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.
Most Americans agree that false information should be moderated, but they disagree wildly on what’s false or not.
Y’all gonna regret this when Ron DeSantis gets put in charge of deciding which information is false enough to be deleted.
What a slippery slippery slope….
Slippery slope to what? We have those restrictions for news already. Only reason you still see Fox and such lie on the air and get away with it is they’re classified as entertainment instead of news. Freedom of speech and press are still in tact.
Edit: I wasn’t referring to the Tucker Carlson case, but I did learn that’s not true anyway. Nobody accredits news channels in the first place, and as it turns out, the FCC doesn’t even have any authority over cable.
Freedom of speech and press are still in tact.
there’s also the detail that most countries do not have unabridged freedom of speech and, shockingly, are actually quite fine for not having it, so…
Neo-Nazi parties are getting ready to take over half of Europe and all of North America as we speak. No, they are not fine. They are very, very far from fine.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
And when they do, laws like this will be used to stop anyone from dethroning the dictatorship and restoring democracy.
this might be the most obvious non-sequitur i’ve ever seen—laws like “don’t advocate for a second Holocaust” or “don’t spread COVID misinformation” have literally no relation or causation to what far-right authoritarians believe or will do if they take power. the idea that this is what will empower them to smother democracy is on its face completely absurdist.
If they take over it doesn’t matter what laws we have. Currently the republican frontrunner plans to expand the power of the president, and previously he packed the court with garbage. That’s how they win, not by the government or companies working to fight misinformation.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
The power to censor inherently includes the ability to silence its own opposition. Centralizing this power is therefore dangerous, as it is neigh impossible to regulate.
Currently, we can choose our forums - beehaw does a good job, /pol/ silences all but one worldview, and therefore I am here and not there. What happens when that choice is taken away, and one “truth” is applied universally, with no course for opposition?
Perhaps you believe you hold the correct opinions, and will not be affected. Only those who disagree with you will be silenced. Or perhaps you change your opinions to whatever you are told is correct, and therefore you do hold the correct opinions, though only by definition.
Consider that 50% of the country disagrees with you politically. If you follow a third party, it’s 98%. A forced shared truth is only “good” if it goes your way - but the odds of that are so incredibly small, and it gets much smaller when you consider infighting within the parties.
Who is the arbiter of truth? What prevents the power to censor from being abused?
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.
No single body can wield this power, and therefore multiple should.
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.
So… what? Are you arguing for an expansion of “punitive models”?
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”.
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
I don’t understand how these questions are germane. We can and have already decided some speech is wrong to spread online and should lead to both deletion and arrest – specifically child porn and terrorism. We can and have successfully defined what those are. What’s wrong with adding misinformation and hate speech to this list? Do you really believe we’d have trouble defining those?
I feel like you’re not exactly talking about the same thing. What you are afraid of is for the government to have the ability to filter out what they see as “false” information, which I also find a horrible idea. A government with this power would be able to change the information flow to whatever works best for them.
But a government can in my mind make specific rules about certain stuff that we as a society agree upon to not say (just as other laws are things we as a society agree to not do). I know that there are lots of wrong laws that need fixing, but the idea of a law in and of itself is quite sound in my opinion. And therefore I also have no problem with the specific law: people shouldn’t advocate for violence against others because of their sexual orientation.
This is not a slippery slope as every one of these laws on speech would be independently created, and opposed if society does not accept them.This is just like how all other laws are constantly in flux, but pushed towards a moral alignment with the people (e.g. allowing LGBTQ+ marriage). The outrage and possible revolution when these laws go opposite ways is what causes them in the end to align further.
These are all my opinions and views, based on my own experiences and ideas. Feel fee to disagree or correct me!
This is an excellent way of looking at it, that is very different from my initial understanding.
This changes the concern profile entirely, from “who decides what is false” (big concern) to “how do we define advocating, how do we define violence, etc” - which are valid concerns, but apply to just about every law.
Off topic, the cyber security world has been wrestling with “unauthorized access” - is there implicit authorization when a device is attached to the internet? Nobody authorized me to use google - are web requests access? Is bypassing authentication access? It’s a mess.
First off, 50% of the country believes things that actually have no evidence other than people they like saying it. It’s not about different truths, it’s about truth and fiction. All you need to do is try and verify claims from first or second hand sources, and that becomes painfully obvious, but people refuse to accept that or be open to it.
Second, nobody is asking to have a partisan arbiter of truth. The supreme court was once non partisan, and they’re an arbiter of justice. Even conservatives who are actually capable of researching and following truths come to the same conclusions as the left when it comes to facts. Here’s an easy one: Conservatives all over the country claim there was evidence of election fraud. Okay, it’s been years, where is the evidence? No where, they didn’t even fabricate evidence, they literally didn’t submit anything. Any rational person, regardless of their political views, would agree that there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. Trump is going to trial for espionage. Where is the evidence? You can literally listen to some of it on the internet, there are photos, a large investigation with multiple people on both sides of the aisle took place, there were raids and testimony. But there are still people claiming it’s a witch hunt and there’s no evidence.
It’s not even censorship if they just mark things as not true. There’s really no reason doing something about it has to be equivalent to full scale authoritarian censorship, so you’re walling yourself off from actual solutions with a slippery slope argument that leaves us in the hands of disinformation campaigns, which are easily paid for by rich people and foreign governments.
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
The 50% of people who believe false things are going to vote for truth arbiters that we don’t like. Surely it will be amazing when the correct party is in control, but inevitably the wrong party will be in control sometimes too.
The issue is that bad truth arbitration is “sticky”. Once a bad actor is in control, they have the power to silence their own opposition.
In order for this to work, we must either make sure a bad actor never ends up at the wheel - which will eventually fail, or neuter the truth arbitration process to the point of inefficacy.
The risks here are probable and tangible. We may have the techniques to do it eventually, but I don’t think we have them right now.
Thing is, the risks of doing nothing have definite consequences that we’ve already been watching. Should we do nothing and let democracy burn in fear that doing something will be abused in the future?
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
…no? the Supreme Court has always been a politically partisan entity. it quite literally has its most basic power (judicial review) because it usurped that power for itself as part of the political dispute at the heart of Marbury v. Madison. there is fairly compelling evidence that Chief Justice Marshall was seeking a means to enshrine judicial review into law irrespective of its constitutional validity and was not really deciding the case on merits. if the body was ever “non-partisan” then the word is meaningless.
Right, and it sounds like people want more restrictions. So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate, so if people are already on board then I imagine we’ll get more restrictive speech legislation.
So it started with some reasonable restrictions baked into the bill of rights, and we’ve been losing rights at an alarming rate,
…what? American freedom of speech has, if anything, gotten less restrictive over time and it never was restrictive to begin with. you quite literally have to go out of your way to utter something which isn’t protected speech at this point (and the First Amendment has never covered private corporations so nobody is losing a “right” when Twitter tells you that you can’t wish for a second Holocaust)
Thanks, yeah, I definitely am the kind of person to wish for a second holocaust. /thread
i think context makes it pretty obvious this is a generalized you (i quite literally say “nobody”, which is an indefinite and plural pronoun), so i’m not sure why you’re taking offense to this as if i’m saying you personally want a second Holocaust. if i thought you wanted that, as an admin i’d just say it to your face and ban you since you wouldn’t be a good fit for here
“we’re losing rights” or some people you don’t like are gaining safety? No rights are lost by combatting disinformation. It’s not like someone is just going to go out with a banhammer and say “I disagree so that’s disinformation, you’re banned”
France here we come!
they’re classified as entertainment instead of news
If you’re referencing the Tucker Carlson defamation suit, that’s not a correct reading of the decision.
Admin spreading misinformation?
Are they an admin? The account seems to be registered on another instance. But in any event what they said is a super common misconception about the case. I guess you could make an argument that it’s spreading misinformation, but only if you’re being very literal and ignoring what most people think of when they hear “spreading misinformation”.
I wasn’t referring to the case, but turns out I’m wrong anyway. Edited my original comment
Not an admin
I wasn’t referencing that actually, but turns out it’s not true anyway. Edited my comment
Ok got it. I assumed you were, but did figure there was a small chance you were referencing something else which is why I phrased my comment the way I did. Thanks for clarifying!
Thanks for existing!
I personally like transparent enforcement of false information moderation. What I mean by that is something similar to beehaw where you have public mod logs. A quick check is enough to get a vibe of what is being filtered, and in Beehaw’s case they’re doing an amazing job.
Mod logs also allow for a clear record of what happened, useful in case a person does not agree with the action a moderator took.
In that case it doesn’t really matter if the moderators work directly for big tech, misuse would be very clearly visible and discontent people could raise awareness or just leave the platform.
65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online
aren’t those tech companies the one who kept boosting false information on the first place to get ad revenue? FB did it, YouTube did it, Twitter did it, Google did it.
How about breaking them up into smaller companies first?
I thought the labels on potential COVID or election disinformation were pretty good, until companies stopped doing so.
Why not do that again? Those who are gonna claim that it’s censorship, will always do so. But, what’s needed to be done is to prevent those who are not well informed to fall into antivax / far-right rabbit hole.
Also, force content creators / websites to prominently show who are funding / paying them.
aren’t those tech companies the one who kept boosting false information on the first place to get ad revenue?
Not really, or at least not intentionally. They push content for engagement, and that’s engaging content. It works the same for vote based systems like Reddit and Lemmy too, people upvote ragebait and misinformation all the time. We like to blame “the algorithm” because as a mysterious evil black box, but it’s really just human nature.
I don’t see how breaking them up would stop misinformation, because no tech company (or government frankly) actually wants to be the one to decide what’s misinformation. Facebook and Google have actually lobbied for local governments to start regulating social media content, but nobody will touch it, because as soon as you start regulating content you’ll have everyone screaming about “muh free speech” immediately.
Govenment censorship? No I don’t support it (except the censoring of direct calls to violence, calls to violence should not be allowed)
Tech companies de-platforming you? Hell yea!
If you’re having trouble finding a company that is willing to host your content, maybe your content is the issue.
If the FCC can regulate content on television, they can regulate content on the internet.
The only reason the FCC doesn’t is the Republican-dominated FCC when Ajit Pai was in charge argued that broadband is an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” which is like the hair splittingest of splitting fucking hairs. It’s fucking both.
Anyway, once it was classified as “information service” it became something the FCC (claimed it) didn’t have authority to regulate in the same way, allowing them to gut net neutrality.
If they FCC changed the definition back to telecommunications, they wouldn’t be able to regulate foreign websites, but they can easily regulate US sites and regulate entities who want to do business in the US using an internet presence.
I don’t think this is really about censorship. You can say and advertise whatever you want, but after this if it can be proven false you have to pay the price. All it does is make people double check their facts and figures before they go shooting off random falsehoods.
What worries me is who defines what the truth is? Reality itself became political decades ago, probably starting with the existence of global warming and now such basic foundational facts as who won an election. If the government can punish “falsehood”, what do you do if the GOP is in charge and they determine that “Biden won 2020” is such a falsehood?
This just another fake poll used to justify the biometrics requirement for internet connection.
This statement reads like “I’m angry people don’t want me using botnets to push my agenda.”
Biometrics? Comcast didn’t even ask me for a drivers license. They asked me for a credit card to make a payment.
Also, frankly, last I checked, Pew Research is pretty much unrivaled in social science polling data, so not sure why you’re calling it “fake.”
I don’t know how things function in the US, but here in Europe it’s already pretty much a standard that average joes has totally the opposite opinion what media claims to be the result.
And when multiple other polls with multiple time more responders shows the opposite result, media is always silent.
Our politicians started to push biometrics / strong identificitation last year or this for every people who connects to internet. That’s just step closer to that “you have no pricacy” conspiracy theory created by conpiracy theorist politicians.
Our politicians started to push biometrics / strong identificitation last year or this for every people who connects to internet. That’s just step closer to that “you have no pricacy” conspiracy theory created by conpiracy theorist politicians.
That’s unfortunate to hear, and I am not here to diminish your lived experience, but I can tell you that they’re not pushing for biometric ID in the US to log on to the internet, and this poll is from a well-respected, well-known to be unbiased research group in the US who does polling data for US households and US issues and has for decades.
So in respect to this thread, your feelings on that have next to nothing to do with this discussion.
Well, that’s good to hear then. Hopefully it stays on that track. EU and US is banning encrypted messaging currently at the same time though. And India already illegalized them, but Indian people says that so far it hasn’t affected anybody by any means.
This just another fake poll used to justify the biometrics requirement for internet connection.
quelle surprise that your comment history is full of right-wing, crank, Great Reset (((globalist))) stuff:
Haha it is funny that you oppose only with the arguments you read from fact checkers instead of going to Youtube and see what those globalists says by themselves. In every country the top politicians goes regularly to their meetings who talks harsh things directly and all you know is that all they talked is a conspiracy theory. You always repeat the sentences who nobody actually said, expect fact checkers. Lol
Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.
Let’s hope the successor of Rutte isn’t a WEF muppet and will stop the closure of farms.
Wow I didn’t realize you hollandaises love WEF-puppets, 15 min cities and Rutte’s lies even after he got nailed by Gideon van Meijeren in the parliament. Well, have fun with your 11 200 closed farmlands then. Luckily the puppets haven’t planned that in here, but most likely it’ll happen here too.
15 min cities as a consept was invented in the Soviet Union by Stalin.
A broken clock is right twice a day, though. Being required by law to present real-life ID to use things online has been seriously proposed and is likely to be attached to must-pass legislation.
So what? You can’t even prove any of your “conspiracy” claims wrong. All you can do is to restrict other peoples freedom of speech.
If you’ve got different opinions, then debate with arguments. Currently all you have capabilities is just very low iq monkey business. But naturally that’s your choice how you want to play. Don’t expect me to give you any credits for that.
Do they agree on the definition of the false information?
I certainly favor this and I hope online platforms will continue to remove misinformation and hate speech extremely vigorously.
I am also definitely okay with the government passing a law that requires online platforms to moderate themselves.
I don’t believe this impacts anyone’s freedom of speech. If you must make a Nazi website online, you are welcome to do so (assuming you can find a platform that doesn’t immediately remove it). But Facebook and Twitter should take down links and advertisements to your site, and even ban your account if you continue to talk about it.
Your freedom of speech is intact. No one is arresting you for what you are saying. But you aren’t guaranteed a platform on which to say it.
The key is defining terms like “false” and “violent.”
Americans are generally quite stupid. Imagine asking private big tech to moderate what you can see online. :)
But it’s the same in every country. The large masses are clueless. If you ask Europeans, you would get the same response even though it’s Americans moderating it, which is even worse.
You know Microsoft is planning to put the next windows online and let people just access it? Same pattern here, people trusting big tech with their own privacy and integrity. So weird.
I have no problem with Twitter moderating content. The First Amendment says they can.
But the government moderating it–the First Amendment says they can’t.
There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.
From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some “authority” (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
The problem is that today we’re relegating everything to “experts”, or more generally, we’re expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.
But how do you implement such a thing without horrible side effects?
