It’s necessary for people to be able to discuss topics even if wrong or uncomfortable in pursuit of truth. Yes, there will be bad faith actors, but they are better than a MoT setting truth.
This was totally idiotic and ideologically driven.
I hope a lesson was learned, but I fear it wasn’t and this will repeat itself because people can’t help but want to drive agendas.
We understand that manually curated feed doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection. In this case, automatically curated feed should be legally the same, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by Facebook or other relevant platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
Facebook whistleblowers stepped forward a few days ago and warned that “vaccine hesitancy” scores are being assigned to posts via AI and those with high scores don’t go viral.
It doesn’t matter if the information is true or false, if the content discourages one from taking a vaccine the AIs will censor it.
In addition whats the difference between foreign propaganda, domestic propaganda and corporate propaganda?
The only thing worse than government sensorship is privatised mafia sensorship
I think they knew there would be issues like this and they would sometimes get it wrong. This is why they tried to avoid being the Ministers of Truth by having so called "fact checkers" determine what is true.
The credibility of these fact checkers and social media should both be tarnished.
Simple as that, you can't have it both ways. I think the provision should also only come into effect above a certain size. We dont want the FCC coming down hard on the petunia enthusiast's forms because they banned someone for starting threads about something other than petunias. And I think reasonable people can agree on the idea of a forum growing large enough to defacto become "public". There is already a legal framework for treating private property as public forums, for example when city councils would meet on private property they couldn't censor discussion just because they weren't on public land.
We understand that feeds curated manually by platform employees doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection, example being any regular newspaper's articles. In case of online platforms, automatically curated feed should be legally similar, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by the platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
Removing section 230 will remove that platform and return us to the CNN and Fox being the gatekeepers of information I'm afraid.
The better answer is to disallow social media companies to consolidate and monopolize. We already have the laws on the books.
But boy, censoring some opinion and then having it turn out to possibly be true looks BAD!
Seriously though, my boomer parents believe literally every single thing they see passed around on Facebook, no matter how outrageously improbable. Is there any balanced, non-censorship way to curb the spread of stupid bullshit that doesn’t trample on people’s rights and occasionally flag a true fact as a lie?
I’m seriously asking, because I don’t know the answer.
More importantly, those explanations and labels should change if the concensus changes.
Yes, but also no.
People were claiming Facebook and the rest of social media had such an absolute, Orwellian grip on free speech, information and human communication that if they censored it, it was in effect erased from existence, like Stalin erasing Trotsky.
And yet the actual effect of that censorship on public debate and discovery, by the platforms people accuse of acting as "Ministries of Truth," turns out to have been practically inconsequential.
If anything, it's proven that much of the fear mongering around social media, deplatforming and cancel culture is overblown.
These platforms have had very large societal effects both through the spreading of misinformation with things like QAnon, and from the censorship on information pertaining to elections, and this entire pandemic. It is hard to say what to do for those that so gullible as to believe everything they read or hear.
Another thought: I’m pretty sure that many of the alternative facts that get passed around are not propagated despite being improbable, but because they are improbable. The bigger lie triggers the amygdala in a way that the little one doesn’t, so that one is paradoxically more likely to get passed on.
Doesn’t help that every once in a while some conspiracy turns out to be true (cointelpro, Snowden documents).
People demanded we steer into the iceberg while staring at it.
Of course the concept can seem very obvious but going through it and seeing how the whole process unfolds is still just hard to believe . We've set the stage for justifying pretty much every excess of authority/control. We somehow managed to make having more freedom something that you should be not only be very afraid of but also something you shouldn't even expect to begin with (which is quite a feat). I can't wait to see what it where that will lead us to!
Now all you hear is what you are allowed to hear, but instead of it coming from 1 source, it falsely looks like thousands of sources.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
This is one of the few social media platforms I'll share some of my actual beliefs and even here I self censor. I don't so much in private but online there isn't much value in voicing opinions that don't go with the current mainstream views. It's all so sad. 11 - 12 years ago I would get into very spirited and often productive debates and felt I changed minds and had my mind changed many times.
In a nutshell, currently, most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, given that the Wuhan lab was studying two bat viruses that are (were?) genetically close to SARS2, and a number of lab workers reported symptoms similar to SARS2 in the fall of 2019, when the outbreak is now assumed to have begun.
Virologists currently differ on whether the changes to the virus were natural evolution, man-made, or the result of contamination/poor safety procedures resulting in cross-species mutations. The argument against it being man-made is that currently as far as we know, we don't actually have the proper tools to get the changes that exist in SARS2; the changes are too efficient to have been man-made. The counter to this is that the released version of SARS2 may have been an evolved strain descending from a (less-efficient) man-made virus.
Other virologists interviewed for other articles, including those who have worked directly with the lead researcher of the Wuhan virus lab, state that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, especially given the lead researcher's history of disregard for proper safety protocols.
Indeed, what is most notable about the lab leak theory is that there are no virologists publicly willing to state that it is implausible, while there are a great many virologists willing to put their reputations on the line and say that the lab leak is the most plausible, and why they believe that to be the case.
Most were appealed.
Do you get it now? Are you starting to understand? This was always going to be the end result. A world of information controlled by the powerful, where encyclopedias, dictionaries, and history books flex and bend with each new re-writing of reality that becomes necessary to protect their interests. Yesterday, we were never at war with Oceania, and claiming we were would get you banned. Today we have always been at war with Oceania, and saying so is perfectly fine. What new reality will we wake to tomorrow? And why is anyone who isn't obscenely wealthy still defending these people?
