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Comment by BariumBlue | Hacker News Reader

> Perpetrators of lies will even hide behind this, and create a false image of rebellious heroism, instead of facing public discourse and the consequences thereof.

Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways".

To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used.

I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea.

(Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)

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If you say it is naive to raise the idea that free speech alone will solve all issues, that is quite reasonable — but I would raise that is just as naive to think that a carefully administered censorship is an effective remedy, either.

The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.

There are countless examples in history where the majority believed medical facts that were utter nonsense, such as bloodletting, lobotomies, electric shock therapy, radioactive dinnerware, etc. It seems naive to think that somehow human nature has changed and the propensity of mobs to correctly determine what is factual or not is different in the 21st century.

There are countless examples in history where speech was suppressed by the general society as the main hindrance to enlightenment. And it was these times that brought such practices about.

I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues

The arguments for free speech are fundamentally the same arguments for democracy itself.

If people can't decide the value of information, why again are we trusting in the decision-making value of each and every voter?

If we filter speech, maybe we should just cut to the chase and filter out voters by testing of some sort?

Do you think we should filter out astroturfers and Russian bots? What about human written Russian propaganda crafted to harm our society? What about a US citizen who crafts propaganda to spread intentional misinformation and harm society but benefit themselves?

We don't let non-citizens vote. We don't allow free political speech nor the right to assembly at polling places. We have independent election observers. We have to ensure that the voting process is not polluted by actors who would wish to harm it.

Similarly, there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums, and acting to preserve those open forums is moral, though it will always be fuzzy.

Do you think we should filter out astroturfers and Russian bots?

I don't think that anyone is complaining about the filtering of deliberate fraud from outside influences. What people are complaining about are the obvious biases exhibited by the large social media companies. Take this new Hunter Biden example. Twitter claims that they don't want to promote hacking and releasing of private information. Hunter Biden's laptop was abandoned, not hacked. Besides, where was that privacy stance a week or two ago when Trump's taxes were leaked? Facebook claimed unreliable sourcing for the story. Where were such concerns when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had said that our troops were "suckers and losers"? Or when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had been peed on by Russian hookers?

We have independent election observers.

Yeah and we balance things out by letting both major parties watch for funny business. Who watches Facebook and Twitter? Those companies are loaded with ex-Democrat operatives in senior positions. They've run out anyone who even smells halfway conservative. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated time and again that they aren't just getting rid of fake news and bots. They're weighing in on complex political and statistical issues by silencing information sources that they don't like.

there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums

Yeah and evidence shows that some of those people are controlling information from within the social media giants.

The Russian bot angle has just recently been uses as an election campaign, so it would be difficult to ban people on that suspicion if you think a bit about it. Worse, it has been used by unaccountable intelligence agencies to frame innocents.

This ideal served us pretty well in the last century. Trust in objectivity grew in proportion to our investment in free speech and liberalism. Incidentally, we see a breakdown in this trust at the very moment that society is becoming more illiberal (Trumpism on the right and woke progressivism on the left). Correlation isn’t causation, but this seems to be as strong a causative signal as we get for these kinds of abstract social problems.

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