Substack Notes Launched

You seem to be assuming bad faith. And then seize on anything you object to as a gotcha to disregard everything else.

That's a dishonest and unproductive approach to conversation. So I'm not going to bother with you for much longer.

But I'll address the point you objected to. In 2020, a whole infrastructure was created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. Their method was to pick topics, create fact checks, and then proactively hunt down and block misinformation and those who posted it. The existence of this infrastructure and its intended goals can be confirmed from a variety of sources, across the political spectrum.

As soon as it was created, it became a natural target for anyone who wished to manipulate things for political purposes. And it was quickly so used. For example see https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... for how Peter Damask managed to use it to suppress the lab leak story for about a year.

Now, as you'll undoubtably agree, Trump is a propaganda machine for whom lying is as natural as breathing. As a result the fact checking machine developed a knee-jerk response of fighting back against anything Trump had to say. But a stopped clock is still right 2x a day. And when Trump was actually right (eg kids don't spread COVID, Hunter Biden's laptop), the fact checking engine still classified his claims as misinformation, and still worked to suppress it.

But the problem is that when you tell people something that they can verify to be a lie, they will see EVERYTHING you see as a potential lie. And now it doesn't matter how often you tell them that X is a lie - they won't believe you. Which becomes a real problem when X actually is a lie.

Which brings us to our current situation. Somewhere around 40% of the USA currently believes that the 2020 election was stolen, and also have learned to distrust all of the news sources that could properly inform them. Obviously primary responsibility for this situation rests with Trump. But he wouldn't have succeeded so well without actions taken by groups including social media and mainstream media organizations that made his lies seem more plausible to his target audience. And it is those actions that I object to - exactly because they have helped fuel a politics-over-truth narrative on BOTH sides that I fear will lead to a really bad outcome in the end.

When people make mistakes under him, he never names them and instead takes ownership of their mistakes. Naming and firing them would be in fact a bad sign and a sign of a bad leader.

> Twitter has ample restrictions on harassing people.

Twitter has never had adequate restrictions on harassment. The were approaching it asymptotically for a while, but that's now in retreat.

> You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults.

Yes, I am also talking about censoring views. For example, views like, "the [ethnic group] must be exterminated to ensure white survival" do not belong on Twitter. For many reasons including both that they help shift the Overton Window toward genocide [1], and because it's really bad for Twitter as a business to have that shit running rampant.

> You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.

Nope. It's sincerely held, so at the very worse I could be wrong. But I'm not.

Some free-speech absolutists are absolutely pro-harassment. Every banned jackass has a deep believe that their free speech trumps absolutely everything else.

A good chunk of the rest are just indifferent to harassment, generally because they're comfortable white men who do not normally experience harassment as a means of social control. Many in this group may be inclined to use it themselves when one of the lesser orders is out of line, but they probably wouldn't recognize it as harassment when they do it. See e.g., Manne's "Down Girl" for more.

And the remainder just haven't thought it through. They fail to see it as balanced with other rights, like freedom of association or freedom from harm. Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME". Which is, y'know, a start on an ethical understanding, but they haven't yet gotten to things like Rawls's Veil.

Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment. Because any sort of platform that tries to follow it, as Twitter did in its early years, will be absolutely full of it.

[1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

I would hazard that they weren’t in a position to know or be sure, given the whistleblower’s revelations, but also that they wouldn’t be publicising random bugs from their bug tracker without reason.

The irony of someone claiming I'm lying in a thread where they've been shown to be so divorced from the idea of what truth is (which is edifying in itself) that they think stating the actual truth is somehow a technicality.

Here's one of my Canadian girlfriends defining woke, that I saw just the other day.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp2650xsuES/

Already you have chosen a path of such tribalism that if anyone opposes anything you say - no matter how wrong you clearly are - means that you have to cast childish aspersions that are easily countered. Perhaps it's time to, shall we say wake up to yourself.