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
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Most people don’t want free speech, and no country has free speech anyway. The question is what limits are made.
The United States has free speech by all but the most extreme definitions. The 1st Amendment is well-tested and supported by the courts. Sometimes, like in Citizens United, to an extremely flexible definition of speech (political campaign donations by corporations.)
That costs money.
Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can be placed in a "free speech zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured.
Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
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The US gov pressured social media companies to censor posts about both those topics for political reasons, even though a lot of what was said turned out to be true
> censor posts about both those topics for political reasons In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons" is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were right to crack down on it. The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is tenuous at best. It's not clear t…
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The US gov pressured social media companies to censor posts about both those topics for political reasons, even though a lot of what was said turned out to be true
> censor posts about both those topics for political reasons In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons" is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were right to crack down on it. The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is tenuous at best. It's not clear t…
I suppose it's human nature to reach out for miracle cures, but the way people behaved in the pandemic still surprised me. Reaching for random drugs like hydroychloroquine or dewormers (why couldn't it have been a fun drug like cocaine?) and eschewing actual covid vaccines makes one wonder how it is possible that one shares a reality with their fellow humans. Obviously they do not.
- it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests
- sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room]
- Everything at CEO level is "political"
- centralization of social media and forums allowed for this behavior. It would be impossible to "control" the Internet with federated Internet
- various powers fight over the Internet (governments, China, Russia, corporations, billionaires etc.). This is why it difficult to tell what is the truth, everyone tries to shift our perception
- YouTube removed thumbs down not to protect small creators. Moderation on social media is also not to protect ordinary people, but to retain clean image, or to keep investors happy
- sometimes when social media removes post is censorship. Sometimes it is not, but both scenarios occur
- some people that complain about free speech might be influenced by foreign powers
- some people that say moderation is required want just more control over social media for their own benefit, agenda
- I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media"
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The problem with Covid censorship (a problem not limited to Facebook) was that Covid was an airborne virus, and the arbiters of allowable speech decided that the truth about Covid was "misinformation" that needed to be suppressed. How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airbo…
Not just that. Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists. All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies. Etc. The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectivene…
The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.