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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> radio and tv have always been free and have been a way for people especially the poor to get informed

Informed? You mean manipulated, right? Watching open television makes me physically sick because of the constant agenda pushing. I can't watch 5 minutes of news without some person imposing their moral judgements on me and telling me what's right and wrong. It's made even worse by all the advertising, the open networks get the bulk of it.

If banning advertisers kills these networks, we'd be doing humanity a favor. Facebook's election manipulation and clickbait news articles have got nothing on these folks.

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Exactly.

Advertising is a universal scourge, in my book. I don't care what form it's in. It's a manipulative intrusion and a pollutant. I'd legitimately rather you mine cryptocurrency on my machine than mine advertising photons on my retina.

You can thank the Regan Administration for removing the FCC's Fairness Doctrine [0]. From 1949-1987 if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

The fairness doctrine in practice boxed out any opinions outside of the mainstream and allowed both major political parties to control public discourse.

It was also compelled speech by the government which plainly violated the first amendment.

Thank you. I hate this increasingly common attitude that free speech should be constrained because [political candidate or movement which I don't like] is in the ascendancy.

You can really see someone's ideals in what they do under pressure, and apparently people's liberal ideals of free speech etc aren't very strongly held.

Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public and use social media to amplify propaganda is clearly a public health threat.

The question is if there is any cure that doesn't destroy legitimate political speech.

(Illegitimate speech being the calculated, coordinated distribution of false information).

> Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public

You're presuming that TV and news media never lied to the public before the end of the fairness doctrine, and the giving equal time didn't give undue weight to some bullshit ideas.

The controlled messaging around the war in Vietnam is a great counter point here.

I'm alarmed by anyone who can genuinely talk of 'legitimate speech' and not see the issues here.

I'm alarmed that you don't see any danger of intentionally, factually false speech being spread to tens of millions of people a day. Or that you don't have any desire to at least brainstorm on a solution.

During the civil rights movement, politicians in the south accused civil rights leaders of lying and tried to used the state to block their speech. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called the First Amendment their weapon against oppression. Now I agree that people shouldn't go on TV and say for example that the recent election was "stolen", but I don't think the state should be given the power to stop someone from doing that. Having the power to stop one kind of speech can easily give the state the power to stop any speech. We shouldn't expect every future government use that power wisely. Imagine your worst political enemy having the power to decide what "factually false speech" shouldn't be spread. I wouldn't want that. Do you?

No, but it's a false premise because I disagree that throttling the velocity of known malicious speech and its amplification is equivalent to banning speech.

I see your point but don't think it's an infinitely slippery slope.

You keep not understanding that the problem is using words like 'legitimate' and 'known'. You can't keep sneaking those in, in such a factive way.

In real life, people don't have labels floating above their heads saying 'Liar', and statements don't have labels saying 'Known' or 'Malicious'. Someone, or some group, or some process, needs to decide what is true and what false, who is benign and who malign, and so forth.

And now that I've guided you to this point, I hope I don't need to explain where things can go wrong from there.

>You can't keep sneaking those in, in such a factive way.

We'll have to agree to disagree for the time being. There are things known as facts, and things known as lies.

Again, I'm not saying we should jump to any particular solution to misinformation, but I refuse to watch it happen and say "I immediately know there is nothing we can do".

> There are things known as facts, and things known as lies.

Yes, I understand that. But if you want to give the state the power to ban speech (or 'throttle' speech, whatever that means) then you need to give someone the power to determine which speech falls into that category. Please... do you really not see this problem, after so many people have explained it?

I do see the problem. But you see it as a binary. Government has no control, or all control. Government does something, or no one does something. Like my above post states, I'm not willing to entirely jettison the idea that there are limited steps that either private organizations or the government could take, transparently.

Throttle, by the way, would be something like Facebook not quite banning a topic, but limiting how many times it can be shared per unit time, or by how many people, or how much a particular account can share things, and so on. Not a ban, but a limit on speech via its velocity.

Just to hammer it home: I get the danger. What if the former president, or what if the head of some far-left student group at Yale, got to determine what is legitimate speech or not? Yes, I get it.

But there is a lot of options on the slider between "let all broadcasts continue without challenge" and "have the central committee delete all non-approved govthink".

Who decides that though? You and I may agree today on a particularly egregious claim, but it won’t always be that clear and we won’t always agree.

The problem is that the slope isn’t slippery until someone in power decides to abuse it, then there’s no footing left at all.

There another often overlooked point here. When you cede the ground that there exists speech that should be sanctioned by the state, you are giving a powerful argument to people who stand against pluralism. The troglodytes who shot up the Charlie Hebdo office specifically accused the writers of hate speech. We shouldn’t give ground to people like that. Even abhorrent speech must be free from government sanction or else we allow for state violence to be used to suppress free expression. When we open that door, all manner of vile creatures might push there way through. Within the broad expanse of human beliefs everyone is a heretic open blasphemer to someone.

“legitimate speech” is not the opposite of “illegitimate speech”. There is a huge grey area in between. It is fairly easy to see egregious lying as illegitimate without trying define “legitimate”.

The argument at the time was that with a limited resource like airwave that the government regulates and licenses out the first amendment doesn’t apply. Harder to use this line of reasoning for modern communications.

I believe that argument was always a fig leaf over restricting speech.

>if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues.

Down here in Texas, we have a law where teachers have to teach both sides of controversial subjects. So, of course, someone is teaching both sides of The Holocaust.

Because it is controversial. And that is the law.

Optimistically, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with a law like this because when engaged with lies, kids should be able to figure this stuff out. It’s not like they’re incapable of critical thinking. They can look up if the claims are true and find that nothing backs them up.

But I get that most children won’t do this, so overall, yeah, it seems like a terrible law.

Ultimately, it comes down to what TX defines as “controversial.” Is this interpretation (teach Holocaust denial) legal or is it some rogue teacher who decided it means they get to teach whatever they want because all their opinions make their family angry at Thanksgiving dinner?

My understanding is that it’s a law designed to allow teaching of creationism, since, to their understanding, evolution is “just a theory”.

That makes sense. Guess they think Intelligent Design or whatever they call it now is due for another challenge since the SCOTUS leans more conservative.

What if they look up the lies and only find more misinformation and articles giving "both sides of the story".

You’re asking a lot of children. Skilled people have been working on improving propaganda techniques for a very long time. It’s rarely just outright lies - there are more effective techniques. For example, it’s easy to find dozens of cherry picked examples and represent them as the thing that was common (instead of say something that happened only 0.001% of the time). Something like this is much harder to refute than an outright lie - you have to do a full blown study figuring out how common the thing really was, and before long you’re demanding everyone to do their own research and verifying everything (in an environment full of bad actors muddying the waters).

Is the Holocaust controversial? IS IT?

I am reasonably certain that in the aftermath of Charlottesville we arrived, as a result of extensive public soul-searching, at the nuanced and bi-partisan conclusion that Nazis are Bad, so I am not sure where the controversy lies.

Open television can contain a lot than just news. Where I live, it has sports, scripted television shows, movies and more.

The fairness doctrine is anti free speech and evil.

I never said anything about any fairness doctrine. I think we're better off without any open TV networks at all. I'd rather people remained ignorant than serve as pawns in electoral games. That's not even my opinion, it's how the prevailing political ideology of my country describes them. They're "masses" to be "maneuvered" into alignment with the proper ideology. The mass media are the means to do it.

Killing mass media is a favor to these people. They would remain ignorant but at least they would not suffer the indignity of being manipulated, herded like cattle.

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