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Old man ranting into the abyss. Perhaps that worked in his day but in these days of bot farms, ai generated bullshit, deepfakes and state sponsored trolling it’s unworkable.
We have to build the infrastructure to handle it, soon. Otherwise, there will be a day where the AI will be so good that there are no moderators left who are good enough to make the right decisions.
An aspect it doesn't touch on is that today, free speech is often legally constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as "misinformation" or "hate speech", censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard.
The problem with saying that something is "misinformation" is that it must mean "something we believe is false". If I claim that it's raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states ("I'm cold") we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can't "ban misinformation", you can only ban information you believe to be false. When an authority controls "misinformation", they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others.
Second, "hate speech" is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the observable evidence isn't sufficient.
Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren't illegal in many countries, but that's of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.
This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won't talk about into danger zones.
There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes
The book banning and restrictions on content in classrooms in Florida are further examples of people being fine with restrictions on speech. At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.
There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes
I believe that an intelligent person should be able to hold two conflicting perceptions at the same time. Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech. But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn't so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barr…
Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it's basically never interesting.
There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book banning and restrictions on content in classrooms in Florida are further examples of people being fine with restrictions on speech. At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
No, the overwhelming dominance in cancel culture over the last few years has been from the left. Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.