Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

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> Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.

Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".

The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.

Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.

Isn't spreading dangerously false information about a viral pandemic similar to shouting "fire" in a theatre? I'm not sure it's always so easy to distinguish that actively dangerous conduct from fake news.

Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.

The "shouting 'fire' in a theatre" meme comes from a case where the Supreme Court used the Espionage Act to restrict speech because the speech in question didn't sufficiently support entering into a World War and advocated against the draft.

Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.

The fact that you need to explain that sort of demonstrates that it isn't relevant to the use of the argument. Good arguments can come from poor sources.

Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.

> Good arguments can come from poor sources.

All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.

From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries."

– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html

That's what I would argue If I had a conspiracy in mind.

By far the most dangerous and most widely spread "information" in this pandemic has come from the same authorities that are being allowed to decide what is so-called correct and what needs to be censored. The only check on their extremism and self-centred attention seeking has come from the grassroots blogging and video making community - those same people YouTube (really I suspect, Wojcicki) is trying to wipe out.

OK, so I admit that Icke's thing about 5G and COVID-19 is batshit insane. I truly can't imagine how someone could argue that in good faith. He must be trolling, doing it for the lulz.

But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.

There are people attacking cell phone towers and threatening workers who work on them. It’s directly connected to the 5G coronavirus garbage.

Icke is one of, if not the, originator of the theories of shapeshifting reptilians controlling society. His own descriptions of himself coincide strongly with paranoid schizophrenia.

Huh. That's pretty wild.[0]

> A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas.

But at least some of them were joking, right?

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory

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