65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
you’re making an argument for absolutist freedom of speech here, because if you believe nobody can responsibly wield this power the obvious answer is nobody should—but you yourself literally admit by choice that you don’t use absolutist freedom of speech places like /pol/ because of how they are and what they invariably turn into in the absence of censors. does that not tell you something about how self-defeating this position is
No single body can wield this power, and therefore multiple should.
/pol/ self-censors through slides and sages, and even maintains at least some level of toxicity just to dissuade outsiders from browsing or posting - you could call it preventative censorship.
Fortunately, we don’t have to go there. We have the choice to coexist on Beehaw instead.
Even on reddit, different subs could have different moderation policies, and so if you didn’t like ex. Cyberpunk, you could go to lowsodium_cyberpunk.
Freedom to choose communities allows multiple diverse communities to form, and I think that’s the key - that there are many communities.
When the scope of truth arbitration moves from lemmy instances to the us gov, the only alternative choice for any who disagree would be to go to another country.
The beauty of the internet is that there are no countries. Any website could be anywhere - there are hundreds of thousands of choices, from twitter hashtags to irc rooms.
I do not want one hegemony of information. I do not want 5, or one for each nato member. I want as many as possible, so I may find one (or more!) that I like.
then you already exist in that world and for most countries a far more punitive model works better than the US’s, so…
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
Iraq has exceptional consistency in thought leadership. There are no drug addicts in Singapore.
Moxie marlinspike has an excellent blog post on “perfect enforcement” - if the law were applied perfectly, we would not have the lgbtq marriage rights we have today. If America had perfect consistency of thought, we would all be protestant catholic.
Consistency is not a world I strive for, and therefore, to return to the start of this thread, I do not believe the us gov should apply censorship to our communications, and I do believe that doing so would be a slippery slope, precisely and purely because censorship may prevent its own regulation.
i mean yeah i very much am fine with the government saying “you can’t say this” because i’m not a free speech absolutist and there are inarguable harms caused by certain forms of content being allowed to fester online. i’d personally quite like it if my country didn’t make it legal to explicitly call for, plan for, and encourage people to exterminate all queer people—and i’d quite like it if corporations took that line as well. many countries have a line of this sort with no such problems, even though it is explicitly more punitive than the US model of “say whatever you want”.
I’m honestly shocked at the pushback for “Maybe we shouldn’t let people preach things like ‘X group of people needs to die because my God said so!’ because it leads to unmitigated violence against the X group 99% of the time.”
right? It’s pretty obvious for whom this argument is about theoretical free speech philosophizing, and for whom it is about actual survival.
All of these well intentioned ideas put in place the infrastructure for abuse when a not so well intentioned person comes to control it.
That literally goes for anything. All systems are subject to risk of abuse. No system is perfect. It’s not as nihilistic as saying “why even have society at all if it’s not perfect?” but it’s approaching that.
Here’s a film that might benefit you. This is an Encyclopedia Britannica film short from 1946 about despotism.
The thrust of the film is, obviously, that despotism can happen anywhere, to any kind of government system or any kind of economic system. You’re no safer by saying “restrictions mean we can be restricted!”
That’s why we have three branches of government, a constitution, and state rights. Literally any government in bad hands can be abused. It’s a senseless argument
Whether someone likes the outcomes of absolutist speech doesn’t necessarily correspond with whether they support it.
i mean, if you don’t like the outcomes of absolutist speech but still support it anyways i can really only conclude your position isn’t a rational one and, indeed, the subsequent conversation here has sort of borne that out to me