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virvar | 5 years ago

I always found America’s grips on these things a tad weird. In my country you’re accountable to print the truth, and if you don’t, it comes with fines or even prison time. Because lying to the public is dangerous.

That hasn’t stopped opinion pieces, but it has stopped media outlets from printing things like “the earth is flat” or “drinking bleach cures covid”. Unfortunately this is yet to apply to social media stars, but when they have audiences larger than news papers I think they should frankly be under the same laws.

Yet in America you seem to put that sort of thing in the same box as Chinese censorship. Which is really just so strange to me. Do you really think you can have a functioning democracy when people live in completely different bubbles of subjective truth?

discuss

vokep|5 years ago

>you’re accountable to print the truth

Whatever portion of government handles that in your country, is quite literally analogous to the "Ministry of Truth" in 1984.

>Do you really think you can have a functioning democracy when people live in completely different bubbles of subjective truth?

Nobody knows, its always been an experiment. The experiment is done with the basis that other ways of going about it (some system of enforcing a consistent "truth" among all citizens) would be totalitarian and tend towards tyranny every single time.

FrojoS|5 years ago

Case by case by a judge not by a ministry.

aaron695|5 years ago

So you ban churchs?

Killed maybe billions over the past 100,000 years.

They also provide comfort and help to billions through their lies. Hard to ever know what their total effect has been. But still lies.

Or is your religion ok and 'normal', but thinking the world is flat not?

alwayseasy|5 years ago

Countries that ask media to print the truth certainly go after religious sects that financially/morally exploit their worshipers. Every time there are threads than mention free speech, it's as if political science and those millennial old problems were new to hn.

virvar|5 years ago

We don’t censor fiction.

MadSudaca|5 years ago

What if your country's government becomes corrupt and starts using its power to enforce "truth" against its citizen's own interests?

virvar|5 years ago

Well, what would stop them from doing that anyway? Look at Poland or Turkey, it’s not like a constitution is going to save a democracy.