It's sad to realize how quick a substantial number of people are to discard what are ostensibly core principles when they conflict with their ability to exercise power.
This sounds like a handwavey dismissal of a well understood paradox.
I'm having a hard time understanding this given how fixed the definition of "intolerance of intolerance" is. Can you help me understand how you're receiving it?
For example, Twitter is absolutely staffed and run by people who I believe would wholeheartedly agree with the posted quote. What types of rules regarding intolerance does their platform employ?
One example of something it has banned is The Babylon Bee, for this piece of satire calling Rachel Levine the Man of the Year: https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...
Now you tell me, is that intolerance? Is it speech that should be censored? Is removing this type of satire something that you believe is philosophically aligned with the original quote?
Meanwhile, Twitter still allows members of the Taliban to post. Do you think they're more, or less tolerant than the Babylon Bee?
"Intolerance" is such a fuzzy concept. Intolerance of what? You can propose any crazy idea and when people disagree with it, say they're being intolerant.
If I don't want my young children to go to schools that are staffed by ex sex-offenders, on the basis that employing them in that role is a great example of how people can be re-introduced into society and embraced empathetically, am I "intolerant" of something? If I voice that opinion on social media, should it be removed? It's not a real example right now, but that's the direction we're headed in.
Specifically the qualifier where suppression should be used where people adamantly refuse rational argument and attempt to suppress the engagement of rational argument by violent force.
"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Sounds kind of familiar
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people - maybe there is, I don't know"
If people want to yell "Fake News" on social media, then, they're participating in the debate.
It makes sense that we might need to do a little debugging and refactoring now and then.
Just like the accessibility and exponentially amplified voice provided by the printing press prompted some of the “core principles” of Europe to get reshuffled, it’s pretty reasonable to me that social media could prompt some reshuffling of it’s own.
Dogmatic commitment like you hint at for yourself is an important part of the dialogue of how that reshuffling might look, but I don’t know that your characterization of others is very accurate.
It's pretty reasonable to drill a few small holes in the dam, and to defer maintenance in favor of more urgent priorities.
Dogmatic commitment to the old no-hole-drilling and take-maintenance-seriously dialogues of the past is just a quaint antiquarian tradition.
So…
—George Carlin (1937-2008)
The problem is that virality in public forums is not driven by "better information," it's driven by verisimilitude, which is the appearance of being true, which is not synonymous with being true. What makes things appear to be true? Consistency with what we already believe to be true for one thing. Another way to put it is that things have verisimilitude if they appeal to our biases.
Another thing that makes things appear to be true is if they're easily digestible. It's easier to convince a layperson that light reflects off a mirror in such a way that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. But it takes an entire book to explain that this is actually a useful simplification, but light's behaviour is much more complex.
The problem of simpler things being more believable is critical to understanding that "better information" doesn't beat misinformation, because misinformation is always simpler than the truth.
To quote another aphorism from H.L. Mencken, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." The neat and plausible attributes of misinformation are very difficult to counter, especially if the problem being discussed has complexities.
Free speech is one of those problems that is complex. There are no simple solutions unless you are a hard-core extreme Libertarian, but you'd never know it listening to all the people who propose simple solutions that are popular because they are simple.
Better information does not dispel misinformation in public forums. I gave reasons why this is the case.
Mind you, better information can dispel misinformation in non-public forums. For example, in a highly moderated community. Or in a community where there is a certain web of trust that discourages cynical actors from deliberately trying to game popularity.
Now onto another problem with your statement: You claimed that better information beats misinformation, and you claimed that if it doesn't, the problem is that the information isn't better.
That's a claim that any idea which becomes popular must be better, because if there was better information, it would have dispelled the poorer ideas. Observing human history, I claim this is demonstrably false.
Billions of people believe things on faith that have no empirical backing, and do so despite access to an unprecedented amount of scientific evidence to the contrary.
Any theory that better information always wins should explain how non-trivial numbers of people can believe things for which there is no evidence or even wildly disseminated evidence to the contrary.
I think the onus is on you to give evidence for your claim, because I personally see evidence to the contrary.
I said no such thing, you did. So AFAIC, you are arguing with yourself, not with me or my words. That, plus the fact that you are making claims without any arguments, examples, or reasoning to back up your claims, suggests that for all your talk of “better information,” you are actually disinterested in better information prevailing.
Your own behaviour is doing a better job of illustrating my point than my words do! I will leave you here to carry on arguing with yourself.
We don't live in a technocracy.
The crux of the matter is you don't get to decide what other people think or believe.
It seems that I called you out on making a claim you didn’t back up, and you are weaving some kind of conspiracy web around my motives and beliefs. That’s an ad hominem appeal to motive, and it’s just as terrible an argument as making a claim you decline to substantiate.
For someone who claims that good information will drive out bad, you appear to have no interest in walking your talk.
This thread has gone from tragedy to farce.
There is one Twitter. Losing access to Twitter, YouTube, etc. looks like losing access to a utility to me.
And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense. One could just as easily say "ISPs are not utilities or monopolies, you can start your own intranet easily with OSS!"
> And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense.
Apparently it is - Trump started his very own, just like that. didn't even take that long.
Not everyone got a free newspaper in the 1800s. The political leaders of the day had various newspapers that were favorable.
The fact and point remains: it's easy to start a social network. Just because it is unpopular/fails doesn't mean it is equivalent to a utility.
But the real defining characteristic that makes an ISP a public utility is that the utility (in the sense of "usefulness") of the internet is strongly bound to its uniqueness, just like the phone system or the road network. Phones and roads and the internet become inherently less useful if there is more than one network. Videos do not become less useful if you have to get some of them from one provider and others from another.
That is not true, though. Self-publishing video on my personal site has effectively no utility compared to publishing it on YouTube. For my job (and the job of, thousands? millions?), it is the only game in town.
An ISP comparison would be hosting my personal site on The Internet vs. a splinternet.
This statement is false. There are plenty of websites that self publish video and receive utility for it.
Just because your unpopular video on your unpopular website doesn't get utility, doesn't mean others don't. On top of that, plenty of videos posted on YouTube also get no utility.
This is a "0.001 is technically greater than 0" argument that could be made for ISPs as well. Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
> Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
Do you accept that all of these content creators signed an agreement to use YouTube's platform, which is a private entity? If the agreement is illegal then it is a civil matter and they have remedy - the court system. This isn't a matter of free speech.
Do you accept that users sign an agreement with their ISP, also a private entity? Why should the ISP, a private entity, not be able to censor traffic for which it provides the infrastructure? Because it (like social media) has few competitors?
The usefulness of public utilities is measured relative to consumers, not producers. You have a right to publish. You do not have a right to monetize. You don't even have a right to an audience. All you have a right to is a potential audience. If someone wants to watch your self-published video, they can.
The problem is not the YT is a utility, the problem is that YT is owned by Google and Google has an effective monopoly on on-line advertising.
There are plenty of places to publish videos. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, etc. So it is obviously not scarce or difficult to do, with that many players. So it fails that definition of a utility, it's not scarce, nor difficult to implement.
Is it necessary? I don't think so. What basic necessities does Twitter provide?
Access to the internet is also not currently a public utility. And yet, some seem to be fine with government censoring speech via one of these non-public-utilities and not okay with it through another.
My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water? The utility argument just doesn't make sense. Perhaps you're thinking more of the "public square" argument.
> My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
I see many reasons to treat utilities different than YouTube, and I also see no reason why YouTube should be treated like them.
There are too many private remedies available. On top of that, the government should not be forcing any private entity to moderate a certain way, this sets an extremely dangerous precedent, and will certainly be abused. I should be able to moderate my blog how I choose.
> Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water?
This is not the comparison I am making. I am comparing YouTube to ISPs and claiming that arguments for or against censorship in the former could also apply to the latter.
America is fully subservient to corporations. Out rights end at their doorways, including freedom of assembly and speech.
To say social media is an exception because it applies rules equally to previously exempt demographics is a joke.
Nope. I just thought the analogy was quite bad.
Similarly, let us imagine that your garden is your own private property and you can ask individuals to leave your BBQ for whatever whimsical reason you choose.
You can open Twitter to the public, just as you can open your BBQ to the public.
Protesting on a front lawn is not a problem because of what is said, it’s a problem because they are trespassing.
Good luck protesting on lawns, try not to get bitten by a dog, arrested, or worse.