I’m not saying there’s no misinformation on X. There’s misinfo everywhere. I’m saying AOC’s rhetoric is dangerous in using that to crack down on your constitutional rights, again. No government, elected or otherwise, can be trusted to regulate truth. The answer to ill-informed speech is more speech. A crack-down will only embolden those trying to mislead.
The answer to ill-informed speech is more speech
It’s not and due to a simple reason: people with ill intent do not play by the same rules. People throwing conspiracy theories, lies, distorted truths and all sorts of disinformation don’t care about being right, they care about reach and strong emotional responses. People that want to spread the correct information want people to know and learn. Two completely different end goals. Not only that, it takes significantly more time and energy to explain why some bullshit is bullshit, than it takes to just spread it.
Put it another way, disinformation is a machinegun and trying to fight it with more speech, like fact checking, is wearing a bulletproof vest. It’s better to make sure no shots are fired than praying it doesn’t hit an uncovered spot.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. - Sartre
Thank you! This is a great quote to ponder.
Fast-forward a little and the anti-semites in Germany were banning any and all press except their own and burning books in bonfires. This was a bad thing for public discourse and the public’s access to truthful information. This paved the way for the Holocaust.
Censorship is inherently a fascist trait. This is not controversial.
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
- Sir Karl Raimund Popper, speaking on The Paradox Of Tolerance.
The answer to ill-informed speech is more speech.
It really doesn’t feel like that is the case. It feels like the more speech we produced on the internet the more of it turned out to be bullshit. We need to turn to quality over quantity.
Where I agree with you is that this isn’t something we’d want to entrust to a government. We need non-profit news outlets that are publicly and internationally founded with transparent decision-making.
It feels like the more speech we produced on the internet the more of it turned out to be bullshit. We need to turn to quality over quantity.
That’s a really interesting point. The question to me becomes: what facilitates quality over quantity? What encourages earnest dialectic dialogue over raging and trolling? I don’t see the twitter format as the answer. Lemmy I feel is somewhat better at facilitating such a culture.
We need non-profit news outlets that are publicly and internationally founded with transparent decision-making.
Non-profit, public, transparent, those are all things any government body should be. What it seems you’re describing is a centralised government body for determining truth/falsehood. To the exclusion of all others?
If you want to know what’s going on in the world, read from at least 4 news sources from different parts of the world with different slants and ideologies. Note: they will contradict each other.
woops sorry, I misread outlets, thought it read outlet…
The question to me becomes: what facilitates quality over quantity? What encourages earnest dialectic dialogue over raging and trolling?
Yeah that definitely is the question. And I’m not going to claim that I have the definitive answers.
I think one aspect is that it used to take a lot of effort to publish something. So there was an incentive to only publish stuff that was worth publishing. That doesn’t mean it was necessarily close to factual or even strictly objectively “better”. But it was harder to unleash a shitstorm on small things and, since a lot less was published, there was more time to consider the things that were.
I think that ties into the second point, people had more time to process stuff. We are racing from headline to headline and only processing using emotions not rational thinking.
But I also have to admit that manipulation and propaganda obviously were a thing and worked in the past too so maybe that’s all just romanticism for a time that wasn’t actually better, just different.
Edit: I think Lemmy is better only because we are still in relatively small spaces and many instances are relatively quick with banning trolls (and even defederating entire instances). So maybe smaller but diverse spaces with harsh moderation on trolling/intentional misinformation are the answer?
