from Hacker News

Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

by jashkenas on 1/26/22, 9:26 PM with 576 comments

by ziroshima on 1/26/22, 9:52 PM
No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions. But you've really got your head up your own ass if you convince yourself that you are protecting people by deciding the information that is appropriate for them to be exposed to. I just don't understand the shortsightedness, the naivete, or the willingness to discard the principle of free speech.
by dools on 1/27/22, 6:46 AM
The funny thing is that everyone commenting here thinks that we're headed towards an authoritarian nightmare, but for different reasons.
It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I'm reminded of this amazing review by George Orwell:
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/
by throwawaygh on 1/26/22, 11:06 PM
I say Bah to the entire censorship debate!
My critique of Substack is that our lesson from the last ten years is simple: speech should happen primarily on platforms that are prohibited from profit-seeking and run in the public interest. Censorship on these platforms should be prohibited, of course, but so should any form of profit seeking.
Our problem isn't censorship. Our problem is that our political/economic/religious/public health discourse is entirely mediated by corporations that are helmed by clever and well-educated folks and funded by the tippy-top of the elite financier class, who expect exceptional ROI.
by rdiddly on 1/26/22, 10:04 PM
It's sad that Substack has to sit there and explicitly explain that "Here is where you go when you want no censorship and to have all different views in a big melting pot where it's up to you to sort them out through rational interrogation, thought and/or debate." Even in my lifetime I seem to recall that place was usually just called "society." Granted I was young and am partly remembering what I was told the world was like, rather than having experienced it directly. Nonetheless, they did bother to tell me that. That interrogation/debate process was understood to be an essential prerequisite for democracy.
by zriha on 1/27/22, 10:12 AM
First online media that removed editor for the homepage and put an algorithm to decide which article is more important than other (based on clicks and shares), we got Kardashians, flat earth believers and everything went sideways. As someone who is 15 years in comms, public relations and media relations, for me, influencers were journalists, not some kid with 1 million followers on Instagram or TikTok. Now they are influencing general opinion and not some experienced journalist that is covering one topic for decade.
Now, call me old fashioned, but now you have generations of people who are "born" on social media, never go offline and now they are parents, and imagine what kind of role model do they give to their children.
It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust.
How everything changed, I will give you an example, COVID-19 breaks, nobody knows what's going on, first weeks of lockdown in Europe, and my first source of information was two people I trust, my mother master of pharmacy (MPharm) and my good friend doctor of chemistry, working in pharmaceutical company. They were my first sources, not some obscure web site, WhatsApp group or Facebook group, but people who read scientific journals and researches.
by rootusrootus on 1/26/22, 10:59 PM
As a little exercise, about once a day I take a pass through CNN or NPR, and then another through Fox News. Just to get a high level idea of what each side believes reality to be. It is fascinating how little overlap there is. For the most part I don't think people are really arguing with each other, they're just arguing with a straw man they have constructed to represent the opposition.
by rhaksw on 1/26/22, 10:58 PM
Moderation should be fully reviewable. I made a site to do this for reddit [1]. As of this hour, user pages [2] work best because the archive service is down. Subreddit history pages [3], which show where the community and mods have disagreed the most, also still work.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq
[2] https://www.reveddit.com/y/rhaksw
[3] https://www.reveddit.com/v/worldnews/history
by anonygler on 1/27/22, 5:44 AM
I was trying to find those “fake face masks” just so someone knew what I was talking about, and apparently they were all deplatformed from Google searches. I didn’t want to buy one, just reference it. But nada. Found it on DuckDuckGo and it’s now my default search engine.
It’s just so offensive they think they should control what I’m exposed to. Creepy and offensive. Google has lost its mission of making the worlds information accessible in a fresh, horrible way. Tragic.
by bambax on 1/27/22, 9:32 AM
The reason Substack has "content guidelines" is because they want to make their own laws. If they only followed the law, they would only need to remind users what's illegal and what's not.
And so they have to go to great lengths to explain those laws that they are making, and why they exist, and how they're enforced, etc. And of course they present them as necessary and reasonable, and "the only way".
> We will continue to take a strong stance in defense of free speech because we believe the alternatives are so much worse.
They are not defending "free speech". Free speech is exactly that: let people say anything. Hate speech. Porn. Wild conspiracies. Praise of terrorism. Anything.
They are promoting a version of "speech" that is deemed acceptable in their own social and business circle. That version includes none of the above, but currently accepts antivax.
My guess is that will change.
by indymike on 1/26/22, 10:04 PM
Freedom of press and freedom of speech exist exactly because government could not be trusted, and eventually, lies have to be covered by making it illegal to expose those lies. Censorship seems like a good idea until you realize the end game looks a lot like "Best Korea".
by cwoolfe on 1/26/22, 10:11 PM
I seem to recall reading "You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28684250
I hope substack can really change the game here because their business model delivers content you paid to receive rather than competing for your attention. More on that here: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...
by austincheney on 1/26/22, 9:58 PM
I can empathize with this line of thinking but its incredibly unimaginative. Censorship is a symptom of a larger problem and users reliant upon something that intentionally abuses them, like Facebook, is a different symptom of the same problem. To me that larger problem is centralized information ownership and people shouldn't trust it.
This is the compelling motivator of decentralization.
Decentralization isn't blockchain, web3, or whatever. Blockchain is third party storage.
In a decentralization scheme data resides at destinations. Nobody owns it but the destinations. Nobody observes it but destinations. There is no third party censorship.
The only users that have to suffer third party censorship are influencers and broadcasters who don't want decentralization.
by dukeofdoom on 1/26/22, 10:19 PM
Clearly, part of the problem is over reliance on experts. Somehow the professional class (empowered by Twitter and Social Media) has now convinced themselves that they're God's gift to to the world ... because they read a book. And is totally oblivious to how stupid some of those things they're advocating for are.
When I go to a doctor, chances are he will prescribe me some drugs. Why? because thats what they're trained to do, rewarded for doing, and punished for not doing. If I go a mechanic, and ask him for a couch, he will probably offer me the back seat. If I ask my teacher, they'll tell me study hard and do my homework.
There's a good chance I neither want or need pills, or a backseat couch, or do homework all afternoon. This might be their best professional advice. But ultimately, I have to use my own judgment to assess risk and benefit since I have to live with consequences.
This is now somehow bad, and we're supposed throw out personal autonomy, and trust experts, newscasters and so on. But this has not worked out in the past, especially when there's coercion involved. By complying you're only empowering these people.
The antidote is to assert individual rights and especially freedom of speech. Build parallel societies. And ridicule the authoritarians.
by krainboltgreene on 1/26/22, 10:15 PM
So many of these threads are now filled with more than the normal "a company made me take something down because it violated TOS" and now has a cavalcade of conspiracy theories.
The tech community certainly wasn't immune to the craziness of the times.
by commandlinefan on 1/26/22, 9:45 PM
> It means we allow writers to publish what they want and readers to decide for themselves what to read
I hope they stick to their guns. History suggests they won't.
by tick_tock_tick on 1/26/22, 9:52 PM
The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. Once that trust is broken I don't know how you rebuild it.
Hell people I commonly talk to still believe a police officer was beaten to death on 1/6 and that people, other then the women shot for trying to enter the chambers, died directly due to the riot. All because of that what the news reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it.
by paulpauper on 1/26/22, 10:16 PM
As bad as twitter and Facebook censorship is, it's worse for other sites, like Reddit or probably any v-bulletin forum. Reddit subs have soooo much moderation, especially any sub that that is even slightly popular, so many arbitrary and hidden rules and content guidelines. On twitter I can call someone a jerk and the worst that may happen is the person may block me, but that will get your banned from many reddit subs.
by hn_version_0023 on 1/26/22, 10:00 PM
We don’t have a trust problem. We have a lack of trustworthy people in positions of power problem. I see how one can be easily confused. But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders because they have show repeatedly they’re not worthy of trust.
by TulliusCicero on 1/27/22, 11:55 AM
Low-moderation platforms tend to have...issues.
They attract trolls and extremists, the regular people don't like sharing space with trolls and extremists, so they leave. Rinse and repeat for a while, and soon all the normal people are gone.
If Facebook permitted everything, they'd just be committing business suicide.
by plainsimple on 1/26/22, 10:01 PM
Society has good reason to miss-trust governments, corporations, media, the education system and the entire pharma industry. Society does not have a "trust problem". The problem is that leadership in all the pillars of society have been abusing their position by controlling what people are aloud to do and what people are aloud to say by demonizing and even criminalizing anything that does not support their agenda.
by umvi on 1/26/22, 9:57 PM
One of my favorite quotes I read last year: "Covid is as much a trust crisis as it is a health crisis"
by serverlessmom on 1/26/22, 11:42 PM
Many people have lost trust in the government and the media because they have proven to be, in many ways, untrustworthy. Adding another social media site(especially one that is so focused on free speech it's lawless) is not going to help gain trust or create community. Have we already forgotten about the 2017 election cycle and the role that uncensored social media played in that?
by rgrieselhuber on 1/27/22, 12:40 PM
From corporate sources, I hear “you must trust what we’re saying or there will be consequences.”
From independent sources, I hear “don’t take a single word we’re saying at face value, verify every claim we make and use critical thinking and research to judge whether you think this is the truth.”
Which approach is more likely to result in a society that values truth and integrity over the long term?
by A4ET8a8uTh0 on 1/26/22, 9:58 PM
You could argue that it is just another stage in 'Escape from Freedom'. I am going to simplify a lot here, but basically the process goes something like this:
-Things are hard; people fight and win some degree of autonomy -Status quo sets in; people believe this is how it always will be -Things get easy and people forget what freedom is -Things get hard..
by pessimizer on 1/27/22, 10:30 AM
This is as silly as Nixon's "credibility gap" or H. Clinton's "optics." Society has a corruption "problem", because it is built on power rather than any ethic. People don't trust it because it is untrustworthy, and its ideologies are constructed from ancient myths and revelations organized with retroactive justifications. Censorship is a tool of power to keep people from sharing that lack of trust with each other, that feeling that values imparted to them by their superiors are self-serving and hollow, so that, alone, they can't assemble factions that are dangerous to order. The internet has enabled so much peer to peer communication that people can casually create disintermediated formations at a rate that wesn't possible in society until now.
The actual content of that distrust is also not important and not noble. In the West it's 99% rewarmed Ezra Pound bullshit mixed with American Lost Causeism, Central European Blood and Soil naturist primitivism, Western European anti-semitism still battling over Dryfuss, and a thousand other, smaller revanchist fantasies. Our current order was constructed by men just like them, and any of them could have been (and gave a good try to being) the power doing the censoring right now. The magical thinking and mythmaking that distinguishes them falls away with power and the secular bureaucratization needed to rationalize and maintain it.
In the past, the thing most likely to get you killed was what you said to people. Rebels began secret societies, with fiercely guarded memberships, and disguised their meetings in coincidence and their discussions in euphemism.
You'll be censored when you threaten someone more powerful than you. Your stable lifestyle relies on the order set up by people more powerful than you, not for your benefit, but selfishly. You are their support structure. The reason you weren't censored before is because you actively propagandize for their order openly, and you keep ideas dangerous to that order to yourself. You can't even rebel right, your rebellion is an appeal to utterly orthodox strongmen who resemble nothing other than the great-grandparents of the people who rule you now, and who discarded their fiery, incoherent ideas like old clothes once they grew out of them and settled into the throne.
There are no more people meeting in secret and making effective plans than there ever were, in fact, far fewer because of the overarching domination of entertainment and commercial culture. Call me when you start seeing people hanging from streetlights.
by nathias on 1/26/22, 10:32 PM
It's not a problem, it's learning. We should have absolutely no trust in the current institutions. When people are openly lying in your face without any repercussions, openly stealing from you and just pay a small fine etc. why would anyone trust them?
by kylebyproxy on 1/27/22, 2:25 PM
> To those who endorse such an approach, we can only ask: How is it going? Is it working yet?
What argument is the writer trying to make here? It's not functioning well. Neither is complete lack of censorship. All that says is we haven't found the right balance.
Frankly, this article just reads like promotional copy to me.
by paulpauper on 1/26/22, 11:00 PM
Substack will always be a sort of niche site. It will never pull anything close to Facebook or Twitter numbers. So investors do not have much expectations for growth. If investors had higher expectations of ad-based growth, then censorship would be a consideration if it meant boosting ad revenue.
by timoth3y on 1/26/22, 10:23 PM
Too many people are confusing "censorship" and "content moderation".
Content moderation is when you determine what is published on your platform. Censorship is when someone else tells you want can be published on your platform.
Substack is probably making the right business decision, but the claim in this article is completely backwarrds.
Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted because they exercise extremely tight control over what gets published. Good news sources are trusted because they moderate content and exercise strict editorial control. Facebook is a untrusted cesspool of misinformation specifically because they moderate so lightly.
The idea that trust comes from lack of content moderation or editorial control is logically and empirically wrong.
by dash2 on 1/27/22, 8:55 AM
I have a substack which occasionally talks about human genetics (from an informed POV – I have published in the field) so I checked out Substack’s actual policies.
They really are pretty liberal. I assumed they would have some policies against racism, but all they have is a ban on threats of harm to groups.
OTOH they have a blanket ban on porn. I suspect that is less due to deep political principle, more due to just not wanting to become a porn platform.
I’m glad they’ve made this statement, but I worry that they will feel pressure to water it down as a profit making company. So, I think we still need “protocols not platforms“. Or “not just platforms“.
by zipswitch on 1/26/22, 10:15 PM
>we allow people to sound what alarms they want and patrons to decide for themselves what to pay attention to
I think the above alteration throws the dilemma into a little sharper relief.
We live in a complex society which requires a degree of deference to "expert authority" in order to function. Our collective ability to agree on how to determine who (or what) qualifies as such an authority is not working well. I do not have any answers in which I am confident, just Socrates line on the beginning of wisdom.
by dukeofdoom on 1/26/22, 11:10 PM
Here's Trudeau telling Truckers they have unacceptable views. https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1486465351214895108
Is this the kind of censorship we want to empower. One guy is going to decide who's views are acceptable and who's views are not. Turns out those who strongly disagree with him, their views are not acceptable according to him.
by Liquix on 1/26/22, 10:15 PM
Could increased censorship actually be making the misinformation problem worse?
If we are allowed to discuss and compare the merits of various theories, the wheat of truth naturally separates from the chaff of nonsense. When everything outside of The Approved Narrative is censored, people inevitably stumble across "banned" ideas - but there's no one to argue the other side or point out the flaws, making it far too easy to get sucked in.
by tpoacher on 1/27/22, 10:37 AM
Scott Adams said something I liked once (this was in the context of a discussion on cancel culture):
"You can't fix what you can't talk about."
Obviously this is a generality and doesn't take into account malicious actors, but in general I agree. Whenever I've seen one group trying to coerce or shame another group into silence instead of engaging in good faith discussion, it has backfired spectacularly.
by headsoup on 1/27/22, 12:35 PM
The article makes it like we should be trusting these institutions and that we don't because something not current has created the distrust.
Amazingly the authors essentially trust the consistent and consensus message coming from these platforms they say have ruined our trust. There must be some good cognitive dissonance backing that up.
Censorship is not required to defend honesty.
by Animats on 1/27/22, 8:25 AM
The US has survived a lot of extreme speech. The Communist Part of the United States existed through the entire Cold War, and while they were sometimes hassled, they continued to publish their newspaper and pamphlets. They still have a web site. The American Nazi Party used to have a big sign on their HQ: "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". I walked by it as a kid. The sign stayed up until one of their members shot their leader. The Klu Klux Klan was an out and out extremist organization, but no one suggested in their heyday they should be muzzled. Just prosecuted for killing people. Even censorship of pornography mostly ended.
The pushback began in the 1980s, with the Meese Report on pornography. The authors were looking hard for something to criminalize, and hit on child pornography.[1] Not just making it, but possessing it. That was a new thing at the time.
The next big pushback was on Holocaust denial, first criminalized in Germany in 1985 and in France in 1990. A few other countries have followed, although not the US. This has gradually broadened into European laws against "hate speech", which is often political and very much a matter of opinion. While it seems to be settled law that the US government cannot prohibit hate speech, there's a lot of pressure on private organizations to do so.[2]
A new problem is overuse of the "big lie" technique.[3] For decades, nobody in a country with a free press tried that much, because it didn't work. The people pushing the lie were quickly discredited. That obstacle seems to have been overcome. That's leading to a new era of censorship merely for being wrong.
And that's the way it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
by thazework on 1/27/22, 9:25 AM
I'm partial to the Athenian version of free speech. Every citizen was invited - nay, encouraged - to speak their mind and offer political advice in the assembly. But if your policy turned out to be disastrous to the city you'd be banished, your property confiscated, or worse.
by GekkePrutser on 1/27/22, 11:01 AM
I really like substack as a platform. They seem to be not as aggressive on monetisation as medium. On my blog I don't want my users be tracked and I want to offer my content for free. Their stance on free speech here I also applaud.
Unfortunately substack is not yet as good on the discovery side.
by ajsnigrutin on 1/27/22, 11:37 AM
I mean.. let's be fair... censorship and propaganda has just got biger in the last few years, mostly because trum pointed it out... but we all remember the "iraq has WMDs" and other stuff even before trump.
The thing that saddens me the most is treating anyone who just wants pure, raw data as a skeptic:
- X infected by covid today --- how many of those are expected to be asymptomatic, how many will have a "mild cold", how many will get a high fever and be useless for a week, how many will be hospitalized, and how many will die? - Y hospitalized *with* covid... how many of those are there because they can't brethe, and how many have an appendicits? No official number (atleast here) makes that distinction... if 70% of the patients would be there, covid or not, and the hospitals are at 200% capacity, then covid is not an issue - Z deaths *with* covid... if you die in a car crash 20 days after a covid test, you're counted as a covid death... ...
"back in the time", the journalists would be asking the politicians (and usually representatives of random health organizations and expert groups handling this epidemic) for this data, and bothering them, until they got it... and now? Just asking about the raw numbers marks you as an antivaxxer, commenting about these thins is basically limited to a few (eg. reddit) threads/subreddits (and just commenting in those will get you banned from a bunch of other subreddits, even the ones you never participated in).
tldr: even if I don't care about the opinion pieces, asking for raw data should be the first thing journalists do, and not a thing that gets random people banned
by fdgsdfogijq on 1/26/22, 10:00 PM
I think what happened is capitalist forces looted the american middle class via immigration and money printing, then construed those political issues as leftist "for the common man" causes. People got swept up in that idea, the capitalist is now long gone from the public eye, and useful idiots are picking up the torch of middle class destruction, confused about the cause and effect of their politcal leanings.
by 0xDEEPFAC on 1/27/22, 9:53 AM
Funny how in the early 2010s most people and activists feared tech storing too much data and violating privacy - now the only narrative from activists presented on the news and search results seems to be about a lack of censorship with no word on privacy (e.g. "Grrr Qanon", "Grr vaccines", "Grr person with regressive political opinion").
Strange how that happens...
by omgitsabird on 1/26/22, 10:18 PM
Who is being censored? Sure people are banned from communities, but that is nothing new.
For most people, to host a blog, one can host a server at their house, through their own ISP, use the latest static website package, and share some links. It is a very low barrier to entry.
I think what people are actually saying is that they want the followers that these platforms provide them. They want to be able to push notifications and invade peoples' inboxes. They want entry into their day-to-day. You can't get that from your own host.
by FrozenVoid on 1/27/22, 12:08 PM
My position is the deplatforming free speech will never work, as censorship itself legitimizes the censored: a nice example of poetic irony in action, but few people understand it.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FrozenVoid/Philosophy-DB/a...
by anovikov on 1/27/22, 6:14 AM
I believe the trust crisis is about social media itself - about physical ability to write anonymously. It couldn't not result in avalanche of lies, both honest and malintentional - the infamous "Putin's bots" are a part of the problem but not even such a big part. Problem is because everyone can post, opinions sparking most outrage will be reposted and thus multiply the most - because the neutral, centrist opinions are just not clickbait-y enough. It results in division naturally - because soon almost half of everything posted is offensive to half the people, as the middle ground disappears. That amplifying, and thus divisive, power of ability to repost is by itself enough to split society in groups.
Maybe solution is to tax social media, in a way that they become more like traditional media? Essentially, you pay based on how many people saw your content - it may be cents per year if you just share your vacation photos with a bunch of friends, but if you post an anti-mask meme, it will drain your pre-paid account in minutes as it is being reposted, and then disappears and no longer seen by anyone (along with the rest of your content) when you reach zero, before you refill?
I see no problem with the principle of free speech here: there was free speech before social media but you could never go on TV, publish a newspaper ad, or print a pamphlet for free. Free speech is about freedom, not price. And just ban all "free as in free beer" social media outright.
by walterbell on 1/27/22, 12:00 PM
Balaji Srinivasan's scenario where both sides lose, https://old.reddit.com/r/weirdcollapse/comments/sbwf3e/balaj...
> What’s coming isn’t fascism or communism, like the left-wing and right-wing pundits will have you believe, even though they don’t believe it themselves. What’s coming is the exact opposite of that, a world where the civilized concepts of freedom and equity are extrapolated to their decivilizational limit, where you ain’t the boss of me and we are all equal, where all hierarchy is illegitimate and with it all authority, where no one is in charge and everything is in chaos.
> You can argue this may be preferable to the status quo, in the same way the chaotic Russia of the 1990s was on balance better than the authoritarian Soviet Union of the ’80s. You can argue it may be inevitable; as the Chinese proverb goes, “the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” And you can argue that this transitional period of anarchy may be lamentable, but that it’s better than the other team being in charge, and that we can build a better order on the other side.
> Maybe so. But prior to any rebundling, I think we’re on track for quite the unbundling.
by AnimalMuppet on 1/26/22, 10:20 PM
I think that part of the problem is that we are under a disinformation attack. Russia did a lot around the elections, but I don't think they've gone to zero. I think both China and Iran are active. (The old Soviet "active measures" is what I have in mind - you get a number of sock puppets to all say the same idea, and it looks like that's what the consensus is, because people hear it from several sources.)
That erodes trust. You have people you know (or think you know) online who say really out-there positions. You either adjust your position, or you don't. Either way, you now have to distrust people you trusted before. (And, I suppose, me saying this reduces trust, too - how many of the people I respect online are actively sowing disinformation? How many are unknowingly passing it on?)
Then there's domestic disinformation. Both political parties (and their satellites) at least. Conservative and liberal think-tanks. (Don't kid yourself that only the other side does it.)
You could even consider regular commercial advertising to be disinformation, though I wouldn't go that far. But big corporations do engage in disinformation - think about the tobacco companies and "no, smoking doesn't cause cancer".
It's really hard to trust when people are actively, deliberately lying to you for their own advantage.
by Nursie on 1/27/22, 6:01 AM
> we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.
In the abstract, it is. But platforms that allow hate to thrive usually find it shouts down all other voices, and those who wish to discuss ideas honestly and openly will find somewhere else to do it.
> While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes
Oh, your censorship is better.
I see.
by mathrall on 1/27/22, 2:36 PM
What a great read, I definitely learned and understood a lot of perspectives.
by ausbah on 1/26/22, 11:45 PM
I think claiming "censorship" is often either an attempt by those in positions of influence to get attention by playing victim (see many super popular voices in Twitter and Facebook like Jordan Peterson) or bigots claw back a position on a platform when the site didn't wish to spread their vitriol
sure it happens, but I think the spotlight is often in the wrong corner
by kaba0 on 1/27/22, 8:28 AM
I really don’t understand why people think it is censorship which is the problem — writer’s of famous utopias didn’t see into the future, they talk about their present, extrapolating from it. I really don’t think the Orwellian world-view would have much to do with our present - the problem is not censorship, but misinformation, based on lack of knowledge, and indeed, trust.
Even though the internet is more centralized than we would like to, it is practically impossible to censor it even today. There is no way to e.g. remove every antivaxx, anti-intellectual bullshit article, “”study””, whatever no matter what, the most any big platform can do is deplatform/tweak their algorithms to prefer different content (which they gladly do for anti-science, unfortunately, because people shouting stupidly at each other drives up their views, quite a disgusting metric). So all in all, if you want to make something disappear from the internet, you just have to spam it with misinformation.
by asow92 on 1/27/22, 1:47 PM
What's interesting to me personally is that no matter where someone stands on their political spectrum, they may interpret Substack's guidelines http://substack.com/content very differently.
I find myself standing with what Substack are saying in this post, and yet after reading their guidelines, I can see someone attempting to forge an argument for censoring the topics discussed in their post (promotion of vaccine distrust and misinformation) in the name of preventing harmful activities.
Of course, on the other hand, and this is where I believe to stand with Substack–what someone may find to be the promotion of vaccine distrust or misinformation, another may find as healthy discourse on the topic.
Ultimately, in my opinion, we should let people decide on their own and not let tech companies masquerade as arbiters of truth.
by ZeroGravitas on 1/27/22, 9:05 AM
But publishing the most profitable lies and claiming it's a moral stance will really help? That's surprisingly convenient for your business model.
by water8 on 1/27/22, 6:36 AM
Society has an arrogance problem
by sascha_sl on 1/27/22, 12:40 PM
This is rich coming from substack, who built themselves on diverse voices, and then only offered their "Pro" funding to conservatives, transphobes, people in the "ideological dark web" and those who are a bit of all of the above (Glenn Greenwald?)
Censorship is also about who you uplift, and substack has been very one-sided here.
by jasonhansel on 1/27/22, 12:01 AM
For context, this is likely a response to an article published 2 days ago about Covid misinformation on Substack: https://mashable.com/article/substack-covid-misinformation
by onphonenow on 1/26/22, 9:59 PM
One problem I am having is that on the left I thought things were pretty high quality from a facts / science side, and that has eroded. Fair disclosure - I'm a max dem donor and will likely continue to vote 100% dem.
7,000 (!) scientists have signed the John Snow memorandum. It states that "Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection".
https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html
6th paragraph
This is despite the fact that our immune system has shown to work, pretty well, for almost ALL other influenzas and pandemics, that almost all analogous types of infections have LONG lasting natural immunity (MERS / SARS etc) etc.
The CDC director has signed this letter.
So we have a problem. CDC blocks testing, then says masks don't help, then says only vaccines can protect us. All these have (or will likely be) obviously false.
So trust in the left I think is diminishing - too many lawyers? Too many folks focused on politics? Too many public health officials / scientists and not enough hard science folks?
by millzlane on 1/26/22, 10:28 PM
It's always funny to see uncensored writers talk about censorship.
by atoav on 1/26/22, 11:02 PM
The question is where that trust problem comes from. Taking the trust problem as granted and shying away from certain measures like censorship is not going to solve anything. Not to discuss whether censorship is wrong or right, but wouldn't this then be a case where we just put lipstick on a pig?
I grew up in Austria and back in the day the Nazis also didn't trust a lot of people. But their lack of trust was totally irrational and based on nothing real. Not doing something because you are afraid they might lose even more trust would have been the wrong way to go back then.
And it might be today as well. If we want to do something here we jave to divide those who reasonably doubt the integrity of the media from those who doubt it no matter what. This is an issue of education, of media law, etc. But giving in to people because they stop trusting is not the way out.
by throwaway22032 on 1/27/22, 2:25 AM
I don't think that this is really a "trust problem". It's more of a misattribution problem. People think they know what the "other side" is thinking, but they really don't.
Barely anyone "doubts the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines". This is a tiny, tiny, trivial minority.
The main arguments I come across are some combination of:
"coronavirus is a non issue for me, and so the efficacy of a vaccine is irrelevant"
"coronavirus is going to spread to everyone anyway, and therefore the efficacy of a vaccine (at reducing the spread) is irrelevant"
Given this, if you go at it from the angle of assuming that people think vaccines are salt water (or microchips or whatever) you're not going to get anywhere. Because what you _think_ people think, is not actually true.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 1/27/22, 12:00 AM
I don't think every village idiot needs a megaphone.
by AussieWog93 on 1/26/22, 10:13 PM
Reading the comments here, I get the impression that a lot of folks view censorship as a tool of oppression by those in power and free speech as the shield against it.
If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it's that both "free speech" and censorship can be weaponised by those in power who wish to manipulate the discourse for their own personal gain.
If we want regular folks to have a greater say in public discourse again, we need to strike a balance that limits the use of both sides as tools of oppression.
I'd personally be in favour of fines or other punishments for deliberately or negligently propagating misinformation, assuming that the decision was made by a jury and not an unelected body.
by gtsop on 1/26/22, 9:56 PM
Wait.. what? Society has a trust problem? Implying we should trust people in power (economic and state) that have repeatedly and shamelessly acted for their own benefit against the interest of the public while they control the media (tv and online) to censor and/or shaddow-ban criticism and alternate views?
Yes, if that's what you mean. We have a trust problem because there are people in power who are not trustworthy. And yes, their acts of censorship will only make this problem worse.
by Barrin92 on 1/27/22, 8:06 AM
I honestly have never seen a single shred of evidence or just even common sense that backs these platitudes about trust and free expression up.
Let's take another nation and covid as a concrete example, Singapore. In Singapore, there's not a lot of free speech. Yet there's a lot of trust. Lee Kuan Yew, in his biography, addressed this trust question very directly, and commented on American media as well.
Lee Kuan Yew was very direct in prosecuting speech that put into question the authority of leadership when it faced (unfounded) criticism. His argument was that, when leadership can be cheaply criticized, there is a categorical distrust in authority because everyone is perceived as equally corrupt. Which is something that's part of almost every post in this thread as well. In a culture in which everyone is "equally bad" grifters and con artists can thrive.
When looking at the Covid response, it wasn't really leadership in the US that dropped the ball. Even the fairy sketchy and controversial last administration managed to produce a free vaccine, within a year, distributed at record speed to everyone. Who didn't pick it up? The people. Who railed against it? Talk radio. And yet the line keeps being parroted that authority cannot be trusted.
Merit and authority and trust are build up slowly and are hard won. When everyone can be defamed, when lie and insult comes at no cost, and if everyone can spread competing versions of reality for free you are in an environment in which trust is impossible. Not because there isn't enough criticism, but because there's too much.
by sleepingadmin on 1/27/22, 1:22 PM
>“We don’t have a misinformation problem,” Larson said. “We have a trust problem.”
How much 'misinformation' ended up being true? Some things very rapidly was labelled misinformation.
How much 'truth' ended up being misinformation?
Let's say hypothetically covid disappears and a new virus starts spreading that is actually as bad as the spanish flu. The consequences of all the lying by politicians means we're nowhere near prepared for it.
by alexashka on 1/26/22, 10:02 PM
I wish people didn't take every opportunity to self promote and pat themselves on the back.
Substack is just another primitive blog platform, with a little 'pay' button attached, nothing more.
It reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about black folks bragging about not going to jail, selling drugs, cheating on their wives or having multiple baby mamas. You're not supposed to do any of those things, you dumb muthafaka!