I am of two minds of this and would invite people to give me some opinions on this thing.
On one hand, I love free speech and think it is good. The innovation capable from people being ably to publish their views, congregate freely, etc. is a foundational good I believe in.
On the other hand, I'm aware that certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects. E.g. cults are horrible, even though people are freely congregating, they just feel like they can't leave because of the emotional abuse these influential figures are heaping via their speech.
On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech. That just seems so wrong to me.
The model I apply to, basically, everything about the past twenty years, is to compare it to the Industrial Revolution. I believe we're in the midst of the Information Revolution now and while history doesn't map to the present 1-1, it comes pretty close.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited.
But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
There actually was another Information Revolution we can draw historical comparisons to - the printing press. The Lutheran Church is a direct outcome from that, as were some much more interesting and exciting events - check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for an entertaining overview.
Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses, but they were removed by the Roman Catholic Church because they determined it violated their community guidelines.
I listened to a discussion last winter about misinformation, rumors, and figuring out how to deal with them as a society. One of the people involved made a comment along the lines of "when he thinks about the internet he remembers that the invention of the printing press was followed by 200 years of religious upheaval and wars."
That made an impression on me, it seems like such a hard problem to think about well. I've seen that moderation is something that is very difficult to scale beyond a relatively small group of both consumers and moderators.
These are public, as was the fact that there were multiple "Disinformation" hires. However, the meetings between the Wikimedia Foundation and the DHS specifically (as opposed to government agencies generally) were not mentioned in public communications, to my knowledge.
> These are public, as was the fact that there were multiple "Disinformation" hires. However, the meetings between the Wikimedia Foundation and the DHS specifically (as opposed to government agencies generally) were not mentioned in public communications, to my knowledge.
Embezzling information is a form of disinformation too.
This is actually a great comparison, and we can look at the proliferation of anti-witchcraft propaganda leading to the brutal murders of thousands of women and queer people for a prototypical example of the very real damage caused by disinformation.
persecution of non-straight people is not new. are you wanting a source for linking queer and witchcraft specifically as one, as I'm not sure that's what the GP was intended even if the wording leans that way.
It's hard to see what else might have been intended, since this phrase seems to be linked to the "anti-witchcraft propaganda" phrase, with nothing else dangling there to apply it to.
> But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
From past research into the history of the Industrial Revolution where it comes to pollution, I've seen that there were many court cases brought up to oppose industrial pollution from factories on farmers and others' land. What happened in these cases is that contrary to all past legal precedent of landowners' property rights, the rulings went in favor of industry because it was seen to be in the collective good to see progress and that superseded the individual rights of the landowners to not have their land damaged by pollution.
The lesson I see from the Industrial Revolution isn't one of dangerous force multipliers, but that ignoring individual rights always comes back to bite you.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
I think we all (or most of us) agree that individual rights exist.
But what is this collective rights you're mentioning? How are rights possessed by a group that aren't possessed by individuals? And if so, which rights and which groups?
And if collective rights exist and if they're ever in conflict with individual rights, why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
> why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
> Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
A simple answer about legality might be: "You can kill all of the fish in a lake that you own just as you can kill all of the fish in your fish tank, but not your neighbor's fish tank".
The legal cases in the Industrial Revolution that cropped up were the equivalent of a factory owner dumping poison in a farmer's lake and a judge merely saying to the farmer, "That's progress, sucks to be you". A strict adherence to property rights could have prevented many environmental problems.
PS: I'm obviously not familiar with your life experience and background, but for some reason it doesn't seem like you've encountered much in the way of libertarian style arguments on this before. I'm not here to do the proselytization thing (and I don't even think I'm a libertarian), but for the sake of enhancing your own arguments, I'd highly recommend looking into some libertarian-style environmentalist discussions on Reddit, looking into searches like "free-market environmentalism", or looking into libertarian-esque environmental think tanks like https://www.perc.org/ to gain a better understanding of what you're arguing against.
> One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
If you can come up with a better definition, I'd be open to hear it and noodle it over, but it sounds like there's no objective standard.
I'm sure your intentions are good here, but a hypothetical imaginary person's rights could always end up trumping an actual person's rights. Think about what happened in much of history. There was no objective code of laws and if there was some judge like a king or tribe leader or high priest or something, he just based his decisions on whatever he felt might have been reasonable. It was always seen as a great civilizational progress for humanity to try and codify all laws into a legal system that could be objectively understood. Not sure that what you're arguing for, based on how you described it, is anything but a step backwards.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
We already have laws which provide penalties for 8+ categories of illegal speech: {Obscenity, Fighting words, Defamation, Child pornography, Perjury, Blackmail, Incitement to imminent lawless action, True threats, fraud, conspiracy to commit a felony, etc}.
My assessment is the tools of the law (police departments, prosecutors, courts, and tort litigation) don't move at the scale of internet posters/commenters.
How long did it take for Alex Jones to build a theory about the Newtown School Shooting kids' parents/families/investigators? He probably just remixed some 4Chan theory in a few minutes then went onto his show unscripted.
How long (and how many resources) did it take the plaintiffs and their lawyers to gather evidence, do discovery, fight AJones's legal motions to delay the case? Literally years. The first case was finally settled 10 years after the shooting.
The law doesn't move fast enough because of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[1]. New laws are unlikely to solve that problem. IMHO only very consistent prosecution of people that do violate the law would dissuade law breakers.
If Brandolini's law is true and if there is gonna be a ministry of truth, then that ministry probably needs to grow exponentially and suck up all other ministries until all BS is eliminated.
[The Ministry of Truth] was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The law moves reasonably fast on criminal cases. The lawsuit against Alex Jones was a civil case, which are inherently less urgent. Many cases were also delayed due to the recent pandemic.
What's your point? 18 months to resolve a criminal case seems reasonable. There's no particular need to move faster. Delays in criminal cases usually happen with the consent of the defendant since they consider it advantageous to have more time, especially if they're not being held in jail. Defendants can usually accelerate the process if they insist on maximally exercising their 6th Amendment rights but most don't.
I wish HN had a way to bubble up or highlight comments from particular people on an opt-in basis. Your comments are always insightful and high quality.
I bookmark some of the outstanding contributors on this forum, usually because of regular insights or domain expertise. It’s quite amazing to read comments from deeply knowledgeable people, who in some cases have even been witnesses to history or inventors.
There is nothing new about this. Mobs, riots, and mass unrest have occurred as a result of rumors, conspiracies, and "disinformation" since the beginning of human civilization.
It was a major concern during the Constitutional Convention that:
> In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.
What's different is we're coming out of a time when a very small class of people had near-total functional control (or so they thought) over mainstream media, so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable.
The arguments you're making are not new arguments. They're the exact same arguments made by authoritarian regimes for millenia. From the article:
> In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.
The problem is dissent. Much of the government is run and controlled by a class of people whose beliefs and values are becoming increasingly divorced from other segments of the population. And rather than re-adjusting their policies and goals in line with a democratic consensus, they want to stay their course and tighten control of speech and even thought in the name of social order and harmony. None of this is new at all.
200 years ago, everyone had about the same power to reach people. Oh, sure, it was easier the richer you were, but the difference was not dramatic and wealth inequality was not as dramatic a factor. Then in the 20th to early 21st centuries, broadcast television and media consolidation put a lot of one-way power into the hands of a very small set of hands. Now everyone is on the same playing field once again.
The issue is not the strawman you put up, where you mention it is scary to the leaders that people are getting access to information and making choices. The issue is that people are riling up large groups of people based on lies and making deadly threats (like Trump's "beat up the people in the crowd who are protesting"), leading to threats, attacks on govt - these attacks are based on absolute lies, and deadly threats of violence and some of them end up happening. Also your broad arguments about "authoritarian regimes did things, so they are bad". It's the specifics that matter. Dictators who controlled everything in say Russia also controlled the production of milk, that doesn't mean milk deliveries are authoritarian and bad.
Everyone is not on the same level now. Some are willing to make incredibly outlandish claims about stolen elections, and make personal threats to others, they are fine with that and they have enough power to make it hard to stop them or counter their reach.
> so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable.
"These people" have brought us a mass convergence of social panics (some recent, others remixed):
- Anti-government zealotry (a la sovereign citizens, accelerationists, Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, Turner Diaries readers, Amon Bundy militia, 3 Percenters, Boogaloo Boys, neo-nazis)
- traditional family advocates / anti LGBTQ+
- sexual slavery/trafficking
- anti police-violence (both the pro-police and anti-police movements)
- local community book burning
- "abortion is genocide"
- "white genocide"
- 2020 election fraud
- anti "Jews control the [elite organization]" (millennias old)
- Pizzagate / adrenachrome / HollyWeird / "cabal of [elite people] who [some secret sex or slavery acts]" / QAnon
- Obama birtherism
- numerous things with the Clintons including "the Clinton Kill Count", "HER EMAILS!!!", and Benghazi
- numerous things with Donald Trump (too many to name)
- George Soros (theories about uses of dark money)
- The Koch brothers (theories about uses of dark money)
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
What about a private sector solution?
We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time.
It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.
The private sector has over and again shown that it is not the right lever to use when trying to solve public commons / ecological problems. The private sector is what gave us Dickensian hellholes full of child coal miners, the North Atlantic cod collapse, the Bhopal disaster, etc.
Private enterprises are structurally incentivized to externalize their costs in order to compete with other private enterprises. They are about as good at preserving a shared public space (physical, ecological, or informational) as any of the hippos are in Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I'm not anti-market in general. I think within the bounds of a well-structured regulated market, they have shown an incredible ability to increase efficiency and allow goods and labor to flow around and organize.
But that only works when the market participants are playing a game with rules and enforcement. If you just get a bunch of people together all trying to win without regulation, you get a quarterback carrying an assault rifle onto the field.
> We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food.
Yes, but we do not rely on Michelin to make sure we don't each roaches or get food poisoning. We rely on regulation for that. Michelin ratings don't scale to the level needed for food safety. It's a niche, luxury product.
> It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
Reporting without enforcement is pointless. There were many many reports showing clearly that the North Atlantic cod population was going to collapse. The fisherman didn't care. They just wanted to get what they could out of the water for as long as they could.
This is a prime example of the private sector working, while Republicans crying fowl without knowing or caring that they are destroying the private sector solution.
Reminder that Google's response to the Republican claims is to RTFM when sending email marketing:
> Google denied the allegations, saying the spam filtering is based on actions taken by users. "As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation," Google said in a statement provided to Ars. "Gmail's spam filters reflect users' actions. We provide training and guidelines to campaigns, we recently launched an FEC-approved pilot for political senders, and we continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam." [1]
GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
Getting regulators involved in this case is increasing nanny-state actions from the party that claims to hate the nanny-state.
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
i think this highlights an interesting dynamic we’re seeing pretty often lately, groups are trying to force their beliefs and the recipients are saying “i’m not at all interested.”
it really seems reminiscent to what i’ve read about the 60s-90s religious groups where these groups were trying to force their personal religious beliefs onto society.
these groups are now suing to use government force to force companies to force their views onto all of us.
again:
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
The capture and revolving door definitely goes both ways.
Although my comment may not be sufficient to prove anything, there's a lot to explore with this topic. For instance, here's an example in the other direction:
>more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms. And Schumer's two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram.
This article is only about the one direction, but you can be sure the revolving door goes both ways in big-tech. Just look at all the ex-NATO officers currently wor
If Google (specifically GMail) is rent-seeking, the Republican lawsuit isn't an example of it.
The study Republicans cite only displayed a bias in the default training of a new email account that had never trained the spam filter:
> "Shahzad said while the spam filters demonstrated political biases in their 'default behavior' with newly created accounts, the trend shifted dramatically once they simulated having users put in their preferences by marking some messages as spam and others as not," the Post article said. [1]
In other words, Republican email messages are more likely to use spammy phrases. Once a user starts marking any messages as "mark as spam" or "move to inbox", the bias dissipates.
This is not anywhere close to a good example of rent seeking.
Reciving thousands of spam emails per user per day is ... not normal. If they weren't exxagerating then there must have some factors that saw them targeted specifically. I encoruage you to run your own mail server and publish your address on the web and see that the reality is pretty manageable without any filter.
Everything that has transpired over the past ~30 years with the big tech companies should have shown you that the private sector does not give a shit about our individual rights.
> We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
This is contradictory.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?
It isn't in the parallel they are drawing - right now you have free permission to visit public property and forests and national parks but you still can't cause harm to others or the property (set fires). So while there is personal freedom, it is not at the cost of other people's freedom.
As to your second point, what about social networks not showing content that they believe to be objectionable. Does that count as “not forcing someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don’t want to?”
"Contradictory" presumes that a given property is Boolean and thus if it isn't one value, it must be the other.
Very few useful properties outside of the artificial worlds of logic and computing are Boolean. Most properties we are trying to design systems for out in the real world continuously varying and often multi-dimensional.
That's why optimizing them requires difficult trade-offs.
I think disinformation is not as a significant problem as it is often made out to be. It would not need immediate attention. It is the individual decision of some people to listen to it. Many of them know better, but they have a conflict with those that want to set themselves up to discern truth and wrong.
Especially with topics like the pandemic I see no authority that could help here and maybe that isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.
"Information" and "misinformation" is not. The problem of "truth" is a philosophical one - how do you know that a particular claim is, indeed, true? Very few things in the world are directly provable. Even judges and juries get it wrong a lot, even when human lives - apparently the most valued things in society - are at stake.
Your model has a fatal flaw in its assumption that "the truth" is something obvious that we all agree upon. It's not - it's subjective and complicated.
The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.
Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.
> The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.
This seems more like a problem of convincing people of truth than problem of the contept of pollution. We have built technology to detect it - we have no such technology to detect truth. So pollution is measurable, truth is not.
> Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.
No, I don't think me having an epiphany of "Gasp! That person on the internet was RIGHT, I was completely WRONG! Pollution is a harder problem than truth!" is going to happen, no matter how much history of ecology I learn. It's a cute sentiment, though.
Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment. And even then we learn new things and have to revise opinions on what we define as "pollution" and what not. See the history of Asbestos, or of CFCs for examples of things we didn't think of as "polluting" initially or assumed the tradeoffs were worth it, only to later realize that they aren't.
> Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment
We also have centuries (even millennia) of experience studying the truth. Yet the problem of truth is still as hard as always. I don't see how could any amount of experience solve such fundamental problems.
I don't think the issue at hand is truths and lies, it's the ability to both communicate with hundreds of millions of people easily while at the same time also being able to create smaller silos of group think with no restriction on geography.
The initial comment's argument is comparing "misinformation" with "pollution", since misinformation can now be massively broadcast to many people through the internet, causing ill effects.
The problem is differentiating between "information" and "misinformation" - which is exactly the issue of truth and lies, isn't it?
Otherwise, if you ignore the truthfulness of information, and judge only by the effects, you're walking a slippery slope towards censoring truth because "it's harmful".
We've been trying to find ways to discover truth for much much longer than we've been looking for pollution. I think consensus is that there are some things that are unprovable - e.g., the existence of a god. We know with a high degree of certainty, thanks to Kurt Godel and others, that there are things that cannot be proven.
You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective.
It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time.
We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier.
Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily.
It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.
No we don't need any more legislation to restrict or suppress freedom of expression. Our current laws are working fine. Today's "disinformation" occasionally becomes tomorrow's historical fact or accepted scientific theory. If, as a consequence, some people suffer incidental harm or take offense then that is a completely acceptable outcome.
Drivers find it quite uncomfortable to be without a car. If they don't use internet from birth, they shouldn't miss it. Or it can be an internet cafe or ATM/kiosk (for a public transport system).
Too many institutions now presume internet access for that to be true, even here in Germany, despite many of the people around me with the meme that German bureaucracy is pre-digital.
And I have a driving licence, but have had no need to drive since moving to Berlin.
I'm not talking about ATMs. I'm taking about government functions, banking (can't invest shares on an ATM), taxation, how to find out which services can be accessed where and when, what schedule changes are planned for public transport, collecting parcels that have been redirected and finding out where they were redirected to, doctor appointments, and so on.
Sometimes these things can be done without internet, but not always, and the current trend is moving more things online-only.
Flaming hot take: the Internet was better in the past because only developed nations had access to it. As soon as mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry and BRIC countries and the like had easy access to it, the quality of everything plummeted. The amount of bad actors that flooded into the system was astronomical.
Hot countertake: No nation has a monopoly on jackasses and the majority of problems in my life caused by misinformation on the Internet came from my fellow Americans.
Just charge for tweets and posts, & like everything else the rich will do as they please and the rest of us will obey the law. I'm pretty sure that arrangement will quickly put an end to fears of "disinformation!"
> to cause large-scale pollution
Be Exxon and have expensive lawyers and you'll be fine.
Looked at from another angle, I guess I'm proposing a thought experiment:
Imagine if only billionaires, celebrities, or "papers of record" were permitted to opine. Would we be discussing the problem of disinformation and how to institutionally address it using police powers?
- "and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality"
How is that any different from violence inspired by correct facts?
Following the logic you're laying out, I don't think it's the defense of truth you're advocating for; it's social harmony and stability. Basically the ideals favored in the Chinese model -- which censors true things and false things equally, depending on their social impact.
Do you truly see no difference between a lie that leads to someone getting harmed and a truth that leads to the same outcome? Your argument seems disingenuous.
> Following the logic you're laying out, I don't think it's the defense of truth you're advocating for; it's social harmony and stability. Basically the ideals favored in the Chinese model -- which censors true things and false things equally, depending on their social impact.
This is a straw man. The original comment made no such argument. From the comment you're responding to:
> ... I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
> Do you truly see no difference between a lie that leads to someone getting harmed and a truth that leads to the same outcome?
Only if the action is justifiable in the first place. Let’s say someone wants to kill gay people (or people who are against vaccines, or people who want to raise taxes); does it really matter whether he kills an actual gay person or whether he kills a straight person who he mistakenly thinks is gay?
If they have to believe in a mythical deity that dispenses "justice" post-death in order to quell their urges to commit murder, they probably should be treated for mental illness or otherwise removed from society, as they are a ticking time bomb.
If they are sincere, it's very useful to allow them to identify themselves by publicly announcing this in advance. Much easier to stop them before they get going if you know who they are.
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not a bad idea. It was scorned and mocked in the 20th century because it had become so unwieldy and impractical, based on the widespread use of the printing press and other media such as film, television, and music.
Now, "truth" is an interesting thing. Ricky Gervais decided that the founders of Christianity were the lying liars, perhaps because their stories were not concretely, verifiably true in every historical detail, and therefore Ricky concluded that Christianity is a fabric of lies made up to make people feel better or control us or something.
Unfortunately it's Ricky who's got the short end of the Truth. Because Truth is more than just facts that are printed in a newspaper about the daily police blotter. Once you accept that there are higher, more important Truths than what you'll find in Wikipedia, we'll all be a lot better off. And we can better evaluate those lower-order facts and figures for what they really are.
Ok you’re espousing a view that’s fringe on HN and of course you were downvoted (not by me), but I’d just like to raise a technical point:
The truth of Wikipedia is epistemic, as is the truth of theology, and as such it’s possible to evaluate them in different epistemic systems and draw different conclusions.
But capital-t Truth is capitalized to indicate that it is an ontological rather epistemological signifier, i.e. a name referring to a personal entity.
So technically speaking God is not a higher or lower truth, in the sense of the verity of a proposition, as you can’t compare a person with a fact.
If we start conflating epistemology with ontology, then... God help us! We’ll end up calling night day, and figuratively literally :)
Violence is better avoided. Most people also believe violence is situationally justified in service of other values, and this is an arena in which the truth of the situation matters very much. This is why we have court proceedings where we aspire to reach conclusions of correct facts before we allow the state to apply law and sentencing that may do violence to property, liberty, or person.
The flip side is much as Voltaire is supposed to have said: "Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust" or "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Violence inspired by incorrect facts is violence automatically out of accord with worthwhile values.
I think this is an insightful comment, but i'm not sure its merely the Chinese model at play. It's also the purpose of courts and lawmaking.
So that the harmony and stability of society can continue; and the truth of the matter can be adjudicated (defense or offense) in a thorough and thoughtful manner.
Why should we leave this battle to be taken up in the public square and threads like this?
Truth is truth, the defining feature of truth is it's independence of any view point. To suggest it can be adjudicated is to imply that there is no longer truth and only the power of the weak over the strong.
Violence inspired by disinformation is so drastically different than violence inspired by correct information though.
If a pizza parlor was actually a pedo ring or a politician was actually sacrificing babies (both real examples of widely spread and believed misinfo right now) the violence induced against the perpetrators would be vigilantism but still considered morally defensible to most people due to failure to take action from the authorities.
It seem perfectly sensible to say that we apparently have a big problem due to people literally shooting up pizza parlors over disinformation, and that if someone was shooting up a pizza parlor over correct information the situation would be different and warrant different responses.
Go read about the Franklin scandal, or the Dutroux scandal before you spout things you are sure aren't happening (in particular the X-witness reports). Elm house, Kinkora in UK. Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner-Mossad, etc, need I go on?
I propose many people pretending to be arbiters of truth refuse to acklowledge facts and citations before them.
The mainstream media inspires wars... they don't get held to account do they? Why the sudden focus on arbitrary standards and funny how they always get applied to those that vary outside the approved overton window.
Obviously pedophilia exists in the world. There obviously should be authorities whose job it is to investigate such things. People absolutely need to be able raise suspicions to authorities for due investigation.
Pizzagate was not that: half the people repeating it were doing it as a meme, were in on the joke. People spread it even knowing it is not true.
I don't know what your point about journalists are: it's literally journalists deliberately spreading damaging misinfo like Alex Jones that need to be held accountable here. The DHS isn't able to go after grandma at Thanksgiving dinner for saying Clinton drinks baby blood.
> I don't know what your point about journalists are: it's literally journalists deliberately spreading damaging misinfo like Alex Jones that need to be held accountable here. The DHS isn't able to go after grandma at Thanksgiving dinner for saying Clinton drinks baby blood.
But how come only the right needs to stop misinformation? Not a day goes by that an article from the left MSM comes out spouting wildly incorrect information (for instance, recently with the SIG SCX SPEAR). The left has increased division and hate in this country and now we’re seeing the result.
It is never morally defensible if you do not have conclusive evidence. Of course what would be considered conclusive is subjective, but that is a matter of education as there can be objective standards. These will never be approached by vigilantism though.
> and that if someone was shooting up a pizza parlor over correct information the situation would be different and warrant different responses.
Wow this is scary, and kinda borderline needs to be reported to the FBI. Why is shooting up a pizza parlor acceptable when the information is “correct”? This is cult behavior.
I did not say it is "correct" to shoot up a pizza parlor. I am saying that scenario of "people knowingly lie, other people are misled, other people cause violence" is an even worse situation for society than "people know the truth, people cause violence". The second one is already horrible, the first one is especially horrible.
I can empathize with the people who are deceived. The person who attacked Pelosi has now had his life ruined by lies; the lies induced him to commit violence against an innocent person. That's a thing that is sad on top of Mr. Pelosi who was almost murdered thanks to the lies. It is a pretty sad situation that people lying without consequences resulted in that outcome for both of them.
If he knew the truth and committed the crime then either 1) it was justified vigilantism or 2) it was a wrong action that he did of his own volition. Either way is is less bad than an wrong action that he was tricked into.
But how come you used an example from the left? How come you weren’t neutral and used an example from both sides? Now you looked biased and are guilty of spreading the same misinformation you’re claiming was spread in the Pelosi instance. You will cause violence against republicans with your comments, so you are now just as guilty.
Furthermore, speaking of misinformation, Pelosi’s attacker was a hardcore liberal, then suddenly became a hardcore Trumpist? And the evidence supporting this was viewed by a handful of police officers and we just have to trust them that someone can make this radical of a change from receiving misinformation? Parts of this story still don’t add up, and looks very convenient to happen right now before midterms. On top of an 82 year old surviving a hammer attack.
> It seem perfectly sensible to say that we apparently have a big problem due to people literally shooting up pizza parlors over disinformation
This is a perfect example of why this is a bad idea. Thank you for being the example. No one shot up a pizza parlor due to disinformation. A single concerned citizen brought a gun to a pizza shot to ascertain if there was a pedo ring being operated in it, after confirming there was not, he handed over his gun and not a single shot was fired.
But you honestly believe that to be the case, either because it benefits your argument or because someone lied to you or because you misinterpreted something you read. But you now believe this is the truth and everyone who disagrees with that "truth" should be censored.
> On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, arrived at Comet Ping Pong and fired three shots from an AR-15 style rifle that struck the restaurant's walls, a desk, and a door.
Your response is exactly why people are getting away with proposing draconian measures like this. You need to stop ingesting and spreading disinformation.
This is a perfect example of disinformation. According to a contemporaneous report by the New York Times, the “concerned citizen” (which of course is a strange thing to call a criminal, but leaving that aside) illegally discharged an AR platform rifle inside the building, in order to destroy a lock.
Think about why a person would want you to believe that the shooter’s actions were perfectly normal or why they would want you to believe you misremembered the event.
I don't understand your point; you think it's just fine that people deliberately slandered and lied about a pizza place to the extent that someone believed it, went in with an AR and fired rounds and that's all fine because no one died?
Surely even if you think that was fine, it would have been better than fine if the guy did that same thing to a pizzeria actually was a pedo ring? My comment was only saying that violence induced by outright lies has a relevant difference than violence which is a reaction to things that actually happened. Those seem clearly different even if you think censorship is not a viable or correct solution to "violence induced by misinfo".
You’re excusing violence cause by your party, but demanding change for the other party. Both parties need to stop the violence. Having actually fought in a war, violence is never acceptable unless someone is trying to take your life.
In fairness, American political culture does leak and infect the rest of the English-speaking cultural sphere, so we do have an interest in it.
For example, when Americans went nuts and tried to remove/deface historical statues, here in Finland local Leftist party's youth group suggested removing a statue of Mannerheim. Mannerheim was a war leader during the Finnish Civil War and led the Finnish defense against Russia during WW2.
He's literally one of the primary reasons those Leftist youth organization chucklefucks' parents didn't grow up behind the Iron Curtain, yet they wanted his statue removed. They definitely got the idea from the US.
No one can comment on the mere idea of violence based on lies without having picked a side and defending a specific political agenda now?
To my knowledge it was never the Republican Party's position is that pizzeria was a pedophile ring was it? What should being of a particular political party have to do with it, that event was based on 100% confirmed fake news. There are no conservative or liberal policies seem involved in that story at all?
> No one can comment on the mere idea of violence based on lies without having picked a side and defending a specific political agenda now?
If it’s unrelated to your politics, yes. What’s the point of you stating your opinion otherwise? Do you realize this can be construed as interference? Would you like Americans commenting on your political issues?
There's a problem of adversarial attack right now.
An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
All they have to do is put doubt in people's mind, keep the focus on others, and appeal to emotions of more and more people slowly.
They can do that because they are free to do it.
Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
Then they can continue the same speech they've always been pushing as propaganda, even denying the removal, bans, jailing, and all that of their opposition, and voila.
This is a pretty straightforward playbook. It's played out many times before.
You can call it a soft-coup:
> populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy
At least to me, it's very obvious our system is susceptible to this kind of adversarial attack. I don't know the solution, you don't want to prevent this attack but enable another one in doing so, but it's a huge threat vector and I'd hope we recognize it and do something to mitigate it.
>There's a problem of adversarial attack right now.
>An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
Appealing to emotions and attempting to label your opponents as corrupt and soft on crime is as old as politics itself. Convincing people to vote for you is not a soft-coup.
The platforms should be the ones who should decide how their algorithms promote information and shouldn't be pressured or controlled by whoever the current party is in power at that moment. The benchmark should be - would you want a Trump DHS with the power to change their censorship policies however they liked?
If online speech should be regulated by the government, pass legislation, don't backdoor it in a risky and unilateral manner through law enforcement.
> attempting to label your opponents as corrupt and soft on crime is as old as politics itself. Convincing people to vote for you is not a soft-coup.
From my understanding of political history, it used to be more common to talk about your policies and what you plan to do to win votes, and something related to Newt Gingrich started a new trend of being more on the attack/discrediting towards others, and it escalated from there.
But the important part isn't that piece, but what followed in what I said, it's the second stratagem to put loyalists in place that is the key to performing a soft-coup. Something you cannot do when moderates abound, it requires focusing on strong cult-like minority, that are really loyal, and slowly replacing key government roles with people you pick for their loyalty to you and not their qualifications.
It's that second part that's all the difference here.
> If online speech should be regulated by the government, pass legislation, don't backdoor it in a risky and unilateral manner through law enforcement.
I don't disagree, to be clear, I'm not saying this in favor of the DHS program, I don't know what the right defensive measures against this would be, that also wouldn't cause other bigger risks, but I think it's a vector for attack we currently are vulnerable too and I'd like to see it delt with.
Your understanding of political history is very limited and simply wrong. Look deeper at the history of 19th century campaigns. There was plenty of attacking and discrediting going on, often using language that would shock modern readers.
Thanks, I went and read about it, it's interesting. It is unclear how it stopped exactly and why it changed, apart from making ballot booths, but it does seem to be making a comeback.
Still, in any case, just to be extra clear, this isn't the issue I'm calling out, the adversarial attack is in-combination with the setting up of loyalists and the overthrow.
That a campaign can be won by crude measures of appeal to emotions and discrediting of your opponents is a bit sad, but it isn't as much a problem if it is just a method for election.
The problem I see is afterwards, are the checks in place to make sure that you cannot instate loyalists, and change the rules themselves to entrench yourself. It's this second part that is the soft-coup.
I think it’s effective because the message is simple and scaled in coordinated fashion. To effectively answer to such an attack you need to massively distribute among the users refutals to every part of the attack message, with reputable sources and it needs to be brief enough so people don’t lose interest halfway. It could take a form of browser extension or a separate site with a dialogue tree of sorts where one participant is propaganda bot and the other the site user. Then users need to publicly post these (i guess you can ask fellas for help?).
> An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
> They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
> They can do that because they are free to do it.
> Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
> Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
This is more or less what the woke left has done to a lot of cultural institutions, with universities requiring political loyalty oaths. They just don't rely on a strongman to enforce their will the way populist movements do since wokeness is a distinctly professional-managerical class movement. But they've systematically taken control of most places of cultural power in the US.
Realistically, the federal government (and by definition any government) is made up of people with their own self-interests. They will favor the style of "censorship" that keeps them in power.
A mistake that I've made before, that I think is quite common, is to assume government will enforce laws the way I would. Regarding speech, because I am a person of good will, tolerance, and open-mindedness, I assume government will enforce the law this way. This is a grave mistake. The people who would seek out jobs in which they can control other people's speech are exactly the sort of people who should not be given that power.
Even if the actual enforcers of speech law were honest, they would never be allowed to enforce the law where it is most needed, namely government itself. Wars are usually supported with lies. [1] [2] Will speech laws be used to punish government officials who lie the country into war? I think not. Instead, such laws will be used to protect powerful people, especially people in government. For example, in Citizen's United, a case that Democrats still criticize, the government was prosecuting the members of a small non-profit with felonies for publishing a 90-minute documentary critical of then Senator Hillary Clinton. [3]
You are correct. There are honest politicians that clearly state in subtext about the honesty of public information. Disinformation is nothing else. It is how politics work these days and we can hope it will improve with time.
I don't know how the parent can compare an instance of a crazy person to government sending people in war that kill hundreds of thousands of people. Because these lives are no media personalities?
To me this is nothing one should base an opinion on. Information needs to be free of course and if government gets their hand on some platforms, these will become unreliable sources with far more and significant disinformation than we have seen before.
The FedGov is an interested actor in the dissemination of information and is therefore not fit for task on arbitrating on incorrect or inaccurate information. It can be a source of information, but it cannot be trusted as an uncompetitive source.
If you are interested in accurate and correct information, it is procedurally discovered in a competitive information environment with multiple interested actors; not decreed by the President and his employees.
It used to be that the State had an established Religion that worked with the state to establish Truth and its boundaries. Therefore the Spanish Inquisition was not merely a religious event but a State event, where heretics were considered seditious or treasonous, and thus handed over to the State to be dealt with before it could be destabilized by dangerous thoughts, words, and actions.
Now what do we do about Truth in this age of disestablishmentarianism? There is no one Religion of the State, and therefore there is no one Truth, there is a Plurality of Truths. That seems to present an existential problem for arbiters of Truth within the borders of the State, doesn't it.
Yep. It’s not that there was ever a Church that was ever fit for the task, but there were people who formed a Church which were powerful enough to impose their own truth. No human institution will ever be fit for the task, but we can maintain the process by maintaining a competitive information environment.
Why does it surprise you that people with more interest in getting accurate information are going to be the ones with more accurate information? If information doesn’t have value to you, you’re not going to pay for it.
No, you wont. You are right. And in a democracy, eventually your rights will be curtailed by those who can’t afford or don’t know to spend that time and money.
I was hoping youtube and facebook falling on their faces trying to implement censorship during the pandemic would make it clear the practice is a non-starter.
Why do people cling to this notion of censorship being a good thing? I feel like it's an attempt at a power grab with "won't someone please think of the children!" as the justification to the masses.
The article makes it very clear what the motivation for this is:
> In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.
As the people running the US government - particularly the democratically unaccountable set - become increasingly divorced in their values and beliefs from a a large segment of the population, they become increasingly obsessed with control of the Other, which by its very nature appears subversive.
This doesn't end well for any of us.
It's interesting to see people see the exact same arguments people have made for centuries, always in service of the existing status structure. "Misinformation" and "disinformation" aren't new. Twitter didn't radically change the world. If anything, we have returned to the pre-20th century environment, where rumors and conspiracies led to mobs, riots, and all kinds of civil unrest. It was a major concern of people in the Constitutional Convention that "designing men" would use misinformation to rile up the people to take over the government.
> In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
What's "different" now in the so-called Information Age is that the brief era of a small class of people having near total control over what is published has ended. And they really, really don't like it.
Not just that: the playing field is flatter, but the reach of every player has greatly extended.
There's no particular guarantee that the past can be used to predict the present here. Lies go around the world before truth gets its boots on, and now everybody can spread a lie with cross-continental reach.
“Cross-continental” reach but the world is a smaller place. Rumors and lies spreading like wildfire through the populace have caused major countrywide social unrest and even revolts in the past.
They spread just as far, just more slowly, because you couldn’t get it all directly from the same person instantly. The government reaction also therefore took longer. But this factor for obvious reasons made “misinformation” worse!
So no, this is still not substantively different. The primary difference is still that we are returning to the way things were before broadcast media controlled by a small number of people. Unless they can stop it.
I have relatives on the East Coast horrified at things that happened in Seattle, Washington. They believe that most cities are like that. They have no ability to discern stories from three time zones over from stories happening in their backyard; it's all coming in over the same internet.
So no, I don't think we're returning to the past. I think we're entering a new future, one with uncharted territory. The past gives us no particular guarantees that people are capable of handling this level of noise, let alone focused culture jamming and intentional exploitation of the new speed and reach of communication.
The exact same things happened with people on different sides of the Roman Empire.
Again, the reach is not new! Nor is the speed - it’s just before only the Right People could do it, excepting maybe AM radio.
Before that, the reach was still as far as people spoke your language - it just took longer and people relied more on hearing what you said from someone else, until the invention of the printing press. Information still spread rapidly and if anything, people were more likely to take action due to the greater level of social cohesion in most times.
People have always had a burning desire for “news”, and the primary source for millennia was rumor.
I think we're using completely different definitions of "rapidly" if you're talking about the Roman empire and I'm talking about nearlight from one side of a continent to another.
People organized a nationwide attack on the US Capitol in 2021. It was a tiny fraction of the population that wanted to participate (much less participated), but they organized and came in from everywhere. What would that organization have looked like in Roman times?
>>concern of people in the Constitutional Convention that "designing men" would use misinformation to rile up the people to take over the government.
Which is why our government selection is spread both over time and geography to prevent that.
Unfortunately there are people that want to move the federal government closer to direct democracy that would tear down both the time (2, 4 and 6 year term cycles) and geographic (Electoral College)
When in reality we need to be expanding these checks on power, not removing them
They only cling to it when their tribe is perceived to be in power
Twitter is a prime example of this, before Elon the mantra was "meh private company can do what it wants" the second the people that followed that mantra perceived their tribe as losing power over the platform that changed so fast that people got whiplash now twitter is a threat to everything from the foundation of democracy to national security.
No, the problem is clearly that the attacker believed they were saving America - and they believed this because they were told that politician was the problem.
I also happen to believe that politician is a severe thorn in the country's side… But for some reason I am not breaking into their home or advocating such.
Why is that? The intuitive answer is that the information we are operating on is not the cause of the attack. The idea that we need to police information to the point where crazy people do not get ideas is a nonstarter.
Presumably because you believe they are merely a thorn and not an existential threat.
I suspect many people might be willing to commit a felony if you could convince them they were, with certainty, saving their family, friends, and country.
Sincerely believing that any singular politician in the system we have is an "existential threat" that justifies violence against them comes under the heading of things only crazy people believe, and even the crazier act on.
This propaganda and brainwashing that is so prevalent and so effective, as demonstrated by the daily threats on politicians lives we need to shred the Constitution to prevent it?
I believe my prior comment stands perfectly fine on its own without your attempts to clarify it.
I don't think it does stand on its own, because it doesn't actually engage with the point. We know exactly why this happened. It's not because "crazy people" (whatever those are) exist. It's because there is a concentrated campaign of lies directed at a large portion of the population who don't have the tools to distinguish that they are lies.
Your remark seems to hand-wave all responsibility onto "crazy people" (whoever those are) instead of admitting that there is a severe problem with how members of this country fail to communicate with each other. It's really important to talk about this issue. It matters for the future of this country, far more than just about anything else does.
The fact that this "concentrated campaign of lies" (whatever that means) has resulted in so little actual damage (note: random members of the public believing things you would rather they do not, do not count as "damage") leads me to believe that the relatively new fear and outrage against it amounts to a politically motivated desire to clamp down on public discourse. The fact that there is bipartisan support for gutting section 230 should give anyone severe pause.
It is the responsibility of the listener to police their own information intake. Anything else leads down a well greased slippery slope ending in the maws of dragons.
Its true that freedom can lead to harm but the alternative is much worse; no system is utopian but some systems are better than others. Collective authoritarian states can achieve great things but when they fail, they fail in very big ways. Places that value freedom may in many ways be more chaotic and even dangerous at times, but I believe they are more likely to interrupt themselves when they are moving toward calamity.
Also you adjust the algorithms of your content feeds away from "maximize engagement," because that tends toward feeding people lots of videos that confirm their biases (no matter what those biases are).
Noise is cheaper than signal. For every piece of signal that can be added, more noise can be added.
That is not an arms race one wins.
Consider how education is done. We do it in classrooms, not in the street. Controlled environment where noise can be down-filtered.
How do we handle it if the problem is we need to educate everyone?
(I do agree with changing incentives off "maximize engagement". How, I do not know; it is the nature of capitalism in the interest economy to chase that brass ring.
Oh, I'm very interested in being satisfied, but I think the problem is way harder than people assume it is.
We had the luxury, for decades, of a de-facto mechanism of tamping the noise in the SNR culturally: the press was free, but only some people could afford it (and, at least over the airwaves, the press wasn't even technically free, as the AM / FM bands were considered shared natural resources that were parceled up by the FCC; break their rules, and your privilege of throwing signal through America's finite bandwidth was curtailed by law).
This is no longer the case. The modern, dominant, massively-distributed, massively-parallel peer-to-peer communications media doesn't follow any of those old rules. IP addresses are a constrained resource, but not enough to actually care. Anyone who can get a peering agreement with an internet carrier can communicate. As a result, we are freer than ever to speak our minds to every corner of the Earth at near lightspeed... But a lot of old assumptions that were implicitly baked into the question of how mass communication technology was used no longer apply.
It is not guaranteed that democratic society survives in this new normal. That is the interesting question. So when people assert, unexplored, that you just "inform" people by "adding signal," it's worth raising the question of how that signal cuts through the noise. In the old days, it'd cut through because various broadcast comms organs, from NBC down to individual stations, refused to carry the noise (either by their own standards or by implicit threat of loss of broadcast license). What makes it cut through now? It isn't whether it's true (we have observed how easily people can be deceived if someone spends enough money to culture-jam them with an alternate narrative of reality). It isn't whether it's important (we've observed people turn to triviality to disengage from painful reality going on outside their window).
We should think hard about these aspects of the new normal.
> are those risks worth being free
I don't think freedom is guaranteed by maximizing everyone's ability to speak at all times, unfettered, to everyone. Trivially, you could assert the one kind of freedom (the freedom to say anything, at any time, unfettered, to anyone)... But if nobody's listening, if you're just screaming into the void, what is the value of that freedom? And what if that freedom is used to deprive you of other freedoms? That freedom can be used by the wealthy and connected to craft narrative that says people like you and me don't deserve to be treated as equal members of society (and, more importantly, say it loudly enough and often enough to drown out counter-narratives by simple weight and the finite nature of human attention... Unfettered freedom of speech means a billionaire can buy up every billboard and ad slot in your town to push the narrative that you belong in jail). Do we just trust that some cosmic justice undermines that narrative? And if it doesn't, what happens to all our freedoms?
And I bet you believe you're the first person to ever claim literal democracy will fall if you don't do it the way you want.
Since time immemorial people have wanted to control others and the primary way of doing so is violence and speech. This has ALWAYS been the case.
This is nothing more than yet another person wanting to control other people. Whoopdeedoo, welcome to the human condition.
What makes the US so unique is that its laws were put into place by those WHO WERE CONTROLLED and thus it was important to them that the usual mechanisms for control were subverted, hence free speech.
And it took a mere 200+ years, a blink of an eye, for society to transform to the point that the debates are now discussing doing away with free speech to better control the information people have access to.
Because ... you know ... literal democracy will fall if we don't give access to control mechanisms to control information that people can see. We'll paper over that democracy has become the strongest super power in the world with those very same tenets in place.
There is extreme danger in relying solely on the assertion "Things have ben fine in past times; this is a time, therefore things will be fine." Stable systems are stable until they aren't, and when they aren't the shift to a new stable arrangement tends to be extreme.
> What makes the US so unique is that its laws were put into place by those WHO WERE CONTROLLED
Americans (and I'm including myself here) tend to have a belief in exceptionalism that isn't well-grounded in their own history.
The first thing the Continental Army did after overthrowing the existing power structure was march on western Pennsylvania to put down a tax rebellion. We definitely traded one structure of large-scale control for another. And the nation that came out of that war, while "no longer controlled," still practiced slavery, a practice that was only ended by a second violent upheaval (resulting in a government far more federalized, i.e. centralized, than the one that it replaced... America had tried the experiment of state-level government self-determination and found it extremely wanting).
The United States is, depending on how you slice the concept, two major political-philosophical upheavals away from its roots (the Civil War and the New Deal). We are the same country in terms of continuity but not stasis. A 1776-era revolutionary wouldn't have recognized the America of 1960, let alone today.
> We'll paper over that democracy has become the strongest super power in the world with those very same tenets in place.
Hard disagree, because as I explained, freedom of the press was previously implicitly curtailed by cost of press, exclusivity, and limited reach. Speech was implicitly constrained in the past in ways it no longer is.
This new paradigm is new. It remains to be seen how democracy survives boiling in this pot. It may very well survive! I have not seen a strong argument that doesn't appeal to the past that the survival is likely, let alone guaranteed, and appeals to the past don't work because the Internet is a discontinuity; we have not communicated with each other in this way before.
(... additionally, while the largest superpower is a democracy, the second-largest is an authoritarian one-party socialist-communist republic, so I don't think we can cleanly assert democracy gives automatic supremacy here. I happen to enjoy living under one, personally. I think it has a lot of advantages. Certainly feels good. It's hard to assert it's the only true and virtuous way to be when 18% of the global population might disagree with me.)
My perception is I'm observing extreme changes and hoping democracy does not fail. I grasp for reassurance and all people seem able to give me is "Well, it hasn't failed so far," which is the way people talked about housing prices before the crash.
This is the same kind of sentiment that nobility and clergy had when the printing press was invented. Society as a whole, and democracy, will be fine. The privileged status that several people enjoy in society today will not be fine. In a few places in Europe, the upheaval was bloody because the nobility and the clergy turned to violent means to keep their power.
I am guessing, since we are on HN and you hold this set of views, that you, like me, are part of the modern "clergy" class. Most of HN is, as well as much of silicon valley. The discourse has so far been controlled to your benefit by people who are your peers, and you are looking at the uncertain future of your own status and thinking that the entirety of democracy is falling. The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
This distortion affects your definition of "signal" and "noise." It is a lot easier for us to see things that benefit the cathedral as signal, and things that don't as noise.
Most people can tell the signal from the noise just fine. The problem is that for tech folks, the signal we want them to receive isn't always the signal that they want to receive. It often isn't noise or disinformation, just signal that is inconvenient for us.
If you look at provably false conspiracy theories (eg flat earth or chemtrails) and cults, there are very few people who believe them despite the noise level they put out and the amount that YouTube promotes them. In comparison, something like 70% people believe one or two conspiracy theories that are hard to disprove (eg things about the JFK assassination, aliens, or the CIA). It turns out that this is mostly harmless - the worst that happens is that it leads to distrust of government, which happens to have earned a lot of distrust.
If you look at other inconvenient things that big tech has suppressed, like the news about Hunter Biden's laptop, you will find that this is important signal that may have swung the election, not misinformation. The problem is that it would have swung the election the wrong way, so the cathedral (in this case, the FBI, Google, Facebook, and Twitter) kept it off the modern airwaves, proclaiming it to be "noise." Unfortunately, this was signal for most people - a later survey said that a decent fraction of Biden voters would have voted differently if they had known about it - and our collective filters caught it because it was inconvenient for us.
People are not bad critical thinkers: they can figure out what is relevant signal for them. After getting out of school, they understand how to think critically well enough to find the information that is relevant and not false. It just isn't leading them to the information that we think should be relevant to them.
Democracy is fine. In fact, it may be healthier when the censorship regime that we have collectively imposed is gone. The control we have over it is going away, and that is a good thing.
> The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
I don't know how to square that view with the observation that in the United States, an attack on Congress was perpetrated as a direct result of a runaway lie regarding the integrity of the election process. That's not free speech protecting democracy; that's a mob riled up by unchecked lies directly, physically attacking the mechanisms of their representative democracy.
Believe me, if I was observing free speech bringing truth to power and undermining, for example, the lobbying infrastructure, or the massive consolidation of power in megacorporations, I'd be thrilled. The cathedral needs to be corrected if not taken down. But that's not what I'm seeing. I think I'm mostly observing the rich and powerful using their ability to buy content on the various free channels of speech to rile mobs with lies. They're trying to cut the structural constraints on their piece of the cathedral and turn it into, if you will, a High Tower.
I'm not thinking about Biden's laptop; I agree with your assessment of that. The amplification of lies about the structure of US elections threatens to undermine the democratic process, and if it crumbles now it's most likely to be replaced with a fascist autocracy.
Attacking ideas rather than individuals is a great start.
Censorious actions are, to my eye, attacks on individuals; especially when power is transferred/controlled/manipulated under the guise of "positive" group think.
Many cliches apply, sweeping under the rug, kicking the can down the road, turning a blind eye.
Well-intentioned good faith conversations about integrity, accountability and forthrightness are in vogue :)
> because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
This person was mentally unstable/disturbed. I'm not sure we should frame our world, an freedoms, around the craziest of us all, otherwise our society will eventually look no different than an insane asylum.
I do believe there are memetic "contagions", but I also believe that a better solution is proper mental healthcare for those in need, like this person was.
> I do believe there are memetic "contagions", but I also believe that a better solution is proper mental healthcare for those in need, like this person was.
People in general are just stupid, but no one seems to have the self-reflection necessary to recognize it.
Think about it like this.
You can look back in history and see actions and behaviors that make absolutely no sense. Those people were just stupid. Salem witch trials, the internment of the Japanese, concrete examples of mass hysteria, ad nauseum.
The question is, what are we doing that will look obviously stupid to people 100 years from now? "omg, they drill holes in their teeth and put metal in it?!?!".
The point is, these "memetics" have always existed in some form, what do you think local superstition is? To argue that this is only a problem for those in healthcare is extremely naive. Perfectly healthy, normal people, have on many occasions participated in various mass hysteria events or believed incorrect things. Blowing smoke up ones ass was literally a medical procedure.
The scary part about social media isn't about the social part, it's about the technology. Never in history has it been possible to manipulate so many people so easily.
This isn't a fight about people, it's a fight about control of the masses.
>On the other hand, I'm aware that certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects.
This also happens because if there's an explicit or implicit ban on addressing those topics and retaining a place in polite society, then only people crazy enough to disregard polite society will address those topics.
> This also happens because if there's an explicit or implicit ban on addressing those topics and retaining a place in polite society, then only people crazy enough to disregard polite society will address those topics.
By definition, writing down specific current examples would be a terrible idea.
Historically, I might suggest the song "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols, or the book "Lady Chatterly's Lover", or poem "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name", given the effect they had on "polite society".
> On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
If the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of a drunk driver should alcohol be banned? What if the person injured isn't related to a politician?
Or cars. Or roads. Or hammers. Or any other ingredient in the process.
Useful tools like speech and hammers are equally useful for anyone and for any purpose. Fire, electricity, sharp saw blades, the wheel, money, intelligence, good looks, encryption, math, can all be used for good or bad, and there is no way to change that and seperate the utility into only utility for good.
It's misguided to try to address the misuse of a tool by controlling the tool instead of the weilder.
It just becomes a little easier to pick on something like alcohol or guns because you can say they "obviously duh" aren't useful tools or necessities like vehicles or electricity, so it's ok to act like they are somehow less inanimate or neutral or useful than other random equally special purpose things, and easier to evoke emotional reactions about them whether from puritanism or fear, than say, paint thinner or construction tools. And most people will buy that more than any academic arguments, and numbers matter more than academic reason.
So we control speech. And on private platforms, which is all platforms, they can. And only the worst a*holes and the dopiest hippies complain about it.
No, but if that drunk driver was driving drunk and targeting the loved one of a politician because someone else incited them by outright lying, then maybe you'd have something to discuss here.
We have many curbs on alcohol. Many to prevent situations like you describe. Maybe it is responsible to also limit speech especially when it can cause harm.
Aside from this particular assault which obviously is harm and curbing assault in general should be a priority. How does one distinguish preemptively which speech will cause harm and in what form such that it can be mitigated?
That is an interesting point. But maybe we don't even need to preemptively define harmful speech. You could just say people are responsible for what they say and if somebody then harms someone based on what you said (and it was untrue), you have responsibility.
It would certainly reduce the chance people would say unsubstantiated and harmful things if it was enforced.
I think I agree on principle, but I think in implementation this becomes particularly difficult. To use a silly example, if two people are having ramen at shop and person A says, "oh man, I think this ramen is making me sick" and person B, feeling that their friend A has been hurt by the ramen maker hucks a brick at the ramen shop window late at night and is caught. Where does the blame start and stop, the person who said it? The person who interpreted it and acted in a way they thought was justifiable (for whatever internal reason)? I think the issue with speech, especially mass broadcasted speech is that there are two "rational" parties involved.
I hear what you are saying. I think this class of problem is one that the legal profession have solved mostly . Their solution is the "reasonable person" test. Would a mythical "reasonable person" believe what the person said.
Btw we aren't discussing what an unreasonable person might do with that information, just whether or not a reasonable person might believe what has been said or understand it a certain way.
We can definitely solve for the egregious cases though and we can solve those before getting too hung up on the tough ones in the middle.
And just to be clear. You are always permitted to say true things. It's only when you say false things that we need these curbs. What I'm really talking about is curbing "false speech".
I think the significance of the fact that it was a politician's relative is that it suggests that this is part of a larger pattern. I think it would be similar if you had a politician calling for violence against an ethnic group that resulted in actual violence; that seems like a good reason for restrictions to me.
The reason I value freedom of speech is the same reason I am not an absolutist: it is a power to trigger changes, and while all improvements are changes, so are all declines.
As with all other laws, my personal preference is the maximum possible liberty that doesn't allow people the liberty to remove other people's liberty.
Unfortunately, that's a soundbite and not a well-defined policy position, and I don't know how to generate the latter from the former.
...while all improvements are changes, so are all declines.
Trivially true, but this doesn't go deep enough. Changes that come about as a result of collective discussion and decision are of a different character than changes that are the predictable result of preexisting feedback loops. For example, once upon a time a single breadwinner on minimum wage could support a family. For some time after that was no longer true, two breadwinners on minimum wage could support a family. That's no longer the case now, but we never had big debate to decide that. It wasn't "disinformation" that caused our soaring inequality; indeed it could be argued that we would have noticed it happening had there been more information allowed to reach the public consciousness.
Usually, this is an collectivist argument with no basis at all. We routinely conduct trade offs of the most eggregious consequences: Driving is ok in pretty much all countries in the world, despite of horrific accident rates. Or the opposite: that we should impose security checks in airports because 1 guy had gel-based explosives in his shoe, let's collectively force everyone to take their shoes off for millions if not billions of times.
These trade offs have no objectivity. They're done on a whim with the exact thinking that the OP is succumbing to.
So, anytime someone makes an argument for supression of speech "for the good of the people", I am instantly cynical of their motives or their gullibility or both.
I don’t think free speech/ assaults is a relationship in isolation. The US particularly seems to have issues with violence being a preferred method of conflict resolution, all else being equal.
Do you have any information to back up this claim?
From what I understand, the US is fairly unique in history for pioneering peaceful transfer of power without violence.
Elections are a form of revolution each term.
In most of world history, this type of transfer of power was incredible bloody.
Also, from what I see on the news, the US isn't at all unique when it comes to political violence, and in general it's much more rare and less extreme than what I see elsewhere. It wasn't long ago that Ireland had horrific bloody political conflict, the likes of which we've never seen in this country other than the civil war.
>Monarchies lasted for millennia, USA isn't nearly as old.
USA is actually doing pretty well at 246 years old. There are certainly monarchies that lived longer, but 246 is above average for regimes. For instance, the current french regime has only been around for 64 years[1]
> the US is fairly unique in history for pioneering peaceful transfer of power without violence.
The US inherited much of its political culture from that of England (not to say that the US didn't innovate heavily and positively on top of that heritage).
Would you say that England / the UK has had less of a history of peaceful transferring of power since American independence, or since the US Civil War?
You can say that the UK has faced violent opposition to its rule in Northern Ireland, but it would seem more reasonable to equate that to attacks like 9/11 in the US.
If you go back to the civil war in the US, you'd also be going back to violent opposition to its rule in what's now the Republic of Ireland, its genocide in Kenya, the collapse of the British Empire in general. It's true that (as in America) the metropole has been relatively peaceful in the UK, but outside of that it's pretty grim.
I think that's some reasonable context, thank you, even though it would require quite a leap to make the claim that it was the "pretty grim" actions in the Empire that enabled the peaceful transfer of power in the metropole. (It could equally be the case, for example, that peace back home allowed the Empire to flourish enough to lead to the inevitable grim outcomes).
That is factually incorrect. Europeans, for example, are on average more violent than Americans. Count up the rate of violent deaths in America versus Europe since 1776.
Is concern about free speech really the right concern? The right concern to me is the lack of critical thinking skills that lead to being swayed by rhetoric. Policing free speech is not the answer, because it will certainly lead to suppression of legitimate speech.
As someone who supported Biden at the time of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think it's unreasonable to equate criticism of his Afghanistan withdrawal (one area of "inaccurate information" DHS was targeting) to the promotion of cults and political violence. Even so, if an individual goes so far as to ignore Occam's razor as to ascribe to QAnon, then I'm certain that such a nut-job would flock to other, equally ridiculous, conspiracy theories. Furthermore, our government can be wrong, e.g. Powell's disastrous UN speech that ignored the State Department's own intelligence [1].
At a fundamental level, one must ask why people are attacking 5G towers, storming the Capitol, and calling for violence against politicians: they believe their voices are not being heard. Censorship and banishment to alt-tech platforms only reinforces that belief.
To use the words of Scalia in "R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul", I believe the government "has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire" [2].
This is the idea of the "boxes of freedom." The soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. Depriving people of one encourages them to turn to the others.
There is a part of the US population that feels deprived of all but the last box currently: big tech censorship of their ideas, beliefs in a stolen election, and belief in a rigged justice system (thanks in no small part to Merrick Garland's actions). It doesn't matter if they are right. All that matters is how they feel about it. If you combine that with the rising cost of food and shelter, you get the recipe for a violent revolution.
This all comes down to the "Gish Gallop" problem. It is easy to vomit out disinformation and lies. Anyone attempting to poison the well can do so much faster than you can refute their lies with facts and well-reasoned argument.
When the other party is acting in bad faith all it takes is some money and time to subvert platforms with paid shills that all network with each other and mix disinfo into seemingly normal content streams. This allows the shills to build credibility.
Good luck dealing with that. You can reply with all the well-reasoned arguments you want but when 500 of the shill's friends bury your reply (and mass-report you) no one will see your message so correctness becomes a moot point... not that people have enough free time to read and consider every well-reasoned argument when they come across an issue to begin with. If you tried that you'd need more than 24 hours in a day.
This is only a problem because platforms weigh any post equal to any other, but for their rudimentary upvote systems. If posts with actual backing behind its claims were weighed more positively, they would gain more prominence and status, and people spewing out unsupported info could get filtered out as simply noise.
Civil society cannot tolerate threats of violence or acts of violence. This applies to all aspects of civil society. There is a limit to freedom of speech.
There is nothing exceptional about social media except that it has taken so long to apply the sane principles of civil society. People who threatened the founding fathers with physical violence probably earned themselves a horsewhipping or a duel.
People who resent society must find a way to express their resentment by democratic action, not through threats and violence.
The founding fathers were not senseless followers of written words. They did not relinquish critical thinking by signing a constitution. The constitution was not a declaration of the end of critical thinking, education, and progress.
There are acceptable levels of violence. Levels of interpersonal violence today are much lower than when our Republic was founded. A few isolated incidents do not constitute a valid reason to restrict freedom of expression. If the cost of free speech is that occasionally some people die then that is an acceptable trade-off.
I'm not entirely sure if it was a felony to threaten violence, but assault was a felony at the founding. The definition of felony was originally "crime that is punishable by death." You can commit assault without touching someone (but it has to be more than words).
I would assume that there were quite a few more consequences for threats than there are today. I would also assume that there was quite a bit of tarring and feathering of people who held deeply unpopular beliefs, because this did happen.
"... certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects"
And this would include those currently in power, no? Who want to further their ability to put their narrative of choice forward - regardless of how truthful - while suppressing any counter-narratives, even if true.
And it doesn't mean what people often claim it means. He was speaking literally. William Penn's family was trying to buy off the state legislature with a one time payment for military defense in exchange for the state legislature conceding more power to the Penns. It wasn't about some abstract liberty like privacy or safety against something abstract like terrorism. It was Franklin judging a specific political offer to help the legislature fight a war in exchange for giving up some rights to self-governance.
If someone yells FIRE without a real FIRE in a crowded town hall that causes a stampede resulting in death or injury - I guess it is ground for bringing criminal charges against the original yeller.
I don’t see what is so hard to understand here. We already have the legal clarity , they just needs to be implemented diligently.
I’d like to see some better sourcing for this. The Wikipedia article, bizarrely, claims that shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre (and thereby causing a stampede or some other awful consequence) is actually protected by the First Amendment in the US. However, the only source it gives for this claim is a Reason article.
Shouting “Bomb!” or “Gun!” in public would put you in a similar situation. In May 2018, for example, officials had to evacuate part of Daytona Beach International Airport after a man ran naked through the building screaming about a bomb in the women’s bathroom. There was no bomb, but he was charged with “false report of a bomb,” “criminal mischief,” and “exposure of sexual organs,” among other things. In that case, no self-respecting lawyer would advise him to claim his actions were protected by the First Amendment.
>The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts.
>The example usually given by those who would punish speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theatre.
>This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513, 536—537, 78 S.Ct. 1332, 1346, 2 L.Ed.2d 1460 (Douglas, J., concurring.) They are indeed inseparable and a prosecution can be launched for the overt acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. Certainly there is no constitutional line between advocacy of abstract ideas as in Yates and advocacy of political action as in Scales. The quality of advocacy turns on the depth of the conviction; and government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.
The part you quote appears to say that it would be permissible to prosecute someone for the consequences of deliberately shouting ‘fire!’ when they knew that there was no fire (because it’s one of the rare cases where speech is ‘brigaded with action’).
In other words, the court rejected the applicability of the analogy to the case at hand. They didn’t draw the conclusion that deliberately causing stampedes in theaters is protected by the First Amendment.
Right, that’s my interpretation as well. I think the real point is something more simple like “you cannot falsely report a fire” (I mean, you can, but you’ll get charged with a crime). The reference to the theater seems to kind of cloud the analogy a lot - and serves to confuse the association with free speech generally.
Yeah so, the anti-"fire in a crowded theater" people are right, in the sense that the analogy was dicta in an overturned case whose actual "clear and present danger" test is no longer the standard (specifically, the case held that handing out flyers protesting the draft for World War I was not speech protected by the First Amendment, a laughable proposition today).
The replacement standard instead excludes protection for speech that is both "directed to" and "likely to" "incite or produce imminent lawless action," and these things are construed quite narrowly.
So: it's a bad analogy that was never the actual legal test, doesn't match the current test, and references an overturned case. But that doesn't mean it's actually legal to knowingly falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater intending to cause a panicked stampede (though note there's more detail about intent and knowledge given there, and there would be other questions).
To a certain extent, trying to stop people referencing this really doesn't matter, though. If you got all the country's internet commentators to talk about "incitement to imminent lawless action" instead, they'd be in all likelihood deploying that phrase in the same places they currently use "fire in a crowded theater" or "clear and present danger." Eliminating this one analogy isn't really going to move the needle on people's understanding of what the First Amendment protects, but the phrase is both enduringly popular and a bugbear of the kind of people who care about this stuff, so the arguments and corrections will continue.
What does it mean for speech to be protected if not meaning to be protected from the consequences? Could I not say one is free to murder but one is not protected from the consequences of murder? I think we can break down government and non-government consequences, but given the previous discussions in the chain were on legality I think the discussion is already focused on government consequences. As a side note I think the non-government consequences can then be broken down further to legal and illegal actions, with the idea the only consequences you aren't protected from are the legal non-government consequences.
You remind me of a dark joke from late Communist Czechoslovakia that said "The Czechoslovak Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech."
Yes - that is exactly the point of the analogy. Compare for example political speech, which can also have terrible consequences, but where it would be an obvious violation of the First Amendment to (e.g.) prosecute an economist for the terrible consequences of their economic ideas.
If someone *falsely* yells FIRE without a real FIRE in a crowded town hall that causes a stampede resulting in death or injury - I guess it is ground for bringing criminal charges against the original yeller.
But my point is since it is clearly defined legally do we have to really over analyze it to the point of inducing paralysis?
You are still discussing in a hypothetical situation that most people can have a consensus about the information eventually. i.e. the information (If the FIRE really happened or not) can be falsified.
What really caused conflicts and damage are the situations the "lies" cannot be falsified (just in current population due the the limit of intelligence, no necessary for smart people in future generations), and the yeller is not a typical liar but belong to a special specie (majority of politicians who have good skill in elections) that totally believe their lies so there's no legal ground base to charge them. There have been already a lot of damaging consequences and seems continue to have more because of this.
Do we have reverse yellers yelling "NO FIRE" to balance the ongoing damages? The are very few for some important issues. There's no way to counter balance.
Why? It's not because there are less people know the truth. In real world it's not a clear cut model that information can be passed back and forth independently between a yeller and audience. The misinformation exists because there are eager misinformation consumers. There are a very large portion of people need the yelling of "FIRE" and hence there are more "FIRE" yellers. This is another discrepancy between your model and real world.
> and the yeller is not a typical liar but belong to a special specie (majority of politicians who have good skill in elections) that totally believe their lies so there's no legal ground base to charge them. There have been already a lot of damaging consequences and seems continue to have more because of this.
- If it is damaging yet done repeatedly obviously it is wrong. Things may not be clear the first time but soon becomes clearer. And if the yeller claim to not know the consequences they better not say something until they collect and analyze more data.
The current legal standard for 1A protection is “imminent lawless action” from Brandenburg v Ohio. Shouting fire is from an old standard “clear and present danger”. You can look at their respective wiki pages for details and definitions.
The history of Free Speech in the US is pretty interesting. The kinds of things that are acceptable today would get you thrown in prison 100 years ago (for example, handing out anti war pamphlets) and are more akin to the kinds of things Americans look down on other countries for criminalizing.
Um, are you aware that this quote was uttered to justify the prosecution of a man for protesting the draft in WWI? And that is legal today to shout it as loudly as you want?
> I don’t see what is so hard to understand here. We already have the legal clarity , they just needs to be implemented diligently.
Then read between the lines and recognize the public in general has moved away from recognition/acceptance of the rules as written and now all the mobs are demanding speech they don't like be restricted by powers on high.
The problem is that platforms aren't liable for the damage they cause. If the NYTimes makes up some nonsense that gets people hurt then they are liable. If some jabroni on Facebook does then there's no liability attached to Facebook. Which was probably fine for the BBS/message board days. Probably not so much when Facebook takes an active role in amplifying some messages over others.
If we are going by total harm, mass media is ahead by a mile. How many people died because of false claims of weapons of mass destruction not properly vetted by mainstream media? Over half-a-million. What's the most deadly situation social media caused?
You can just generate a bunch of legit looking news sites and spam it on facebook/whatever. Most people won’t check and it’s not viable for facebook to track every fake news site.
I don't think anyone has a perfect answer to this question, but I'd prefer we invest in education. My english class, many years ago, tried to teach us how to identify whether a website contained useful information. I thought it was helpful.
Bluntly, that’s just the cost of freedom. How many people get punched in the face for saying something unsavory, yet there is no national conversation about curtailing speech?
Why didn’t we have that conversation after the Dallas police shooting shortly after Obama talking about police violence? Or the mass riots spurred on by democrat politicians? Or the Jan 6th riots following trumps speech (actually, he got deplatformed everywhere following that). Or the congressional baseball shooting following Bernie Sander’s calling Republicans hateful for not passing healthcare bills?
Obviously this attack is unacceptable, but if these other instances didn’t move people to curtail speech, the fact that this relatively minor event does tells me this is more about pushing an agenda and putting politicians ahead of freedoms.
As far as I’m concerned in the conversation about the limits of free speech, Pelosi is nobody special. Would we curtail speech because some random person in Ohio got assaulted for saying mean words? Of course not, so why would we do it for some powerful politician, who’s used speech in just as inciting ways as well no less?
To put it plainly: should we curtail freedoms because somebody attacked Pelosi? The answer to that is the same as the answer to “should we curtail freedoms because speech makes people mad sometimes”. The way we’ve answered that as a society in all other instances is “no”, so the answer remains the same.
Actually there was a lot of discussion about this sort of thing after the baseball attack.
But in any case, we can't limit freedom of speech because of "unreasonable" implications of speech. Simply saying you hate Pelosi, isn't grounds for any reasonable person to think you try to kill her with a hammer. But if someone said, "we need to kill her" then that is much more prosecutable IMO.
Unfortunately what probably works best to avoid these sorts of incidents is critical thinking and common sense. I do think the echo chambers on the internet create less of this - so these sorts of things will happen more frequently.
Oh right, because people don’t get assaulted in places where free speech doesn’t exist. It’s totally the free speech that is causing the violence and not anything specific to any circumstance of violence or some other general state. /s
yeah i'm a little confused. Assault is illegal no matter what you've been told. You could be grossly misinformed yet when you assault someone you're breaking the law. The point is, don't assault someone because it is illegal and you'll goto jail for it. Now if you're so mentally ill that the law doesn't matter anyway then i don't see how information, bad or otherwise, makes any difference.
> On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
Oooh you really lost me here. It feels like you’ve fallen hook line and sinker for the news emotional storyline.
Deranged individuals exist regardless of current rhetoric. Never give up free speech in an attempt to cure society of deranged individuals. It won’t work.
Also, “the facts of reality”. You believe this exists in the political realm?
By what standards would disinformation be classified and exempted? It would have to be 100% public - no discussion or decisionmaking in darkness.
Would religion be policed for making unproven claims? Would there be any allies of political favorables who could correct the record with their version of the truth? Is inconvenient information disinformation, as in, will they define disinformation as any information disruptive to the status quo as able to be proven without revealing state secrets, classified information, or restricted media like the "collateral damage" video, whether true or false?
Despite CNN and MSNBC being broadcast in Russia and China, their news is all but forbidden in the US. How damaged and fragile is the US mindset that it can't exist in the presence of other ideas?
How would you feel about this if it were coming from the Trump DHS? or if somehow Trump inherits this in 2024? would you still be so circumspect or would you be in full disaster meltdown mode.
This sort of thing assumes that bad actors don't exist and will never get into power... only it turns out bad actors do exist and... gasp, they already control many of the reins of power, why would you support ceding more control?
... the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures...
It seems likely that there is more to the story than is represented in this summary. Truly "new" news is rarely completely accurate and accurately complete.
> On the other hand, I'm aware that certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects. E.g. cults are horrible, even though people are freely congregating, they just feel like they can't leave because of the emotional abuse these influential figures are heaping via their speech.
If they're that influential, then what chance do laws limiting free speech have at curtailing their efforts? The solution seems to be pass laws that only effect the average citizen and ignore the obvious differences in scale with these flagged "problem cases."
> the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures
Is there actual evidence of that? I mean, which exact "influential figures" lead to this crime? What writing of theirs were the most provocative to this individual? What should we be considering when examining this situation? Is there anything other than vague accusations?
> So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech.
It seems to me that's exactly what you're doing.. and you've not made the connection between free speech and generalized harm in anything but a casual way. This makes people exceptionally uneasy, you're suggesting that a defined right should be curtailed simply because there's an implication in one particular notable situation.
And why is this _one_ newsworthy situation being used to spark this debate? Doesn't this raise questions of inappropriate "influence" itself? Again, we know nothing about this individual, yet all kinds of motivations are being ascribed to his actions all in service of suggesting that "a little too much free speech" might be responsible here.
"Is there actual evidence of that? I mean, which exact "influential figures" lead to this crime?"
To the former, I imagine this was brought up as an example. Whether you think it's the strongest example seems immaterial unless you're saying there is no example at all in the history of the world?
To the latter, that seems to be the exact purpose of courts and lawmaking, no? To take the murky uncertainty of life and create a reasonable line of evidence that binds two points together. That we, in American society, have decided not to draw the line between those two points to see if they intersect the same victim is our choice. Unless you believe no ones words are influential in any context?
> To the former, I imagine this was brought up as an example.
So we're to argue with your imagination?
> Whether you think it's the strongest example seems immaterial unless you're saying there is no example at all in the history of the world?
I'm saying you're implying things without any proof. I think you should have proof before you consider depriving people of their rights.
> To the latter, that seems to be the exact purpose of courts and lawmaking, no?
Precisely. If you break the law, you are charged with a crime. If you were incited to do so, that person will be charged with a crime. So.. what reason is there to restrain free speech?
> Unless you believe no ones words are influential in any context?
I don't believe prior restraint will solve your problem, and other than these vague assertions, you've provided no concrete argument as to how they will.
To be clear, not my imagination as i'm not the original poster. Nor anyone's imagination since the act of violence did, in fact, occur. A poor choice of words, on my part.
> Nor anyone's imagination since the act of violence did, in fact, occur.
And the open question, still, is "was the violence precipitated by too much free speech? Is there literally any evidence of that?"
This whole thread is based on this assumption, and people are happy to argue a point because they "imagine" the evidence for it exists. If this is actually the case, this is absolutely stunning.
What are you proposing exactly? I'm trying to steelman your position, but the best I can come up with is "Only the rich should be able to spread their opinions (which are obviously correct, since they are successful)" and "You can have your free speech in your designated free speech zone (which has bars on the outside, and is surrounded by armed guards)".
This is a clear false dichotomy. The platforms that monetize outrage and disinformation by rewarding it with free reach are at issue here. As to solutions - The only way to filter the volume of information reaching us into meaningful, useful, true narratives is through trusted filters that prioritize attempting to be truthful and operate in good faith over time. Fact checking creates a history of this which should feature into algorithms. This is not to say that people are prevented from speaking, but amplification should come with responsibility.
Trust in the facts of reality can only really be established as a chain - this is how the sciences work. That’s why independent experimental verification of results is so important. In the information ecosystem, fact checkers perform this function. We should establish structural means of support for these functions.
> Fact checking creates a history of this which should feature into algorithms.
At first glance, it looks like you've just re-defined the problem from "platforms should decide which posts are true" to "fact checkers should decide which posts are true", but actually I think you might be onto something.
Platforms could use their existing user-reporting features, and measures of audience size, to inform fact checkers about which posts are the most controversial; then different fact checkers could (reactively) investigate the claims and offer rulings that would appear as a banner over the relevant post.
The missing pieces of the puzzle are that individual users should be able to opt in to one or more fact checker, and platforms should give users a default set of fact checkers, and the fact checkers should be funded by a 1% tax on platforms' revenue (split in proportion to the popularity of those fact checkers among users).
This could actually be a valuable and viable system, and maybe the sciences could also benefit from a system like this for flagging suspect papers and paying for researchers to attempt to reproduce results. It could even be gamified, with researchers winning "points" for correctly guessing which studies have non-reproducible results (as long as these points didn't have financial incentives attached which could corrupt them).
I think we have to stop thinking "what do we do about these bad individuals". Disinformation is a force that is increasingly shaping what americans think, which is obviously a big deal in a society which has individual choice as its foundation (in government, economy, etc). This force is being used by bad actors from every corner, within the country and without, and has already threatened societal upheaval. It just _can not_ be ignored. It will get worse, not better. Forget trump, putin, musk, whoever the current individuals are, we need an answer to this force.
Now, I am also a believer in your first point. The cure _must not_ be worse than the poison. And I don't know what the right solution is. But we need one because we are not equipped to deal with this. Just a couple days ago a single individual bought one of the biggest speech platforms in the world and proceeded to post a defamatory conspiracy theory from a "fake news" outlet about a political target. The way the world is set up right now I think things can really go sideways. And while I am sure most people here prides themselves on their ability to discern the truth, remember that the electorate is not comprised of hacker news users. Thanks
I think it comes down to the question that everyone working on tools has to answer: is the good that it can bring worth the potential for evil that it can also be used for? TOR says yes, and they develop it even though terrible people can use it to hide their tracks, because it also allows nice people to hide their tracks so terrible people can't see what they're doing.
I do believe that free speech is so incredibly beneficial that it's always worth having, even if that means accepting cults, celebrities, politicians etc preying on the weak.
> the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures
For one, stop making up stuff like the above. Are you in the attackers head? No? Then be responsible and make a claim like that. Otherwise, I’m glad there’s no fact gestapo to stop you from running your fingers; keep typing; be as irresponsible as you’d like; make the mistakes everyone makes; eventually realize people are and must be responsible for their own actions no matter what people say (in both senses).
People need to be held ultimately accountable for their own actions, without recourse to «they told me to».
If you cultivate a strong culture of ultimate responsibility, people will learn to think twice.
If everyone took ultimate responsibility for their own actions, then the cult leader / dictator / influencer would just be a person shouting in a room.
To me, the problem currently I believe is with the internet and how it creates a new quality to speech.
People can speak up, but it turns out that there's now too much noise and nobody can distinguish the source of the speech, the context of the speech, the trustworthiness of the speech, and the occurrence of the speech (how many people are saying the same thing versus parroting what they were told).
Not only that, but the cost to speak is so low now, that bad actors have a field day, and I include bad faith people looking to just amass political fame, power, following, etc.
Mix that in with our new shortened attention span, and people no longer engage with the speech, instead it becomes like advertisement, if you've seen the same message a lot you'll subconsciously have taken it as a truth. It becomes which opinion have you seen most becomes your opinion, and everyone does this, so the truth becomes a matter of who can parrot their message as often, as loudly and to as many people.
This also means that catchy speech will win over non-catchy speech, because everything is more like a marketing game. Appealing to emotions is attention grabbing, controversy is attention grabbing, so all speech of that form becomes the winning speech in terms of getting viewed and heard.
That's why I think all reasonable people are doomed here, this mechanism of social conversation lends itself automatically to destabilizing opinions winning over stable reasonable but boring and not attention grabbing perspectives.
Before the internet, there were more filtering happening in a layered approach, publications and journalist were there to filter out the noise, the low quality, the unsubstantiated, the agenda driven, and all those.
Speaking up about injustices involved having to physically mobilize yourself to a public square, which takes a lot of effort from the speaker, again allowing a filtering out of bad actors and bad faith individual since the effort demanded had a cost, only people really motivated by great injustice would have the will to go through with protesting.
I don't think it was ideal before either, as publications as a filter had their own bias to what they'd filter out. But at least even what they let through, since there wasn't an abundance of it, the listeners could have a deeper think about it, and didn't believe it to be true just because they keep hearing about it over and over.
Hopefully we can find a way to improve on both. I think we need to put more contextualizing and filters over the internet speech, nothing that removes or bans speech, but allows to manage all the noise.
Algorithms are already in place doing this, except they filter based on corporate profit making, which often involves around engagement and attention grabbing. Again this is extra counterproductive, worse than a simple unfiltered approach with everything chronological.
I'm not sure how best to implement improvements, but I feel strongly it is needed, because even I can no longer make sense of all the noise on the internet, and it feels more and more like I actually can't tell what's real or not anymore, even though I'm in an ocean of information.
"So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech. That just seems so wrong to me."
"More speech" works when the number of voices is limited to an actual number of people. The truth would eventually/inevitably drown out the conspiracies and disinformation. Now, with bots and social media's algorithmic amplification, the "amount of speech" a single person can contribute is unbounded, and bad actors are weaponizing the unlimited nature of speech to drown out the truth.
"More speech" is too simplistic to work in the modern world.
I strongly agree, also with the factor of energy and rewards: many of the people spreading disinformation have MUCH greater appetite for spreading it, even if it’s not actually their job, than normal people do for debunking it. There’s a burnout problem, especially when the volume of noise overwhelms the rewarding aspects of using a particular forum — less of a Gish Gallop than a Gish Stampede now.
I'm on the side of free speech on this one. We can't have "perfect" security, and policing what people say will be as effective towards ending extremism as the war on drugs has been towards ending drug use.
The solution to the misinformation is education, critical thinking, and depolarization; not criminalization. It's a slower process but it's the right one. The more a government gives up on educating and trusting the people it represents, and tends towards instead treating them like little children who can't possibly make decisions on their own, the more that population will be become just that— incapable of making decisions on their own. We don't want that to be the case; that's dangerous.
Republicans don't want schools to teach beyond the core subjects and are attacking higher education with unproven allegations of liberal indoctrination. In my opinion the right is attacking schools because misinformation benefits them more since they constantly tell people not to trust the government and elect them to drain the swamp.
1.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a law punishing student 'indoctrination' at public universities and threatens budget cuts
My own anecdote from my time as an undergrad at UConn: my ethics professor once said, verbatim, that anyone who supported a pro-life stance was, flat out, wrong. I watched conservative speakers come to campus and the associate vice president said that “even the thought of an individual coming to campus with [conservative views] can be concerning and even hurtful” [1]. This was after an “event review process” was stood up, ostensibly with the intent to moderate content that could be discussed at the university, following a right-wing speaker’s talk breaking out into violence after being called a Nazi and having his property stolen [2].
My own experience has been that “liberal indoctrination” correctly captures the magnitude of this effect.
Conservatism, by definition, opposes change. It disapproves of new ideas and philosophical innovation in favour of tradition.
Universities have always been hotbeds for change, research, vanguard and protest against the standard. I'm not surprised there's so little conservatism there; it's an environment that attracts open-mindedness, not people who shy away from deep analytical reconsideration. For the latter, there's churches.
So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech. That just seems so wrong to me.
That’s exactly it - the cost of free speech.
And why should we pay that cost? Because the alternative is far worse.
The problem everyone ignored is who decides what speech is “ok” and which is not? Clearly someone would have to. And when that someone uses that power to silence “disinformation” that is in reality legitimate opposition? Well now you’re screwed.
I’ve lived in countries where speech is highly regulated and it’s basically used to control political opposition. Posting the wrong thing on Facebook can get you jail time.
I can think of two recent examples where it failed, bitterly dividing the country:
1. in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop, a media organization was censored based on false allegations of “misinformation”; and,
2. during COVID, people who said authoritarian policies were a bad idea were censored — including medical professionals; resulting in devastating but only marginally effective authoritarian policies.
How, specifically, do you only censor “wrong” speech — without in practice just giving special government powers to the people who manipulate speech in the pursuit of personal power, eg Fauci?
Censorship isn't about doing what is right. It is about promoting authoritarian ideas to maintain status quo. It is an abuse tactic that decides for you what is right and wrong and doesn't give you a choice.
> On the other hand, I'm aware that certain influential figures explicitly manipulate their speech in order to primarily amass personal power regardless of any second-order effects. E.g. cults are horrible, even though people are freely congregating, they just feel like they can't leave because of the emotional abuse these influential figures are heaping via their speech.
> On a third hand, the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of someone who believes the incorrect speech of influential figures and I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.
Terrible things, but I wonder how someone can come to the conclusion that it is a better solution to police the information than actually strengthen people's ability to detect arbitrary BS by themselves. Policing disinformation does not scale (Brandolini's law), while teaching people to think does. Why aren't logical fallacies a part of every school's curriculum? Is it because the "official" disinformation would suffer from that too?
Before we start to police disinformation, don't we need a court-proof definition of the term disinformation? I tried to look up the definition of truth, only to learn that there is no commonly accepted philosohical definition of that. So most likely, any definition of disinformation that is used to depress certain information will be BS too.
The common refrain I hear from communities like HN seems to be that the way to fight disinformation is through education. However, what that looks like is never really explained in practical details. Is this just new curriculum that is taught to middle and high school students? Is there some course that all citizens have to take? If it is only taught to school age kids, what are we supposed to do for the next 30 or 40 years that the country is run by people who haven't had this training? What are we supposed to do when this disinformation education is corrupted by people who themselves have already fallen victim to disinformation because they haven't been educated properly?
I just don't see any practical solution that doesn't involve some type of restriction on disinformation.
> Is this just new curriculum that is taught to middle and high school students? Is there some course that all citizens have to take?
Critical thinking skills should be taught and practiced at all levels of education. An online course available for everyone for free would nice too.
> what are we supposed to do for the next 30 or 40 years
Everything else we've been doing. Calling out bullshit when we see it, explaining why it's wrong and how it's being used to manipulate people.
> What are we supposed to do when this disinformation education is corrupted by people who themselves have already fallen victim to disinformation because they haven't been educated properly?
Isn't this is a risk with teaching anything anywhere? The good news is that it'll be a lot easier for students to catch issues with how they're being educated when they can think for themselves and are trained in how to catch bad arguments.
Everyone thinks that the other side of an issue is spreading disinformation. It's such a vague and ridiculous assertion to assume that any person, organization, entity, or any one side has the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Freedom of speech is a prerequisite for a society to arrive at anything close to resembling truth, because no one has a monopoly on truth. No one can adjudicate it. Ideas must compete. Perspectives must be entertained. Right now, in this very moment and in all moments in history, there are mainstream ideas that are thought to be absolute truths which are brazenly false.
Debate is how you get educated. Nothing else can suffice.
You can't really debate people that think every creditable source is mainstream media propaganda. I'm a debate bro ... I have decades of first-hand experience -_-
Do you think libel and defamation should be allowed? Those are restrictions on speech which rely on their being some identifiable truth.
I guess I just don't understand why saying "[individual X] is a criminal" is restricted but I can say "everyone in [group Y] is a criminal" without repercussion. Why does the broadening of the statement make it allowable? It seems just as easy to disprove and just as damaging to society.
Yes, it's hard and difficult work and it takes real effort, humility and cooperation from everyone including me and you. But it's work you gotta do if you want to avoid a slow slide down into totalitarian hellhole.
Well for starters schools are part of the issue. Having students being taught whitewashed history while pledging to a flag under God each day only reiterates cult like behavior. Our society is brainwashed from the time they are children to like certain things based on ads that use all manipulation techniques. Kids ask for things without even really knowing why they want them. In order to educate children to question things and keep an open mind would require big changes that I don't think society is willing to make. The best we can do is an open dialogue with children about there techniques and how they can recognize and empower themselves to be independent thinkers unwilling to succumb.
> What are we supposed to do when this disinformation education is corrupted by people who themselves have already fallen victim to disinformation because they haven't been educated properly?
What are we supposed to when this disinformation censorship is corrupted by such people?
Could there be a commercial or nonprofit media platform that licenses users before they're allowed to post, and revokes the privilege if they abuse it?
> So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech?
IMO, the solution is to teach and reward critical thinking and questioning authority instead of blind obedience and defering to others who know best.
All policing disinformation does is make people afraid of questioning what they are told - and that will still hold true once the authority they follow changes to one you disaprove of.
>So what's to be done about the actual, real harm being done, while also protecting free speech? I don't want to assume that assaulting people is just the cost of free speech. That just seems so wrong to me.
Free speech has reasonable limits. Slander/Libel is necessary. Death threats, bomb threats, incitement to suicide or genocide. All completely reasonable exceptions nobody will argue against. All of these are IRL physical damages or at least threat of.
So do you go further to amoleriate or prevent psychological damage? This is really the biggest part of the controversy.
So what happens when you create hate speech laws? If you define what isn't allowed to be said. For example N-word isn't allowed tobe said. You actually are going to receive the opposite effect. In order to hurt, people now know what to say; if they don't want to break the law but still hurt you invent new words.
Civilized people who aren't looking to hurt don't care, they simply avoid those words without the law. So you end up with a cat and mouse game where you say you cant use the N word but I sure can invent the same destructive word which isn't the n word. The law is utterly pointless.
So you don't define the words. You just say 'anything that offends' or "anything which incites hatred"
But now even the civilized people are at a loss here. What the law ends up being is a direct method to silence your political opponents. E-word used to be the term for the inuit up in the north. It's now considered a slur. Why? Because it is similar to words that mean snow in other languages that dont matter? But what happened was the inuit used this 'slur' to silence their political opponents. It was orchestrated by the same people who wrote this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/dear-qallunaat-white-pe...
To anyone you can see the problem with hate speech but better yet that isnt the whole story. We now have compelled speech. Hate speech avoids words, but compelled speech... that's next level. The government under force of law are telling you what you must say. This is to avoid offending people. It's remarkable how bad this has been.
The primary battlefield has been a bunch of overworked doctors have been getting fired from our public healthcare and going into private clinics for more money and less work. All because they were accused of not using the right pronoun. No wonder they don't really try to defend themselves. So what happened? You break your arm or whatever emergency. You'll be in the ER for >15 hours and very likely not be able to see a doctor.
The real argument for free speech is that policing speech is not practical.
This discredited story began on a conspiracy website, was repeated by Republican candidate(s), Elon Musk (since deleted), and other conspiracy nutters. It has no traction as it doesn't appear to be based in truth, any more than the false story of Democrats running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant in a slab-on-grade building. Conspiracy theories used to seem harmless before the internet was spreading them far and wide, but more and more, these stories are encouraging (generating?) stochastic terrorism.
What evidence would you need to show that the person who assaulted the Speaker's husband did so because they were spurned by "stop the steal", and similar rhetoric?
Guy had a list of democrats he was going to target after Pelosi, which completely disproves the whole gay lover idea. Why would he have a premeditated hit list of unrelated people if it was a crime of passion against his lover?
Let alone the screaming that he was gonna smash Nancy's kneecaps, etc. How does that fit into the whole thing with the hitlist, do you think?
It was ridiculous on the face of it, the fact that the attacker bonked a hippie chick in SF and did some nudity stuff with her doesn't mean he wasn't a conservative attacking the targets that conservatives have railed against for a decade. He literally posted about the pizzagate hoax lol.
It was a ridiculous circumstantial theory spun by some conservative website to deflect blame for their violence as usual, and even Fox admits the guy had a list of targets to attack next.
Meanwhile it's literally a microcosm of the disinformation problem, you have people actually taking this whole idea seriously when literally a few minutes thought shows it's not reasonable at all. But it was a politically advantageous theory to push.
> E.g. cults are horrible, even though people are freely congregating, they just feel like they can't leave because of the emotional abuse these influential figures are heaping via their speech.
Linux is not a cult. It's a holy war spreading across the Universe like unquenchable fire.
The issue here is that Russia and China have recognized that the internet is a powerful channel to introduce propaganda, sow distrust in democratic institutions, and so on [1].
I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
It's not just Russia and China that realize this though, the US government does too and they're starting to directly push (it was indirectly previously) for private corporations to censor dissent even if it is correct (see the White House directing Twitter to kick off Alex Berenson in emails).
So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections.
If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.
A solution is to discourage media consumption. Modern media may be full of disinformation or malinformation, but those types of information reside on a mound of overinformation intended to overhelm the average person's ability to parse out reality and form their own conclusions. Making available streams of nooze, cat videos, fictional killers, social media dares, and jiggling butts is totally unnatural to the human mind that did not develop under these conditions. If we can't get enough of the public to consider these things harmful in the way we do things like alcohol, then we're kind of screwed because large amounts of disinformation aren't even necessary. As long as the mind is retarded by too much information, it has been set up to accept the single most absurd disinformation.
I don't think it's a fantasy, it's just that organic solutions like religions or societal norms take a long time to develop and that development is damn messy.
But you don't need to introduce a new problem that doesn't solve the old one in the first place. How should this ministry of truth be implemented? It will simply be counter propaganda, which means more propaganda. US propaganda on the English speaking net is vastly dominating, nothing comes close. It looks different in other languages of course.
Although to be more precise it is talking points of said propaganda that is multiplied to a far greater extend.
>If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy.
And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
Moderation is essential to keeping internet forums from devolving into cesspools.
The question then becomes, "who should do such moderation?" Should it be private entities (of which there are more than one within any political boundary), the government (which one can't opt out of short of physically moving) and/or both?
I believe that government should stay out of the business of moderating speech, leaving that to private entities who (within certain limits, many of which don't apply WRT digital communications) can moderate/remove any content they choose.
If I don't like how such entities do so, I can vote with my feet/wallet and go somewhere else. Which isn't generally feasible when a government does it.
All that said, there definitely is a problem with disseminating dis/mis-information that has, and will (increasingly) continue to negatively impact discourse and political discussion.
So what's to be done about it? That's a complicated question. For me, the answer is to try and get accurate news (not opinion -- opinion isn't news) from multiple sources and make a determination for myself as to the value/validity of information.
Unfortunately, many folks are unwilling or unable (whether that be time constraints, lack of access, lack of knowledge/interest in sources that challenge their preconceived notions, etc.) to do so. And so many folks just assume that their Facebook/Google/Instagram/Tik-Tok feeds are accurate and honest.
If/when that turns out not to be the case, large swathes of the population are now being misled and won't even know it.
That DHS is looking at dis/mis-information as a national security threat isn't the problem -- in fact, I applaud them for doing so.
The problem is one of institutional distrust (whether valid or not in this or any other circumstance, it exists), providing bad actors the space to spew false/misleading/irrelevant information to advance their goals.
Which makes it more difficult for those with unpopular (not false or misleading -- there's a difference) ideas to gain traction. And that's a problem as well.
How does this play out? I don't see anything close to a positive outcome (i.e., generally free speech and discourse with a strong tilt toward rewarding factual information and penalizing mis/dis-information).
The best-case scenario in my mind would be more decentralization of discussion forums. That gives us both the best and worst of both worlds: Folks can express themselves freely in forums that are accepting of those types of expression, while limiting the impact of mis/dis-information to those who actively seek it out.
Which isn't all that great for a "best-case" scenario, but seems more appropriate than heavy handed, centralized (private and governmental) moderation.
> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
I feel like it's important to note during these discussions that twitter was a 4chan-like platform until it started doing political censorship leading up to the 2020 election, and it is currently a 4chan-like platform that practices political censorship and virtually no other type (4chan is a very successful and influential platform that other platforms, like reddit, imitated.)
You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested. You can create a #fuckingidiot hashtag and organize hundreds of people under it with the sole purpose of harassing this one person. Twitter will not be interested in it, and will not censor you.
Twitter is not censoring for civility, it's censoring for orthodoxy.
Type in #NAFO. A Poland-based social media disruption operation, literally supported by the state department and feted by Adam Kinzinger. Survey the tweets.
Open harassers and disruptors are not actually that hard to find and moderate. The problem is lack of desire, not ability. There are various government departments that have harassment operations going on twitter, and there was a story not too long ago about twitter actually warning the government that their operations were becoming too obvious to ignore.
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.
Do nothing. Point it out now and again I guess.
Either
a) most people are smart enough not to believe the first thing they read on the internet, or
b) the Russians and Chinese are right and democracy is a farcical sham for a people that's too dumb to rule itself.
In either case, doing nothing is appropriate. Actually, this dichotomy goes for most "free speech" debates. If you have to protect the citizenry from its own stupidity, you should probably reconsider this whole "voting" thing.
Isn't focusing on what's proven false better than attempting to determine what is true? Are you saying it's impossible to determine if something proven objectively false is false?
Also it's worth point no arbitration of "true/false" occurred, the use cases were fraud spamming etc.
A Department of Disinformation is totally different. We're not trying to define what truth is, we're trying to define what it isn't, which is absolutely not equivalent. If you say it is equivalent, you will be banned for spreading disinformation.
I would prefer people were taught critical thinking skills with a focus on identifying and dismissing propaganda for what it is. I suspect the main reason we don’t is so much of the propaganda is home grown and considered essential to maintaining a compliant population. Corporatism hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain a population that’s receptive to marketing and resistant to foreign propaganda. For now there seems to be a focus on provenance and restricting of speech for non-approved concepts.
I don’t think people are smart enough generally. There’s a huge amount of money to be made spreading fake news. Just like you shouldn’t represent yourself in court, the professionals will always find ways to beat the hobbyists.
> I don’t think people are smart enough generally.
This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.
People aren't smart enough and/or don't have enough time and/or are too susceptible to emotional or psychological manipulation to be capable of sorting out truth and fiction, let alone correct conclusions from incorrect conclusions supported by misleading truths. The scale and effectiveness of misinformation makes it completely untenable.
Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.
Here's a fun academic paper HNers may enjoy: "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
> What would be your suggestion to this problem? Just ignore it?
Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content.
There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.
Do any of these "counter bad information with good information" solutions address people who seek a narrative first and are not moved by more, or more factual, information that offsets their prior belief?
This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.
I mean at the end of the day you have to leave the burden of responsibility with the consumer and the people disseminating the news. There has always been fake news, and there will always be fake news, better informed readers are how you counter it.
idk, this seems pretty dogmatic to me, and you just repeated my question as a statement. is better informed readers actually always the best solution? are there any conditions that could ever form where this would not be the case?
what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.
Yes that seems a reasonable concern. Indeed it's hard to censor something without censoring complaints about censoring that thing, unless these complaints are entirely on free speech grounds. But if we already don't believe in free speech anymore, then we would have to interpret a complaint about censoring something as an endorsement of that thing, and hence censor the complaint as well.
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has)
I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government
One part of the solution is letting people know the origin of the people they're communicating with. I'd like to see country flags on every piece of content on the internet, HN included. Not enforced by law but just by convention.
It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well.
And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with.
And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account.
In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.
First amendment rights are defined as a restriction on the government, not any criteria of the person:
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It doesn't say who is allowed to speak, just that the government cannot interfere. (The fourteenth says that they can't interfere through third parties either.)
So this conspiracy between the DHS and tech companies is unconstitutional twice.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site in the intended spirit. Intellectual curiosity and ideological battle do not go well together.
First is for people to educate themselves about what propaganda is, and which countries use it and have in the past. In fact, all countries, including the United States, use propaganda. It is most critical in relation to warfare.
The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war.
People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that.
Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy.
By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.
Sure, this is the desirable solution. But...your example, people did believe it. So is it not as easy as we'd like? Or as a society, what do we do when this easy bar is not being met by our friends, neighbors, relatives?
But I'd also argue that if the owner of a pizza shop has an Instagram feed full of disturbing imagery of children and child-related "art" ( https://archive.ph/9FN8nhttps://archive.ph/5UecO ) and their social network graph is full of convicted pedophiles, sex traffickers, and powerful people supporting media and the political class ( https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 )......maybe, just maybe, we should put some effort into proper criminal investigation of them all instead of dismissing the whole thing because an overzealous citizen honed in on one majorly-wrong detail and skipped straight to vigilantism?
1. online propaganda and astroturfing are very effective
2. our foreign adversaries are very aware of point #1 and use it for political gain
3. hence, there is rampant misinformation online which fuels polarization and societal instability
So I guess there are two questions here:
1. do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?
2. if so, what can or should be done about it, and by whom?
Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”).
I’ll answer by saying this: HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. The upvoting/flagging system is broken as a result since opposition can be easily quashed by downvoting/flagging without manual intervention. Daniel is one lad, he can’t keep up with all of this (but kudos for trying, really). The shit faucet diameter is just too large. My thinking? We’ll need to take a page out of 4chan’s book because placing speech silencing tools in front of users is a dead end. Whatever you do to try to control things, an adversary will gain control of and use it to control the narrative. It’s right there on Reddit.
Don’t take my word on it. Foundations of Geopolitics spelled this out long before most of the internet as we know it today was a thing.
> HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time.
Ok, so it seems you recognize there is a problem.
What, if anything, do you think can or should be done about this problem (and similar), and by whom?
> HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time.
You're stating this very matter-of-factly, so presumably you have some more concrete info. Can you give us more? Who are they? How many? Whats the breakdown between "paid" and "useful idiots"? When did this start? How much of an impact does it have?
> "Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”)."
I think we live in a dangerous time. We have always disagreed on things and discussed and occasionally fought over them. This is healthy and needed (except any violence).
It is important to realize that even as we disagreed, we still used to agree on basic facts and then fought over what best to do next.
That is what is different now! We now live in a culture where any discussion can simply be ended with "Your facts are wrong", or "I have alternative facts". A reasonable discourse is not possible this way.
It takes just one "side" to take such a stance for society to fall into camps. I think that is what we see happening.
Tons of people in Florida with the same name as felons were purged right before the election. Those people were overwhelmingly black and likely to vote for gore. I think hardly anyone says that’s a stolen election, but it’s definitely a bit suspect. As far as I can tell there isn’t really any reason to claim 2020 was stolen, it’s 100% bs. No one was disenfranchised, although the house republicans tried to disenfranchise the entire state of Arizona on January 6th.
Honestly the 1700s and 1800s were far worse in terms of both misinformation and mob violence than what we are going through now. Look at what happened to Andrew Jackson's wife, for example.
There was no golden age where everyone agreed on the same basic set of facts.
Funny stuff. You have a significant portion of Republicans believing in an anonymous Q-clearance government official who's fighting the "deep state" by posting on 8chan but it turns out it's the Democrats who have lost touch with reality.
Now that we've got "malinformation" for "true information your rulers want you ignorant or disbelieving of" we should introduce a phrase for "information your rulers demand you believe" and true/false subsets of that
Seems to cover more than that, things we should be ignorant of could simply be labeled as False. Malinformation seems to be about how facts should only be interpreted in a certain way. So for example a factual statistic but it can only mean what the government decided it means (i.e. supports the government's policy).
Shutdown DHS for good. It is a redundant and useless government agency created in the wake of 9/11. We already have the FBI, secret service, ICE, US marshalls, and from time to time the CIA operating in country. The DHS has no purpose and has accomplished nothing in its history.
> other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
This is a chilling line, and yet so predictable. If DHS’s original mandate has wound down, I consider that an occasion to scale back DHS. But no, government bureaucracies (especially ones with immense, unchecked power) don’t just shrink away when they are no longer needed. They keep growing.
I can see the issue with this, but we also can't simply ignore the information warfare happening in the modern world.
It's one thing for them to control US citizens rethoric, but there's very much state-warfare going on and the US is a big target.
Is that an elephant in the room we don't want to talk about?
I feel we're coupling two problems, one of free speech for citizens in their democratic process, and another of information warfare from enemy of the US against it.
Everytime you've got a non US citizen or resident tweeting, retweeting, and other such about US political topics, that's state warfare. Sure sometimes it's just somebody else that cares, but let's not pretend it isn't often time part of state warfare.
Being able to influence the votes for candidates that other states feel will be more supportive of them or would destabilize the US in ways they benefit, that's definitely happening.
Now I don't know if what the DHS is doing is overreach and also affects the internal democratic process, but I really think we should all think a little about how vulnerable we've made ourselves to outside actors.
There is one answer and only one answer to this problem.
Intellectual self defence.
Problem is, it's the worst possible answer for those in power.
Because if we the people can defend ourselves against foreign state
actors trying to rip up our democracy, we might conceivably start
defending against threats closer to home.
And the fact that in a democracy we are ok to becoming an idiocracy for our temporary comfort indicates we are already an idiocracy perhaps -- hopefully untrue and just a joking statement.
I personally think people get the movie Idiocracy wrong when they see it as a warning of what could happen. I personally take it as a story of how, if you took someone 100 years ago and moved them to today, they would feel very much like they were already in that world. The movie is just using even further exaggerations of what America has become today, in order to shine a light on what's already happened: we've become idiots in many ways. Idiocracy is already here, we already do a ton of useless crap for comfort and aesthetics, but we all just got used to it and don't see how fucked the country has become. We've already gotten to the point where adding classes pre-college about dis/misinformation would probably be considered indoctrination of some kind, so we kinda lost.
I agree with your synopsis. Idiocracy is allegorical of now.
And you're right that one would meet stiff resistance broaching the
matter head-on. Misunderstanding, offence, divisions and accusations
of indoctrination would surely fly.
So I tried a different approach, some of which is mentioned but not
documented in detail here [1]. The discussion of art and literature as
a method can be extended from digital self defence to a more general
"intellectual self defence".
The long and short of it is that this has all happened before. Great
civilisations have fallen into the intellectual doldrums. That's why
we have literature, poems, plays and songs. The Arts are there to
rescue us from this sort of nonsense when we reason ourselves into the
corner of stupidity.
Would agree that we are totally screwed now. I tend to wonder sometimes if we've actually always been this dumb, but now that we are connected enough we can see it better. And this phenomenon seems to amplify not only how dumb we are, but for people to act even more dumb.
I love the internet, but a great experiment IMO would be turning it off for three to six months just to see what would happen. I know it's not possible, but the idea still runs through my head here and there.
You might call it "streetwise" education - but that wouldn't quite
capture it, because it's more about spotting a bad argument or con
artist. The kind of education that creates robust citizens (as opposed
to the 18th century dogshite we teach kids today to keep them dumb).
Is there some reason to think that the DHS policies described in the source article are limited to or even targeted at non-citizens? It really doesn't seem like this is what they have in mind. If they were concerned about foreign influence of domestic political discussions, wouldn't they be focused much more on Tiktok ownership and relationships with hostile foreign powers than misinformation on Covid-19?
Owning a major communications service allows them to spread misinformation that's not popular enough to go viral normally, as well as suppressing true information that they find inconvenient.
Agreed, used to be outlandish and questionable content was relegated to known publications such as the National Inquirer (a weekly purveyor of alien, crop circle and 90 year old grand mothers giving birth) in the US. Nowadays with the decline of journalism, and decrease in editorial objectivism, it's almost impossible to know what information can be trusted. It's a sad state of affairs.
I think there will always be this conflict between the state and the open internet. The state is an institution of the past, and the internet is an institution of the future that transcends any state in particular
The critical question is this: how can we preserve an open internet without opening the door for foreign governments to wage psychological warfare?
This doesn't ring true to me. It's like saying "roads are an institution of the future". The internet is a set of technologies, not an organization or community with any particular purpose or creed.
I'd really really prefer an approach that built an improved information infrastructure rather than establishing yet another police force. I suspect that better information is antithetical to the current powers that be. That isn't to say that they aren't aligned with truth more often that not, but that they wish to keep the option for a false official truth open.
> malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent)
It's interesting seeing these concepts being created in real time. This seems like the sort of thing that will become popular in new york times articles in the near future.
Finally, this answers some questions about the madness of the last 5 or so years. Everyone knew this was happening to some degree but the abhorrent part is how politically biased the execution was.
Contrast this to the very successful information operations by the US and other western nations prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and continuing through the present. Basically every false Russian claim has been countered with nothing more than truth, all the way back to countering Russia's claim that they weren't preparing for an invasion with information showing they were preparing for an invasion. I wonder if there's any reason in particular that this was more successful other than it wasn't particularly controversial in the west and that it hit the cultural zeitgeist
If there is anything that the COVID pandemic should have made abundantly clear, it is that it should not be left to politicians to decide what’s true and what’s false.
> Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.
How can anyone who was rightly against the authoritarian insanity during the War On Terror justify this sort of thinking? "Trump is bad/election deniers are bad/anti-vaxxers are bad" is not enough. This can and will be spun right around and used against you.
You seem to assume this will work by censorship, but I haven't seen anything to substantiate that. So as far as I can tell, there will be more information and how is that a bad thing?
This would be worthwhile if you hadn't read the article and already decided that twitter execs meeting with DHS weekly to discuss specific accounts and what should be done about them is not censorship.
The US gave a report of what was misinformation and requested that social media companies respond with a report of what, if anything, was done about it. What were the repercussions of Twitter didn't do anything? Oh, none? Okay.
The US does this weekly, and about specific people and subjects that it wants to communicate its concern over.
> What were the repercussions of Twitter didn't do anything? Oh, none? Okay.
Why are you convinced that you have some sort of inside information about repercussions twitter may or may not have when the government approaches them with concerns about content? Who convinced you?
>"Why are you convinced that you have some sort of inside information about repercussions twitter may or may not have when the government approaches them with concerns about content? Who convinced you?"
I'm not convinced there were. I don't think the Biden admin would do that as its flatly unconstitutional. Sending a list of misinformation, weekly, daily, monthly, whatever, is flatly constitutional.
It's not really a matter of a religious belief, it speaks more to their desire for political expediency, which would be thrown out the window if they actually did violate the first amendment. Not that I expect you to bring a realistic view of the current political climate to this conversation.
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, look at where Jen has worked in the past, what organizations specifically. One of them performed the exact operations she's trying to prevent.
Because Moscow doesn't have to beat the US on the battlefield of Ukraine if they can ignite a US civil war and force a military withdrawal assymetrically.
> misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context
First I heard of 'malinformation'.
I always thought it was the other two at play (misinformation & disinformation), especially disinformation used in propaganda and influence operations.
I also thought disinformation doesn't have to be 'false information'. It can be information used to shape a narrative, factually correct or not.
Anyway this new word 'malinformation' helps if it means we really need to distinguish between all three words.
Also these China-style crackdowns on people shaping political narrative via social media is ridiculous. Nothing wrong with using the net for organized dissent & speaking truth to power.
We need terms like "malinformation" when we're trying to censor things that are true. It's important to create new language when we're trying to guide people's thinking down preferred channels.
Considering everythat happened this past decade of mismanagement you'd think priority 1 would be limiting how tools can be used in bad faith rather than creating new ones of horrifying unchecked scope.
As I understand it, misinformation isn't necessarily unintentional. Disinformation is a type of misinformation.
"Mis" is wrong. "Dis" is intentionally wrong. "Mal" is using real information for bad purpose (to lead you to a wrong conclusion by giving you out of context info, or to injure with information, like with doxxing).
Interesting that this makes top of HN now that a democratic president is in charge.
When just 4 days ago, we learned that
>Department of Homeland Securitagents "scrambled" to Best Buy in 2020 to get laptops for new recruits with "barely any form of training," meeting up in a "parking lot" to begin work creating spy files on Americans protesting George Floyd's murder.
DHS should be abolished. It was a transparent attempt to create an unaccountable organization after 9/11 that had a vague mission statement and would not have stopped the terrorist attacks, nor could they do anything about terrorism in the middle east, being a completely domestic organization. They provide no value, do nothing, and have immense power. That is why they would search for a new, broad mission statement. They are just like the Patriot act and the TSA. All stupid mistakes allowed by a pathetically emotional and stupid public to let a horrific regime fuck around in the desert and bomb sand for decades, murdering innocent civilians.
I am all for groups like the FBI watching actual domestic terror cells as hate groups spend their time "infiltrating" (literally just a person with extreme opinions and thoughts becoming a police officer) law enforcement. But the DHS has no defensible mission. It was made without a real reason for the people.
Apparently criticizing the debacle on how incompetently they withdrew from Afghanistan or where Covid originated from are all considered disinfo and misinfo? It seems more like political narrative shaping.
> Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions.
> FBI agent Laura Dehmlow was in communications w Facebook that led to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 over the false allegation that it was “disinfo.” This year, she met w/ Twitter/DHS to stress “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”
> Facebook and Twitter created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content. The portals, along with NGO partners used to censor a wide range of content, including obvious parody accounts and content disagreeing w gov pandemic policy.
> The emails and documents show close collaboration b/w DHS & private sector. Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (fired by @elonmusk last week) met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship plans. Microsoft exec texted DHS: "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't"
> How does DHS justify its evolving mission from countering foreign terror groups to policing domestic "disinfo" on social media? Leaked planning docs show the agency argues false information is a source of radicalization & violence.
> Earlier this year, DHS launched a widely panned "Disinfo Governance Board" which it later shuttered following criticism. But the same agenda lives on w/ DHS sub-agency "CISA" which argues disinfo is a threat to American "critical infrastructure" #dhsleaks
Never minding the sketchiness of "working with" government on "misinformation", how is:
>There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.
Internet communication is a gain medium. Like a pumped ruby ready to lase at the first random fluctuation.
A tasteless joke getting dogpiled by tens of thousands of people. Or some speculation turning to fact in minutes.
The gain medium is in a high energy state and will emit on anything that triggers it. Simply removing the triggers will just let the gain go higher before something let's loose.
I propose doping Twitter with tungsten to poison the cascade.
Defining disinformation exhaustively and concretely is an impossible task, it's almost like defining beauty. Moreover, disinformation is not even contradictory to "vetted, objective facts", because not all "information" (which is also hard to define) is necessarily intended to be viewed as factual, and not all information has any kind of deliberate intent associated with it (malicious or useful).
Which makes it a terrible choice of words as it somehow suggests something is not propaganda if it's true.
It also turns discussions about propaganda into discussions about objective truth which is a lot harder. It's easier to show someone has a lot to gain by spreading a certain message, than to verify a bunch of unfounded statements, framing propaganda as 'disinformation' is a brilliant move that makes any subsequent discussion of who to trust about endless fact-checking. It might seem like facts don't matter any more, but focusing on the facts might be the wrong counter move, the facts may well be red herrings used to sneak in dangerous ideology unchallenged.
Truth vs disinformation vs whatever is the sideshow.
Fundamentally, what we have is the US Federal government is not allowed to take certain activities so they outsourced it to third parties.. all the while people claim these are private companies doing what they want.
I propose a new rule:
If it's illegal for a government to do, it must also be illegal for them to request, pay, demand, threaten, require, or imply that another should do it.
Misleading information (I don't want to use the article's silly buzzwords) is a genuine problem, and a security branch of the government is the last party I would want "policing" it. In democracies we have other institutions more appropriate to counter this, eg. educational institutions, journalists, non-profits like EFF, experts in the relevant field, etc.
I had never heard of this person before this Intercept article, and after scrolling her feed for a bit, she's the exact type of person who should never be anywhere near a "committee" that decides what is and isn't "disinformation" (or "misinformation" or "malinformation" or whatever Orwellian term they come up with next).
Incidentally, this is a great example of why Twitter is so useful. This person definitely qualifies as "elite", if she gets to sit on this committee, and Twitter is giving me an insider's view into how she sees the world, and it's a very specific, curated narrative that is basically the consensus opinion from The Economist, plus unquestioning repetition of whatever the Intelligence Community says.
Absolutely bananas that people don't have a problem with this.
So the state wants to decide what is truth and what is not... What should be shared and what should not?
I wonder how that can go badly? Maybe this one time in history we will make that notion work...
I would say the above statement is sarcastic, but if at this point people actually believe this is a good idea I would either question the history or civics education quality or the hypocrisy tolerance perception.
I claim this is a surefire way to create more instability, undermine democracy and straight out attack the most fundamental right in a democratic setting: free speech. (Also, personally, extremely insulting to any scientist to have truth dictated.)
So what: some people/bots act maliciously and spread disinformation. Put a disclaimer. Teach your people to be critical and better. Recall how the state screwed up in the past. There were states that in law stated if you orgasm it couldn't have been a rape. There are states that mishandled the pandemic, and botched the messaging.
Perception of speech is extremely subjective and cultural. You only create extreme views by censoring -- you are banning collaboration. The U.S. has an extreme Political correctness approach, that has only harmed democracy in my book in the end. Communication is for reaching consensus.
You can't be "diversity is great" and "if you say X that is disagreeable to me you are terrible." Pick one.
If someone, including state actors, screws up and causes damage with their speech, get them charged for the appropriate crime -- and even then I would say
"maybe." That is what should be in question and up for discussion and debate.
That some people in DHS even considered this should get them fired (at least); how is this not a crime subverting the U.S. constitution?
(my) Theorem: Sure words can hurt temporarily. Lack of works is fatal.
> You can't be "diversity is great" and "if you say X that is disagreeable to me you are terrible." Pick one.
By "diversity", they mean every characteristic except independent thought. Be of a different race, religion, gender? Sure, that's great. Think different? You're terrible/evil/anathema.
Whenever I see a headline with the word "misinformation" or in this case "disinformation", i replace those words with "free speech" and it really worries me about the future of this country. Putting the power to decide what information is right and wrong into the hands of a few is extremely dangerous.
What's more eggregious is that if this news story were to come out during Trump presidency, everyone would be losing their shit here on HN. It would be so insane, try to imagine us ramping up the Fascism toeing line on all conservatives who have nothing to do with this.
There is no moral compass left in people I feel. We haven't got a north star that we used to. Subjectivism has occupied us all. The only way to move forward is to anchor your beliefs with sound fundamentals, no matter what others are doing around you.
I still remember vividly when the left used to believe in net-neutrality or in free-speech.
Edit: Those downvoting this, can you explain why this wouldn't be true? Can you try to imagine what would have heppened to this story in 2019? I understand you might not agree with my take, then please respond below.
The cognitive distortion 'catastrophizing' comes to mind.
For example you just imagined a made up scenario (this and that would have happened if X variable was different) and then accepted it as fact to justify a litany of observations about entire populations and subgroups.
This daydreaming is somehow 'more eggregious' than the contents of the article.
The Department of Homeland Security should not be allowed to be involved with any sort of fact monitoring or information shaping in the US. I'd think this would be obvious.
All this does is more thoroughly pollute the well. People should ditch trust in information online and concern themselves more with their primary observations. Obviously that doesn't tell me what's happening in Ukraine, for example. But the mistake is to assume that you could reliably have a good idea of what's happening without primary observation.
Same goes for print media, it just has a much lower throughput. This is the side effect of a lot of trends (internet, globalization, urbanization) that has destroyed local communities. It wasn't that long ago that events on the other side of the world truly had 0 impact on your life.
I'd go one step further and say that even primary observation doesn't guarantee you'll have a good idea of what's happening. Just ask a group of your friends from Ukraine/Iran/Pakistan/Haiti (or any other country that's in the news).
It's unlikely they'll have the same position on the issues that they all have first hand information about. The issues that are portrayed as black and white in our media, where the good and bad side is "so obvious", are suddenly not that obvious if you ask someone who actually knows more.
I know it's not a popular approach, but I just accept that everything I know could be wrong, and I don't know who the bad and good guys are (tbh, most often it's just various groups of bad guys the more research you do).
Every advisory of the US recognizes information war as a key strategy of their overall war, why on earth should the US gov ignore this and refuse to fight back?
The correct analogy would be bombing their military bases launching attacks on you, vs doing nothing because you "wouldn't want to escalate" or violate peacetime statues for military use.
> Every advisory of the US recognizes information war as a key strategy of their overall war, why on earth should the US gov ignore this and refuse to fight back?
I think you responded to someone else's comment from elsewhere. I didn't write about any of that.
Everyone should agree that the executive branch should not be pushing the envelope in regards to constitutional rights. This
treasonous behavior demands accountability.
«earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media«
«According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”»
«How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.»
«Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.«
I am not sure why this is called disinformation, and why folks think this is a new concept. It's called propaganda, and it's been a tool of war since ever. We do need to defend against propaganda, free europe and US. There are actors out there leveraging the reach of the internet to spread propaganda in their favor, much as the SU did and any actor before or during it.
> There are actors out there leveraging the reach of the internet to spread propaganda in their favor
The US does this more than any other country on earth, and has covert intelligence services with bigger budgets than the entirety of the budgets of many countries.
> much as the SU did
It's not 1987, and I think the US might have also done a little bit of propaganda about the Soviet Union. It may have declared war on its own citizens to stamp out any indication of Soviet sympathies for decades, even.
> It's not 1987, and I think the US might have also done a little bit of propaganda about the Soviet Union.
Not enough to be honest. An entity that exterminated people en masse and destroyed entire cultures and peoples deserves worse than just a but if propaganda against it.
I think there is a big difference with electronic media in that you can get propaganda from the other side. Eg in WW2 in Western Europe you wouldn't even hear Nazi propaganda except perhaps the occasional leaflet or maybe some radio if you searched for it - in America there would be nothing. Now you get messages on Facebook mixed in with your cousin's wedding pics.
There were definitely attempts at promoting nazi ideas in the west, both in the us and western europe. But unlike modern day it was quickly counteracted. Today you dont need a specific political ideology to sow discontent and damage free societies. All you need is to indoctrinate naive cousins in any toxic topic they may be ready to believe. At scale that causes polarisation, mistrust, conflict and eventually political change. A bit like poisoning the body just enough so it doesnt function properly. The question is how do you police content in such way that it doesnt block legitimate opposing ideas.
> misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent)
Disinformation can, as the others, be used as propaganda.
Random thoughts that I might not fully agree with myself but that I think it’s interesting to think about:
What if the solution to misinformation is _more_ information? If 99 % of all information that you come across is wrong (and you know it), you’re forced to start thinking critically or just believe in random things.
That is, if someone believes that we’ve never been to the Moon, feed them with information of the same logical structure that we’ve never been to the North pole. If someone believe that a politician is guilty of something just because he’s been accused of it, make the same accusations towards one hundered other random politicians. If someone is seeing ghosts, tell them that you’ve been seeing dinosaur ghosts in ballerina costumes.
In order to not die in such an environment because you haphazardly eat led for breakfast, you’re forced to develop critical thinking skills.
> Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether the enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president.
Bernays almost 100 years ago. The solution is more propaganda.
I would encourage folks to carefully read the article and give a mind toward the word “police” in the headline. It can have a variety of meanings, some of which include powers like arrest and imprisonment… but some of which don’t.
The U.S. government has long served as a clearinghouse for information, for example by funding the CVE list of vulnerabilities.
There is a difference between flagging likely disinformation to publishers for their private option to act, vs sending federal agents to arrest private citizens for the content of their speech. A program to do the former is not necessarily a slippery slope to the latter; the First Amendment still exists.
Put another way, there is a difference between the government acting as a participant in the conversation about disinformation, vs the government as the violent sole arbiter of what constitutes disinformation.
When the "participant" in the conversation happens to have the monopoly on legitimate violence and the power to break up (or not) any big company it doesn't like via antitrust law, then it's impossible to trust that there is no coercive pressure being applied.
> Intelligence agencies backed new startups designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.
The onus is on the people here, reading this, to actively fight to counter any attempts to create this form of infrastructure (and never participate in building it)
> An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts
This shows that the threat comes from the right just as much as the left. Once the infrastructure is in place, it doesn't matter who it was initially targeted against. This is why people need to seriously consider the impact of assenting to one political group using it to screw over the other. The extreme polarization of American society has allowed the intelligence community and executive branch to pit political groups against one another in order to increase the breadth and depth of centralized control of the internet. Take Palantir for example, it's a company that outwardly touts its own conservative values, yet participates in employer surveillance, union busting, and predictive policing. The intelligence community relies on them for building this infra[1].
> The strategy identified a “broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
The executive branch is essentially using divisions in American society as a justification to annex more control of social media platforms. It's hard to read the words "enhancing faith in government" and not think of Orwell
There's a growing strain of authoritarianism in this country. Notice how the language has changed in the past couple years, and how we see more whining about "faith in government" or "trust in institutions". The internet has established itself as a revolutionizing force and the current establishment and moneyed class clearly feels threatened by it
I'm surprised The Intercept has decided to report this and not sweep it under the rug. It's good to see more investigative journalism instead of the nauseating lockstep media outlets have put themselves in recently in the name of achieving their desired political change "at any cost"
There is no free speech, really. It is just various forms of preferred speech. This moniker has been hijacked by right-wingers recently. What really scarce is a reliable speech. Noise to signal ratio is really bad in social media. Especially due to state actors with their amplification of disinfo.
The GOP will spin this as a direct assault on right wing speech and shut it down the moment they can. In the mean time they will weaponize it and use it to win elections. This is not not new, every effort to bring sanity is hindered and used the same way.
The cynical partisanship of the past couple years has been used by the intelligence community to justify increasing its scope. This isn't a matter of D vs R but of the state vs its own citizens
Most people who accuse others of spreading misinformation are really concerned about controlling narratives and spreading their own misinformation than they are about truth.
The first amendment has been around for more than 200 years and SCOTUS rulings for as long. At this point any government actor, or private sector entity working in conjunction with the government, should be facing years in prison and brutal fines for even suggesting Prior Restraint on speech. When these pieces of shit get together and make plans they are actively conspiring to violate civil rights.
>should be facing years in prison and brutal fines for even suggesting
I love the irony of this statement. You are such an advocate of free speech that you believe suggesting alterations to free speech should be punishable by prison time. Free speech is so important that we must restrict speech to protect free speech.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Has only been expanded by the courts to apply to all levels and branches of government, and they're not allowed to outsource (14thS1) it and very clearly says that the government cannot abridge speech. Which is exactly what DHS was conspiring to do with big tech.
People get free speech. The government does get a say in the matter. People who are acting members of the government being held accountable for violation of the 1st amendment is a great way to illustrate the difference between free speech and the first amendment.
If this were only big tech/other companies the first amendment wouldn't apply and your comment would have merit, but with the DHS involved this is just wildly unconstitional and there's nothing ironic about it.
The government already restricts speech. Libel is an obvious example. We therefore need to debate what the concept of free speech actually means and what the practical implications of the 1st Amendment are because they clearly don't mean that speech is completely unrestricted.
OP is suggesting that anyone who comes to that debate with definitions that are more restrictive than OPs should end up in prison. How is that not inherently a restriction on the speech that one can make about free speech?
When you become a government actor you swear an oath to uphold and defend the constitution. In your official capacity, it does seem conflicted to then engage in behavior that suggests limitation of the rights granted by the constitution.
As a private citizen, do what you want, but I think this is understood by the context of the OP.
I can't say I agree with that logic. Would you say that any government official who advocated for the repeal of the 18th Amendment was violating their oath of office to defend the constitution?
It seems imperative that government officials need to be able to openly discuss the meaning of laws and whether those laws are appropriate without fear of punishment for that discussion.
> Would you say that any government official who advocated for the repeal of the 18th Amendment was violating their oath of office to defend the constitution?
Yes. Just because you happen to agree with them is not an excuse. The constitution belongs to the States and is ratified solely by them, not the Federal government.
A federal official advocating for constitutional changes from the position of their office is wrong to do so.
> It seems imperative that government officials
It is imperative that legislators do. Administrative officials are not given power to make law. They are required by the due care cause to follow it. They have no cause offering official opinions on these matters.
>A federal official advocating for constitutional changes from the position of their office is wrong to do so.
I guess FDR and many other politicians should have been thrown in prison.
>It is imperative that legislators do. Administrative officials are not given power to make law. They are required by the due care cause to follow it. They have no cause offering official opinions on these matters.
How do the administrative officials implement the legislation without offering official opinions on what that legislation means? Don't they need to be able to discuss the details without worrying about prison?
> I guess FDR and many other politicians should have been thrown in prison
For campaign speeches before he was even in office? That's ridiculous. Once in office he used standard administrative procedure to get his way.. it probably helped that literally one month after being in office Congress, who has the right to do so, proposed the 21st amendment. This is a pretty thin example.
> How do the administrative officials implement the legislation without offering official opinions on what that legislation means?
They hire lawyers and consult with them _privately_. None of this has anything to do with using the power of your office to _advocate_ for a specific position.
> Don't they need to be able to discuss the details without worrying about prison?
Can they discuss food safety without implicating the first amendment? I obviously think they can, particularly through very broad administrative procedures already laid out by congress. This is just picking up goalposts and moving them. This argument was pretty narrowly constrained, if not slightly unhinged, to begin with.
As a rule, can we avoid dealing in absolutes? Implying that the FDA should have no input whatsoever on laws regarding food safety regulation seems a little odd given that they would represent 90% of the relevant experts.
OP used "suggesting" which i take as speech and you used "engage in behavior" which i take as action
for me, the difference between speech and action is at the crux of the issue
It's not ironic, you are twisting words. They're pinpointing a specific set of entities who should be very careful about making certain discussions not included in these entities are individual citizens. If a case has been decided that indicates a specific set of actions are civil rights violations, then I'm not sure what you are suggesting, its ok to violate precedent over and over again without consequence?
>They're pinpointing a specific set of entities who should be very careful about making certain discussions not included in these entities are individual citizens.
Who do you think makes up these "specific set of entities" if not "individual citizens"?
>If a case has been decided that indicates a specific set of actions are civil rights violations, then I'm not sure what you are suggesting, its ok to violate precedent over and over again without consequence?
But OP didn't say the trigger for consequences would be the violation of civil rights. They said that the suggestion was enough to deserve a punishment. They want the speech punished, not action.
Of course you do. You probably lost rights before then if you signed an employment contract, and your employer lost rights when they started working with the government. You lost rights the first time you registered with paypal or facebook (forced arbitration clauses.) You lost rights when you signed your lease.
I don't understand what's supposed to be shocking here. There's this phrasing that seems to indicate that this is an absurd situation rather than a commonplace one.
It just seems weird to suggest that I can be like a random IT worker at some tech company and can post something like "All hate speech should be illegal" and that will be fine. Then my company signs some contract with the government and suddenly tweeting that again would result in prison time.
GP didn't use the word conspiring, I did. But to answer your question, conspiracy is an expression of intent. It can be merely speech but usually involves some action to back up the speech. Because, again, conspiracy is a question of establishing intent.
For example, three people discussing plans for a bank robbery are conspiring. Likewise, the same three people sharing only a knowing glance before splitting up and regrouping with masks, guns, a car and a map with the local bank circled have also conspired to rob a bank. One group only spoke and the other didn't speak, yet both conspired.
It's already the law, it would just be better if the higher penalties applied to all civil rights violations and not just those that involve physical assault. The problem is that the DOJ is heavily politicized and won't proceed with charges.
Discussing the definition of specific rights is not the same thing as actively depriving people of those rights. You are equating speech and debate with action.
This is such a bad comment. Nobody is suggesting free speech for government employees during the performance of their jobs. Would you think it was ironic that somebody who supported the 1st Amendment would object to the FBI writing letters to MLK convincing him to kill himself? Would that be something you loved, or not?
Isn't that just a variation on the paradox of tolerance, though? If we tolerate government entities pushing ideas to restrict the speech of citizens, we are going to lose our freedom of speech.
> Focus on education and providing more information, not suppressing the information you don't like.
A: Education is at best only partly-effective as a response — too many malevolent actors follow Steve Bannon's largely-costless strategy of (his literal words) "flood the zone with shit."
B: Mass purveyors of disinformation are thieves — they steal the time of people who take seriously the need to figure out what's true when, say, voting.
C: It's already established that you don't always get to say whatever TF you feel like without consequence — for example, the Federal Trade Commission goes after people for false advertising, and people have been imprisoned for leaking classified information. (At the zoo with my kids years ago, I saw small monkeys scampering quickly around a set of monkey bars in a giant outdoor cage — they shit and pissed whenever the urge struck them, heedless of where it fell. I get much the same impression from people who get indignant when told that they can't say whatever they want whenever they feel like it.)
> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
The fact that Jonathan Swift was already complaining about this in 1710, should make us more skeptical of the idea that the internet or social media is this unique threat, that older ideas about freedom of speech don't apply anymore.
Also liberalism continues to power the most peaceful and prosperous regions in the world. Giving up on it because illiberalism is on the rise is equally as stupid.
Why is it the federal governments job? Platforms were already removing actual calls to violence and terrorist propaganda in 2014, what happened was that since 2016 a whole new censorship apparatus was created that was substantially broader than anything seen before not due to new regulations (first amendments is still here) but various extrajudicial mechanisms including senate hearings, “friendly” knocks from DHS agents and the whole 9 yards. Daniel Ellsberg today would be Russian misinformation for saying that America had been bombing Cambodia too.
One of the many question marks with your viewpoint is "How much of what is labeled foreign actor disinformation is actually foreign actor disinformation?"
During much of the last few years, heaps of undesirable stories were labeled by the media or big tech as "foreign bot propaganda" with no proof provided, and a large chunk of even the tech-savvy public bought these claims at face value even though there are methods that could be used to largely verify these claims that were never provided.
It would be trivial for an authoritarian government to label any inconvenient story as "boosted by foreign bots" and totally manipulate and control the news while pretending to "fight foreign disinformation".
I reject that framing. I reject the idea that there this clearly defined thing - disinformation - and the question is how to fight it.
The right framing is: How do we figure out the truth? By letting everyone argue about it, on platforms like twitter, or by entrusting that to a bunch of bureaucrats, who then share their findings and censor anyone who disagrees?
Yes absolutely. The government should be spending a lot of time writing very carefully worded press releases that encourage you to research facts, question their pronouncements, and wording all of their releases with a healthy dose of "I am not certain, but we believe" in order to rebuild the public trust.
That will go much farther towards combating misinformation then trying to suppress even outright lies by force.
The power? Which form of power are you referring to?
The power of law? That's very clearly "Nowhere". Taking down Facebook posts is not authorized by law, and is not compatible with the First Amendment (though to be clear: The Bill of Rights does not create or codify our rights; It just enumerates them). It is in executive policy, which should be having repercussions such as prosecution and censure, and it's a failure of our legislative and judicial branches that there's not been such.
The power of force? They're literally a federal law enforcement department. They have guns and ammo and the training and experience to use them. They will arrest you if you wink at them funny while trying to board a plane.
The power of precedent? They're setting it right now. There were a set of leaked e-mails of government officials getting obsequious replies when asking Facebook for posts to be taken down for "Misinformation". I'm not even against the government pointing out posts that violate Facebook guidelines; I just think they should get the same canned responses that everyone else gets.
It does not help that a key campaigning strategy from the sitting president was suppressing an embarrassing story. I would have had some respect if Biden had come out and said "My No-Account son is trying to profit from my name, and I apologize for that". I have no respect for the sitting president nor the previous.
Unlike DeSantis's Stop WOKE law, these documents do not give the government the power to compel social media companies or anybody else to remove posts. This seems like it will hold up against the legal challenges that Stop WOKE failed.
It's not just a suggestion. During the pandemic multiple government agencies worked with social media services to remove content that was not in line with official statements and ban people who made such posts/comments.
>There is no law that gives the government power to restrain speech.
All government actors are subject to the constitution and criminal and civil statutes. If they violate them, they can be charged even in the absence of a statute that says they can commit said violation. See Derek Chauvin and the other officers who recently were convicted of violating George Floyd's civil rights.
>Where do you see the government restraining speech?
When they arranged a contact at social media giants to whom they can report content to be removed.
this is where things get trickier for me. don't all the social media giants have rights to free speech as well, allowing them to do whatever they want with regards to promoting / disseminating content on their site ?
it seems like the government is not forcing them to do anything, it seems like the companies are the one's taking action since the government portal is just to make requests. there might be nuance here if the company allows a government official to remove content directly but even then it might still be legal. can you prevent a private company / individual from giving someone else control over their speech ?
within that context though, perhaps you are saying that it is or should be illegal for government employees to ask . . . i'll have to think some more about what my opinion is there, i have no idea what the laws are around something like that. as a hyperbolic extrapolation, since you mention police, is it or should it be illegal for a police officer to ask someone not to call them a mean word ?
>When they arranged a contact at social media giants to whom they can report content to be removed.
What does arranging the contact have to do with it? The government has long identified speech it disagrees with and I'm really hard pressed to believe you think this is something the government can't do?
>All government actors are subject to the constitution and criminal and civil statutes. If they violate them, they can be charged even in the absence of a statute that says they can commit said violation. See Derek Chauvin and the other officers who recently were convicted of violating George Floyd's civil rights.
Oh, I thought you were saying this empowers them to.
>What does arranging the contact have to do with it? The government has long identified speech it disagrees with and I'm really hard pressed to believe you think this is something the government can't do?
It shows collusion. The government saying so and so said something we disagree with is fine. The government working hand in hand with a third party to prevent someone from speaking is no different than the government stopping the speech directly.
I'm positive that emailing that list to someone does not make it a violation of the first amendment. There's nothing secret or illegal about it either, so I don't think collusion is the word you are looking for. Now an agreement between Twitter and the executive branch, that Twitter would do everything asked of them would maybe make your point. Of course, that's exactly what's missing.
This has been attempted and "paused" after the backlash. [1] I should add, I don't know what paused means in this context.
As a fun side note, DHS is short for the Department of Homeland Security. KGB is short for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti which translates to Committee for State Security. I do not understand why this organization exists when we already have the NSA, especially if they are attacking free speech. Would it be possible to move their budget to the NSA? False statements must not be censored, but rather countered by facts.
I've been thinking we need some sort of checks-and-balances system for the administrative branch, if we let it continue at all. Every agency must have a corresponding shadow agency with equal funding and incentives aligned with policing their counterparts. Instead of just the FBI, we would have the blue FBI and the red FBI.
Also, every 20 years, one of the agencies is disbanded entirely and replaced with a new one.
> Every agency must have a corresponding shadow agency with equal funding and incentives aligned with policing their counterparts. Instead of just the FBI, we would have the blue FBI and the red FBI.
At that point you’ve bifurcated power and removed any rational checks and balances.
With partisans running the show we’d be spending millions investigating Hunter Biden and Don Jr.
Plus, now 3rd parties would have an even higher barrier to entry.
>I do not understand why this organization exists when we already have the NSA
The TSA (division of the DHS) exists to condition Americans to having their 4th amendment rights violated:
The fourth Amendment:
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Every single search conducted of a person in the US travelling without a warrant is a violation of the 4th amendment because it is absolutely unreasonable to search every single person from 80 year old grandmas travelling to see family and children going on vacation.
The NSA always seemed like a strange name. Their primary function has always been cryptography and the mathematical research to power it, kind of like the national laboratories are to nuclear physics. Then at some point physical interception of the phone and internet networks got added on to that. But as far as I know, they do not do assassinations, psychological operations, etc. like the KGB or CIA does. It seems like it should have just been called the National Cryptologic Agency or something like that.
The article is pretty clear that although the board was shut down due to backlash, DHS hasn't stopped this new "mission" to censor speech the government doesn't like.
The only uniformed services branch under DHS is the Coast Guard, so if the OP is correct in talking about DHS and not DoD, it must have had to do with that branch.
I searched "DHS court-martial general" and the only thing that came up was the Air Force court-martial I linked to, and I don't see the DHS connection you mentioned. The Coast Guard is under the DHS, the Air Force is under the Department of Defense.
Many have an expectation that the media and formerly trustworthy institutions are at best "framing and positioning the truth" and at worst "always lying" to them.
Frankly they believe this because it is, to an extent, true. Very few people believe The People can be trusted with the unvarnished truth without appropriate "context".
I do not believe that trust in institutional communication can be restored unless it is re-earned. Perhaps by communicating only fair and factual information and leaving the positioning and framing for the pundits.
The media has never only communicated fair and factual information, but the biases of previous eras were less blatant. Chomsky detailed a lot of these cases where very similar cases of Soviet actions were covered much more harshly than comparable or even worse actions done by Americans or American allies. This is normal stuff, but it felt like this bias was done largely because American journalists were American and naturally, this is how many saw the world.
We now have this divide in America where the difference between the journalist class and wide swaths of America are as wide as the gap between the Soviets and cold-war era journalists. So we have this strong bias whereby don't want to report anything that in any way legitimizes the viewpoints of the 'bad people' (e.g., anyone with viewpoints deemed to be 'populist), even if, particularly if those viewpoints are actually popular.
The problem is if they make up fairy tales about how the Taliban are a bunch of sweethearts and freedom fighters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, how would US citizens of the 1980s know? On the other hand, if they massage the truth about something that happened down the street, citizens are bound to notice and naturally, lose all faith in their reporting.
> Perhaps by communicating only fair and factual information
No one is unbiased. The order and depth to which you present facts can itself be biased. Also, the extent to which you leave out or don’t throughly investigate “unimportant” facts can be biased.
For example, some networks and politicians try to “flood the zone”, with more information than can reasonably be covered. Even without bad intentions, it’s impossible to know all the facts about the war in Ukraine, let alone trying to also make time to learn facts about the economy, classified documents and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Ironic because an accurate portrayal of the news would illuminate actual atrocities/genocides that American news sources generally don't cover.
Had they, from the OP's perspective, the genocides that might have happened, have happened. We just don't cover these things.
Examples being considering the Korean war a genocide due to the mass assault on civilians, The right wing coup in Indonesia that led to a million members of the Communist party to be murdered, the current blockade of Yemen that has contributed to the deaths of 85,000 children.
Because of how Media in the US already serves a national security interest, these things are either not spoken about, or twisted to make the US be the good guys.
So to say that mainstream media accurately reporting the news would lead to genocides is silly, because the inaccurate news through the filter of natsec, helped these atrocious acts by leaving them in the dark.
I think a more charitable framing is that these institutions believe a dangerously large subset of “the people” can’t “be trusted with the unvarnished truth without appropriate "context".”
Which are made up of people. So some people think other people "can't be trusted with the truth". Thus, the first set of people deserve to exert complete control over which information the second set are allowed to see. Do we have an objective test as to which people belong in which group? Will the first group ever abuse their power?
Find out on the next episode of "Everything will be different when I have all the power"!
Indeed, what I have found in missing from these discussions has been a critique of the power these platforms have.
In my opinion, what we should be talking about isn’t the moderation decisions Twitter et al are making, but why they have so much power over information in the first place.
Government policy over the last forty years has promoted far too much concentration in traditional media, and it, along with social media, needs to be checked.
Another aside is that the 2013 NDAA legalized domestic propaganda. This needs to be discussed more and reversed.
> In my opinion, what we should be talking about isn’t the moderation decisions Twitter et al are making, but why they have so much power over information in the first place.
While I agree with you in principle, experience shows that public pressure can change Twitter's moderation policy—but I think suggesting that Twitter remove or reduce its power over information is less likely to have success. So, in a regulation-hostile environment such as the US, where it is preferred to leave decisions to businesses whenever possible and beyond (and what could Twitter do, even if it wanted to, to limit its power over information?), it seems like we might as well pursue the policy that has some chance of success, in the hopes that it gives us enough time to address the bigger problem.
What does success even mean in such a context though?
The fundamental problem is one of governance over hundreds of millions of not billions of users.
People talk about the first amendment, but that is a fundamentally America centric worldview, while most users on these platforms are outside of the United States.
Platforms may be accountable to some users, but certainly they are far from being accountable to all, most, or even a large subset of their users.
In any other decade this would be by far the largest political scandal in US history, with non-stop mass media coverage, endless investigative journalism, universal public outrage, pop culture shaming, politicians resigning en masse, and criminal prosecutions. Today? A collective shrug from everyone like-minded, or who got caught on that particular side of the story. All the safeties have been removed these days, the ends always justify the means, and near total control of this country's most important institutions by the left (everything but SCOTUS, as far as I can tell) is the ultimate enabler of this tacit collusion.
Secrecy, censorship and propaganda are a great combo if you want to produce awful political outcomes. If you forbid freedom of speech, that's basically the same as saying people are too stupid to make their own decisions. This leads to a China or Soviet style dictatorship to protect the people.
That was always the contention of Bolshevism. The people are too dumb to protect their own interests. The party must be the vanguard of the proletariat to protect their interests. Democracy will be replaced by internal party democracy where only party members will vote.
The party will only make decisions in the people's best interest. Few people study history though so they're unaware that all of this has been tried before with disastrous results. Might as well move to China if you enjoy all your information being tightly curated by the authorities.
It's not China or Russia's fault. It's the consequence of the ideology that says common people are too stupid to make the right choices in their own best interests and there must be an inner group of enlightened know-it-alls that make all their decisions for them that leads to these kinds of totalitarian outcomes.
Censorship. At the end this ends up in censorship. Instead of this terrible fights for having the official truth, why not educate people to not believe absolutely anything that has no shown proof?
Why so much secret and "it is for your security"? When I go to sign a contract I want to know everything upfront and later choose.
All in all, it does not convince me at all the increasing efforts to be able to spy absolutely everyone, control all the information flow...
For example now in Europe they censored RT and Sputnik bc they are "russian propaganda". I do not say it is or not. I just say that if we are democracies we should not be censoring, but warning people. If we do not do that, then we are the same thing as the people we point fingers at.
Balaji Srinivasan posted a prescient Tweet a long while back. I'm paraphrasing but the general gist was that the US intelligence apparatus would be turned on American citizens, as the US started to retreat from foreign entanglements. We are dangerously close to setting a precedent where intelligence agencies effectively choose our elected leadership. This unelected shadow government within the United States must be rooted out at all costs, lest we really lose our democracy.
So the DHS is wrapping up its war on terror and is now focusing on domestic information sharers for their new war. Jeez, hard to see how this ends well. The motivations of these people can only be nefarious.
Of course it is. Anyone with non-orthodox viewpoints should be familiar with the groups who will be targeted because it's not always who you think it is.
> [Those] who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and
governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society[1]
> [Any] ideology that considers capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive[2]
We'll see what this means for the free speech everyone says we have or the extend that "wrongthink" will be punished.
This is honestly dystopian and I can't believe that I am reading this. It's as Orwellian as it gets. Generally speaking, avoid implementing government policies and powers that you wouldn't let the worst of your enemies use, even if its with "good" intentions. The federal government stepping forward to fight disinformation might seem benevolent to some at the surface but it is a terrible idea in practice. History has shown that the state isn't always trustworthy and we should be more cynical and cautious when evaluating them. A war on disinformation will turn into a war on information in general.
If the US goverment truly has plans to censor/control American social media at will, Then all of their arguments against Tiktok lose meaning.
The whole argument is that China can influence TikTok to change content to hide truths and harm other nations, which is soon going to apply to the US too, if not already.
imagine if the US removed anything against the Apartheid state(Facebook already does this, any news showing what's actually happening in occupied Palestine is removed), or if it does another invasion and it removes any reports going against the Governments story?
The difference is the U.S. has never been challenged in tech and influence, and now they have and they don't like it, they don't like to live under the mercy of another country with its own interest that doesn't match with the US.
Truly, the US is finally getting a taste of its own medicine.
With all of that said, I can't deny that the US would still be probably better than China in freedom of speech.
> The whole argument is that China can influence TikTok to change content to hide truths and harm other nations, which is soon going to apply to the US too, if not already.
Well, presumably the US government's argument would be that China can influence content to harm the United States, whereas the US government would only influence content to help the United States (pinky swear!).
I do agree with you that the ability of a government to censor at a large scale is likely to be bad for the people under that government's jurisdiction and the people of the world, even if that government is acting competently in its own self-interest.
However, it's not that odd for a government to be concerned about a foreign government exerting an influence on its citizens that it also wants to exert on its own citizens. As a crude example, it wouldn't be that odd for the US government to be very concerned if China started conscripting US citizens into military service, even though the US government has the ability to do that. Even if you believe that all military conscription is bad, it's hardly a notable "double standard."
> Well, presumably the US government's argument would be that China can influence content to harm the United States, whereas the US government would only influence content to help the United States (pinky swear!).
Correct.
But that's from the view point of the US only.
The US isn't going against Tiktok only locally, it wants to remove it world wide because of Chinese influence.
The US can influence local content how it likes, they have their own rules and its totally fine IMO.
The issue is controlling global content, which is what they are accusing China of, and what they really want to do if not already have been doing.
> I do agree with you that the ability of a government to censor at a large scale is likely to be bad for the people under that government's jurisdiction and the people of the world, even if that government is acting competently in its own self-interest.
I think this is obvious.
My point is that the US is mad at Tiktok because the CCP can do it, yet now the US wants to also control all content on its platforms and wants the world to see it as something totally different to what China can do.
Its basically, "it's OK for us, we are good, but not for them, they are the Baddies!!!"
> My point is that the US is mad at Tiktok because the CCP can do it, yet now the US wants to also control all content on its platforms and wants the world to see it as something totally different to what China can do.
> Its basically, "it's OK for us, we are good, but not for them, they are the Baddies!!!"
Yeah, it seems like we agree, except that I just wouldn't call it a double standard, because the US government is pretty clear that it does claim that it's "the good guys" and that China (or insert other historical nation state with a less-than-great relationship with the US) is "the bad guys." The US government isn't trying to make some principled claim about liberalism and the appropriate role of nation states domestically and on the global stage. It's just literally saying that it's the best nation state and that it should be responsible for and in control of a lot of global affairs. I don't agree, but I just don't characterize the problem as a double standard.
Why are you framing this as a hypothetical scenario? They’re already doing it, and have been doing it.
>There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
It’s already happening. What makes you think otherwise? It says so right there that they have this throttling system. You really think they designed this system and it’s never been used before?
I edited the comment to make it clear that its possible they are already doing this.
Also I'm taking about international discussions, not them throttling local news/"misinfo".
Because if they middle in international topics, then they are doing exactly what they are accusing China of doing, And is IMO a much bigger thing than fighting local "misinfo"
First off, wrongthink is not a thing, you're thinking of crimethink.
Second off, those are literally different things. Malinformation is defined in the article as information shared, out of context, with harmful intention. Crimethink is not about sharing or intentions, it's literally about having a thought that goes against The Party. No need to share.
>In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report[1] to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the “information ecosystem.” The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.” They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”
Soviet-tier insanity. I wonder if the Intercept article itself would've been classified as "disinformation" by these people.
> DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Nice Western values at play here. Hooray for the rules-based order!
Total joke of a society, at this point I’m wondering when will the whole pack of cards begin to fall, there’s ideologically nothing holding it in place.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We've asked you multiple times already, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.
Using HN primarily for ideological battle will also get you banned here—regardless of which flavor you favor. So please don't do that either.
> Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN?
Just tell me what ideology to cheer for and I'll do it. You've last asked me about some 4 or 5 years ago not to write about history stuff, I didn't since then, maybe you're confusing me with someone else.
Later edit:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle
Didn't see that put into effect on this website after February 24th.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Could you please stop creating accounts to do that with? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I do think news outlets should be held accountable for blatant disinformation.
Then they can be fined via a "lie tax" with a required rating on their front pages just like restaurants have a health rating. That tax then goes to fund critical thinking programs in our schools.
Interesting idea, but how about don't let news outlets be owned by the fat cats they're supposed to be critical of?
The Telecommunications Act of 1996's supposed purpose was "to promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services"[0]. Now there's far less competition since media conglomerates have greatly consolidated, and deregulation has allowed mainstream media to regulate the viewpoints of popular conversation.
And what happens when the government fines the media company and then it comes out that the lie was actually a truth? Will the government refund the media organization and make a public apology? Will the person who wrongfully fined the media company go to jail for violating the first amendment?
How about you don't try to take away my inalienable, God-given right to read whatever I desire. I don't need some nanny-state commissar telling me to pay up extra taxes for daring to view unapproved opinions
I honestly find more useful information on 4chan. At least I'm not taking anything at face value, and if something piques my interest I will do my own research. Reddit on the other hand pretends to be the only truth in town, much more insidious in my opinion.
Why do you say 4chan when it's other chans that tend to have CSAM? That's why the one had to move to a dot onion, plenty of places still serve up gore.
I'm a sadist. I won't kill you, but I'm not going to hide I might smirk. For many years I warned that if you abuse your access, nothing is off the table and it has been that way for years now.
I remember rumors about /b/ but I never saw abuse material, just gore and a bunch of racist bullshit circa 2009.
On my end, I found it... weird... how people would pair "only" looking at cartoons with some really weird shit they're write, on the erotica side of things.
(Weird as in power dynamics -- the idea you might just leak your preferences on a dating site is amusing to me, since... come on... you're both trying to meet people... the problem if it's paired with being more or less helpful depending on if people bang you. Keep in mind, I literally had a conversation with a published author about how so many fiction writers are basically doing a roman a clef I can't tell if it's rude to comment on it, but it's a lot easier to look things up nowadays...)
Anyways MOVING ON!
When I was considering grad schools I was told it was a known thing you can de-anonymize reviewers, but later on someone was dumb enough to self rate a five, state something factually incorrect about what would have become my PhD thesis, then rank it a 1. From there, based on "the metrics" I wasn't accepted to... a privacy thing.
Now, to be fair, before we got to that moment, I could have... not done a full on PhD.
But I was living in a shared house with some ex army libertarian who probably would have thrown a fit if I ran a packet capture, so I kind of assumed on day someone might knock on the door and tried to get a receipt when I went out for coffee -- I fully expected one day I'd have to sigh and go "listen, I just pay the internet bill, here's where I was then, that guy is a weirdo".
The above is... creative nonfiction... but I hope people know that is the source of a HUGE chunk of meme culture. Imagine you're Catholic, sheltered, have only been to Niagara falls, and people keep very obviously asking you questions with the promisem of not repeating your answers because apparently they find your opinions both intriguing and hilarious?
The classic example being that in the aftermath of the G20, people started testing the limits of free expression, and they had some kind of... nude art thing... down at CMU... and the bishop had been offended.
And I was just tired and annoyed and snapped "Well, it's a private college right? If the cmu want to take their pants off tell them to put down a towel" and tried to ask about something actually work related...
It was one of what became a series of very WTF moments. Like, ok we are "privacy researchers"... how am I supposed to ignore that I was born here, so if these rich weirdos want to wander around with thousands of dollars in electronics AND call the cops every time they get scared so someone can come shoot some poor bastard who wasn't lucky enough to be born in "Cali" or whatever...
Especially since I'd been told they had to bring every cop and swat person in from all over the country for the 2009 G20 -- the implication being if you had that many pissed off in multiple cities at once, there is NO WAY they could do the things they did if there were multiple protests at once.
So occasionally, from around Y2K until now, I'd meet these gun reform people who were just... rude. They were bullies who worried someone would literally kill them... like... with a gun. And they'd make a big scene about how someone they knew had been killed with a gun, then push... bad legislation... like the AWB.
And I'd smirk and go "*oh sure, I'd be willing to vote for someone who supports the AWB -- my main concern is just that we maintain access to things like bolt action rifles and revolvers... quiet little things you can't hear from the next house. That's what they did in Prague. Keep shooting those local party officials until one gets shipped in who is less of an asshole... or so I heard."
It's fun to watch their eyes bug out when you say that in your cheeriest "I'm a millenial and yes I vote" voice. (Literary or otherwise.)
You can associate with whoever you want, I think the thing people are finding out is that no one wants to fuck Nazis, then having meltdowns they're gonna have to jerk off for the rest of their lives.
(Personally I'm just hoping one day I can engineer it so it's a girl, but apparently the things I write are so incredibly offensive to women, I'm the poster child for planned parenthood.)
Were you intoxicated when you wrote this, or am I just really tired? I'm having trouble connecting the dots on what you're saying. It seems all over the place
Good. Disinformation is a threat to our infrastructure and the country. Not all weapons are physical.
To be clear: disinformation is not a free speech issue. It is a weapon of war. Saying we shouldn’t fight it is as invalid as saying we shouldn’t repel an invading force because that enemy has a right to bear arms.
(the 13 critical infrastructures that the DHS protects includes our voting system, our water system, roads and bridges, etc. look it up)
"Suppressing disinformation" is a power battle, nothing more.
Whoever has the right to say their understanding is the correct one and all others should be repressed has power over speech.
Freedom of speech means ALL speech or it means nothing.
If someone defrauds you, prove the fraud and the damage and sue them.
Otherwise, whether you want them to or not, people have a right to tell you what they think, or even to lie to you and tell you something they don't even think.
Otherwise "stopping disinformation" is just "censorship" by another name.
Yeah I'm sure this new department will not be used strictly for political gain.
Bad inflation numbers going into the midterms? Joe B flubbing some speech or person reference? Just call it misleading or misquote on some stretch technicality and down moderate.
The mostly uninteresting Hunter Biden laptop story suppression from mainstream media, Twitter, and Facebook in a very obviously concerted effort, and only for a period of time before the election, with orders from the top is a sign that, when pushed, the Arbiters of Truth will squash dissent to save face. (Here come the downvotes)
You mean the Hunter Biden laptop story literally everyone has heard about incessantly for years? The same one that They suppressed from the mainstream media, Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia¹? The one that's the reason They are going to downvote your post?
1) Most MSM harped on that it happened but not its contents. Same with other leaks such as emails, paid speeches, cables, etc. The story gets out. The substance of the leaks, however, are not widely discussed. Only that it happened.
2) I clearly stated that it was suppressed by MSM, Twitter, Facebook for a short period before the election. Twitter and Facebook admitted it outright. Zuckerberg himself said they got a call from the State to "watch out" for it. It's no longer a debatable as to whether the suppression before the election happened.
And no, the downvotes come in droves when speaking less than positively about the American Democratic Party.
For years after the election, certainly not before - the narrative before was between Russian disinformation handwaving and complete fabrication.
eg
NPR
"We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."
I can only imagine how much more effective this strategy would be if you codify it into a federal agency.
Maybe. Just maybe. If the system did not produce ignorant citizens, there would be no need to police disinformation systems those citizens engage in. Which brings me to another point, how comfortable do you feel about DHS determining what is sufficiently non-disinformationy? Do you think DHS would have an opinion as to whether Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are disinformation?
I do not understand the naivety that comes with this particular view. The freedom of speech is not about saying a $slur. It is about ensuring we are not Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia or China.
Why are people clamoring so hard to become like those states? Beyond government, who benefits from this?
It is not the citizens of US.
edit: added Iraq since that reference may not be as evident in in 2022.
> Maybe. Just maybe. If the system did not produce ignorant citizens, there would be no need to police disinformation systems those citizens engage in.
> I do not understand the naivety that comes with this particular view.
Frighteningly, producing ignorant and naive citizenry works for governments on both fronts. On one front, it makes the populace susceptible to "foreign" propaganda, thus a justification for censorship. On the other front, it makes them susceptible to government overreach and the erosion of their own civil rights to combat this "threat".
Among the information labeled as disinformation was the Hunter Biden laptop which turned out to be true. So this disinformation apparatus ended up doing the opposite and suppressed true information. Not only that but the government knew at the time that this information was true.
Just label this for what it is, government censorship supported by big tech.
Can you be more specific? What specific claims were labeled as disinformation by whom?
This matters because what was covered at the time was that the laptop was known not to have a good chain of custody. At the time, journalists at the NYT, WaPo, and others reported that they were able to verify some of the emails but that large amounts of data were hard to validate and the lack of a clean forensic history made it hard to confirm validity for many of the files because there were clear signs of access and modification after it had left Hunter Biden’s control. Nothing which has come out since then has changed that, and the general consensus outside of movement conservatives seems to be that the main thing politicizing this did is to make it harder for the DOJ and other investigators to prove anything to a legal standard.
Nope. The New York Times and others ran headlines that front lined that it was Russian disinformation. They didn't talk much about how the emails were verified. In fact Glenn Greenwald quit because his editor tried to suppress his story on it.
If that was true, you’d be able to provide a source. Instead, you’re linking to things like this story which do not say what you’re claiming:
> No concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.
> John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, also told Fox Business Network that the “laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
1) Would/could a reputable news agency validate chain of custody/authenticity of those emails at the time the rag first dropped them?
2) Though it is beside the pint of the discussion of disinformation, I'm interested to hear from someone I assume is actally human tell me if the email contents would affect an individual's choice in the 2020 election. The alleged corruption of a politician's son would stack against the overtly corrupt and anti-American behavior of the Republican candidate?
The NYT is pretty unambiguous that the laptop is disinformation:
> Russian intelligence officers were using Mr. Giuliani, who provided the hard drive copy to the tabloid, as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Mr. Biden’s presidential run.
Also, if you're going to break HN rules by using your account to do ideological battle and spread disinformation, maybe make it a little less obvious in your username?
Did you not read that the New York Times changed their mind a year after your story? Go read the article I linked that was published a full year after your article.
Pretty much everything about Hunter Biden that was decried as "disinformation" or "Russian propaganda" has turned out to be true. The laptop story was squelched just prior to the election.
> Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.
Either the NY Times is a "right-wing blog spreading Russian propaganda" or the fact that they based this story on the contents of the laptop is a tacit admission that it's authentic.
The NYT is pretty unambiguous that the laptop is disinformation:
> Russian intelligence officers were using Mr. Giuliani, who provided the hard drive copy to the tabloid, as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Mr. Biden’s presidential run.
If one has to equate information with direct physical violence before arguing for suppression of information, what does that say about the validity of the argument? If it's so important to suppress certain information one should be able to argue for this in terms of information qua information, without having to falsely equate it to literal physical violence first.
It's also quite constructive to conceive of "disinformation" as information (as opposed to physical violence) because it leads naturally to the realization that the remedy should be in the realm of information as well (education, establishing trust, trustworthy or verifiable information from trusted sources, etc..), instead of violence (suppression, shutting down, imprisonment).
So then use the pen and not the sword, to fight "disinformation".
Also that quote does not necessarily equate information with physical violence ("mighty" is something quite different), which is what I am objecting to.
> Saying we shouldn’t fight it is as invalid as saying we shouldn’t repel an invading force because that enemy has a right to bear arms.
You're conflating the rights of citizens vs foreigners. Your own citizens are not your enemy. You should never call them that. That sort of thinking is what gets you internment camps. That is a road which we already traveled and do not need to travel again.
The difference between "you can't say that" and "you will go to jail if you say that" is very minor and plenty of western nations have already breached that wall.
This is valid opinion but it really is a strong negative to just spout something like this as if it's self-evident, and that any disagreement is obviously just so stupid you don't even need to spend the extra 30 seconds or so to justify it.
The biggest and most obvious question is who gets to decide what qualifies as "disinformation" - including what the difference is between disinformation and just being wrong, and how is that protected from changes in the political landscape?
Unfiltered, anonymous speech on major social media platforms is the equivalent of a supervirus. Bad, poisonous ideas spread more quickly than truth and logic can catch up, and no one is silenced or held to account when these bad ideas keep spreading.
I don't know what the solution to organized disinformation is. I don't know if the "cure" would be worse than the disease of disinformation. But it's naive to think nation-states are not using social media to leverage peoples' negative emotions and dividing society and making people disrespect really important things that should be held in really high regard in society, like truth and science.
Nonsense, but even if this is all true, the solution is more education, more debate, more speech, not heavy-handed government imposition of what can and cannot be said in what contexts.
Eventually, the people - or person - wielding that heavy hand will not have your best interests at heart.
Interestingly the biggest purveyors of organized disinformation are governments. Anyone else remember how the US government had a massive disinformation campaign that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and then orchestrated an invasion?
Even more revealing is that the disinformation campaign was aided and abetted by US media including such supposed stalwarts as the New York Times.
I think there is more trust to be had in the stalwarts still than in the alternatives I see my mother watch and read, notably fox news and OANN and Investmentwatchblog.com .
I’m not sure it’s sane to classify disinformation as a weapon of war. There’s all kinds of bullshit that definition doesn’t fit. At best you’re if ignoring it, at worst you’re lumping it together.
How about "fight" "disinformation" "weapons" with explanations of the truth. The 4th branch of the govt AKA the mainstream media has proven a failure of disseminating truth when it counts, and thus has eroded our trust in it.
PSAs paid for w/ public tax $ like The Ad Council have their controversies but are generally countering some social issue with a "this is bad" message [0] but outright censorship of even blatantly false information is a sign that our government's integrity is shot to hell.
Next time you hear someone spewing some bullshit like the 2016 election was rigged (Russia) or the 2020 election was rigged (tbh not sure who the main villain rigged this one), remember that people have been accustomed to lies from the top and are not completely crazy for looking to the fringes for the real scoop.
> How about "fight" "disinformation" "weapons" with explanations of the truth
Tell me how this isn’t comparable to saying “if you just explain to the trolls they are hurting your feelings, they’ll stop”
I 100% promise you “the truth” already exists for 99% of topics out there. You seem to be setting up a paradox. The government shouldn’t intervene in misinformation, but somehow the government and media should align themselves to spread only factual information, which would be way creepier.
Any realistic solution has to happen despite an imperfect media and a landscape with all sorts of conflicting information, not try to eliminate it. Ad council seems like just another way to tell people in their bubbles what they already know.
Freedom of speech has its downsides, yes. My only point is to _add_ to the discussion, not _delete_ discussions. We have laws in place for defamatory speech and plenty of other exceptions. Saying false things about climate change or how "democracy" works can often be countered with basic facts. People will often still choose to believe fallacies at will and that is their right as an American.
You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit, which they're able to do at trivial cost. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the shit spread by those who, for their own purposes, want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.
> Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights
1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose.
2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
> Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil.
That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.
Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers.
It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
(Replying to my own comment because I can't reply to the one below)
If right and wrong are not matters of opinion, then what objective test does one use to discern which is which? For example, is contraception right or wrong — and why? How about same-sex marriage? How about interracial marriage?
As to rape: You and I certainly agree that it's wrong, but that hasn't been true in all times and circumstances (are you familiar with droit du seigneur and its variations?). And the Russian soldiers who raped their way through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-45 were told by many of their superiors that it was their right to do so.
> 1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.
You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.
> My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose.
If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
