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Comment by Ikatza | Hacker News Reader

Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.

If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information, to give the people better tools to identify it (like X's community notes), and to educate the general population so they will have better critical thinking.

Restricting freedom of speech is never a solution. How long until dissenting opinions are censored because somebody labels them "disinformation"? Who watches the watchmen? etc.

I'd rather live in a society with full freedom of speech and disinformation from State actors than have only 100% accurately vetted news.

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> Freedom of speech is binary, there aren't any acceptable degrees of it: either you have it, or you don't.

That seems to be the American definition.

We don’t all have binary systems for our views and politics, and some of our democracies are doing better than than US despite our apparent lack of free speech.

It’s not even the American definition. We have many exceptions, particularly using speech to cause violence or physical harm in various ways. I’m also confused by American free speech absolutists because that’s not a thing here and essentially never has been.

Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, as the current administration doesn’t seem to care much for the law.

Community notes typically kicks in after the tweet has already gone insanely viral. It’s not useless, but I wonder about its effectiveness.

I see your point about free speech but I think it has to be more nuanced. For example, where has continuing stupid anti vaxer debate left the Americans?

So, how do you feel about libel and slander laws? Don't they torpedo your binary framing there?

>> If there is disinformation, the solution is to counter it with actual information

So what you argue is that we should build good bots to counter the bad bots right? and all this in a "secret" to avoid suspension by the tech companies. This looks like playing stupid games.

The disinformation in this era can basically shadow any kind of legitimate "counter-disinformation". To make the game fair we would first need lockdown the internet content on citizen ID authorization so that we can identify if the free speach spread is actually published by a real person or some chinese bot pretending to be a single European mom with 3 kids.

This is not something anyone wants so I think the current trade off of court orders to take down content is legitimate and the best approach. Cloudflare, the tech companies and US government likes the absolute free speech like everything else (i.e. free market) as long as it serves their interests. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cloudflare proudly repelling some "chinese propaganda attacks" and frame it like a cyber security win instead of anti-free speech action.

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