[jarpadat]

It's pretty simple, although it may not be obvious. There are 2 different views about "what freedom/democracy is" that are presently doing battle in america, at least among inteligentsia

One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and we don't need any analysis of what specifically the discourse was to make our determination, which is why your comment abstracts over any value it could be. Full disclosure, I don't fully understand this worldview because it seems to enforce a particular discourse on Mark Zuckerberg, which seems a bit contradictory to me although I assume there must be some way philosophically to resolve this objection.

The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis, and we don't need any analysis of what Zuckerberg "disagrees with" to decide if it's right to limit. Obviously the people who will advocate for removing a discourse are people who don't like it, but that's separate from analysis of whether the discourse itself is a force against democracy.

These ideas are at cross purposes, and success of the one is often at the expense of the other. For this reason we seem reluctant to just lay out the underlying value systems the way I did here, which is unfortunate, because I think the fundamental disagreement is really important to discuss.

[samatman]

You're doing a poor job of explaining the first worldview. Which is okay, you've acknowledged that you have trouble understanding it.

This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon.

Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.

Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way.

There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large.

If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

[montagg]

I think there's a non-splippery-slope way to position the worldview you're describing that might be more palatable to the values of a worldview based on limiting discourse based on content.

I believe the hardcore freedom of speech view has a few important underlying assumptions:

1) More information is better, and shining a light on something is better than trying to selectively hide it, because eventually the real truth comes out through persistent discourse. This is only really possible with the maximum amount of information, and especially all viewpoints laid out on the table with the least amount of obstruction.

2) People are broadly able to parse out untruths, or irrelevant positioning, or anything that is of low quality, and they will not be persuaded by it. This isn't true of everyone, but it is true of enough people; that's an inherent assumption of democracy. We live (or want to live) in a free market of ideas, where ideas can compete, and the market (what people are persuaded by) will be broadly rational and land on the best position in aggregate, even if some people are persuaded by bad or malicious arguments.

3) Limiting the visibility of any information detracts from the overall quality of discourse because it robs people of the ability to improve their thinking. It negates the possibility of refutation, because the untruth is hidden. Giving people all information, including misleading information, in the long-run leads to a population that can have better discourse and evaluation of all the information thrown their way.

---

I think the above puts the ideas in the best possible light. However, I disagree with enough of these assumptions that I can't take this worldview myself. My main counter to these ideas is that, similar to (pure) free market proponents, it takes on a very idealistic view of rationality that doesn't match real behavior. In practice, people have to take shortcuts to understand things—it's inherent in human conciseness—and those shortcuts can be exploited. I don't believe this is something we can grow past on a large societal scale, because it's embedded in how we think. To improve the quality of discourse, we have to explicitly protect against these biases. There are a whole host of difficulties there, too, but I think they are more surmountable than all the downsides of allowing deliberate manipulation and misinformation to spread broadly.

[Aperocky]

> they are false in a different way.

In what different way? Has not both been scientifically refuted by reputable scientists? Just because one sounded more plausible doesn't mean it's not false.

To me, both needn't be banned, because I believe and agree with your premise, but I don't agree there's a difference.

[Pils]

Determining how discourse occurs, its rules and the dividing line correct and incorrect speech is built in to the democratic process, not some holy "rules of the game" handed down by God. Your misguided understanding of "liberal consensus" is actually a fundamentally authoritarian position, a doctrinal decree about what can and cannot be discussed.

The irony of course is that the "experiments with official truth in the 20th century" in the US were often defended on the grounds of protecting "liberal consensus" from opposing viewpoints. See the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals statement of principles, the trade group responsible for the Hollywood Blacklist:

"We believe in, and like, the American way of life: the liberty and freedom which generations before us have fought to create and preserve; the freedom to speak, to think, to live, to worship, to work, and to govern ourselves as individuals, as free men; the right to succeed or fail as free men, according to the measure of our ability and our strength.

Believing in these things, we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of communism, fascism, and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life; groups that have forfeited their right to exist in this country of ours, because they seek to achieve their change by means other than the vested procedure of the ballot and to deny the right of the majority opinion of the people to rule."

[jarpadat]

I freely concede that I'm doing a poor job of defending it, because it isn't my view to defend. The part of it that I don't understand is limited to how it is self-consistent, which is not something I see addressed in your reply, although I could be mistaken.

But I think we are still saying talking points instead of getting to the core. I understand and I share the concern about an important voice being silenced. But I think the mechanism of that silence in the current environment is probably related to loudness of noise rather than quietness of signal. Obviously, it may be different at different situations and times in history. But I think if our goal is to hear quiet voices we ought to consider both sources of the issue pretty seriously. A philosophy that only considers the problem of transmitting and ignores the problem of receiving through a noisefloor seems an incomplete troubleshooting procedure to me.

Whereas you perceive a threat about the slide into censorship, I perceive a threat about the slide into unrest and violence. In reality, it seems likely we will get both: one of them first and the other following as a reaction. So I think our interests would really be best served by hammering out a workable compromise so as to hang together rather than separately.

I agree that we ought to return to the "liberal discourse", but we may perceive its makeup differently. Limitations on discourse have always been part and parcel of the institution. Some limitations have been very harmful. Others, like 'you can't threaten not to leave when you lose an election', have been very helpful. Liberal discourse is presently threatened because we have abandoned that sort of polite limitation, and it is by reintroducing it that we can recover the institution.

> If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

This is a bit of a strawman. I do empathize with the skepticism of authority in our present climate. However, you rely on some method to determine whether a person is doing censorship in the same way I rely on a method to determine if a person is doing misinformation. I expect it is a similar method, which is to say, imperfectly, based on values present in our historical age, individual biases, and so on. Which is the "same sort of stuff" that democracy otherwise uses to make any of its decisions.

I expect this dispute arises because, in your worldview, limiting the discourse is very exceptional, and doing it properly should require an exceptional method. Whereas from my perspective, laws, elections, jail, and wars are very serious, and we have processes to decide those.

[slg]

>Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.

Why do you believe that only the the second viewpoint will suffer from this slippery slope? We also seen similar examples in the first worldview. A conversation can quickly go from being against illegal immigrants, to being against all immigrants, to being against a specific race of immigrants, to genocide of that race. We have already seen this laissez-faire approach from Facebook help contribute to genocide in Myanmar.

[crazygringo]

I think you're mischaracterizing the classical liberal consensus. That was best represented by John Stuart Mill, and his main point was not that censorshop will be used as a weapon -- it's simply that censorship infringes on liberty, and that the best cure for bad speech is more speech.

And the idea that the "general consensus" is against all forms of censorship is quite false. In America it is, but in Europe and other countries censorship of hate speech (e.g. racism, Nazism, etc.) is quite accepted as part of the general consensus.

And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. And arguably, spreading blatant viral lies on social media close to an election is akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, since the national consequences could be so dire.

There are many intelligent arguments to be made that censorship of speech that is either a) primarily hate-directed rather than information-directed, or b) outrageously false but capable of swinging an election, could be outlawed, and neither of these would be incompatible with modern-day political liberalism, which is more commonly called "social democracy" to distinguish it from the classical liberalism that Mill did so much to defend.

And the idea that this would somehow depend on an "oracle of truth" is nonsense. Courts judge things like libel and defamation cases all the time. Sure, there are gray cases that could go either way, but drawing lines in gray areas is what courts have done ever since they existed in the first place. Holding Facebook moderators ultimately responsible to judges, for example, isn't inherently difficult to do if we wanted to.

[grawprog]

>For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system.

So, what's different now vs when there was paid political campaigns and advertising on TV, radio, magazines etc.?

Partisan political ads have never been a source of reliable information as long as i've been alive.

I'm curious as to what elections you've participated in within your lifetime that wasn't full of campaigns full of misinformation or hell even an election where the candidate that won kept their word on everything they said.

My problem with this all is it feels just engineered and over reactionary.

Misinformation has existed as long as i've been alive in pretty easily accessible forms. There's always been tabloids next to checkout stands, there's always been bullshit news, ads pretending to be factual and mountains of garbage info heaped onto people and the same people that believed it then believe it now.

None of this is new and the only thing the internet changed about it all is now we can hear about whatever nonsense Joe Blow believes in.

I have a problem with it all because what people call 'misinformation' isn't always such, it's 'disagreeable information'.

Many of the things i've seen labelled as information.over the years, not your examples in particular, but in general, aren't even things with an objective correctness to them.

The whole second viewpoint relies on the idea that there is a morally superior group of people out there who know the correct ideas and everyone would just be better off if we just listen to them as any other ideas are just misinformation against the 'correct ideas'.

Again, this reminds me very much of the way things were when the church ran things. Just replace God and his commandments with the correct world view and beliefs.

This is very much the idea behind wrongthink and thoughtcrimes in 1984. That holding a non conforming belief makes one guilty and requires them to be punished by those that believe 'the correct thing'.

In the end, it all comes down to the idea that one group of people has the moral authority to decide what's right for everyone and should be allowed to crush any dissenting opinion.

And this, yes, I have a huge problem with. It's no different than what any other oppressive dictators have done to crush dissent.

[schuyler2d]

Paid ads (including political ones) on TV are not allowed to make false statements. Networks have had that policy for a long time.

It's Facebook that is undermining that norm -- even though they have the same standard for ads from non-politicians.

There's a GOP pac head that is running for something just to dodge Facebook's policy about lying.

[NewOrderNow]

Your point of view is intrinsically liberal, and the latter point of view plays the victim and assumes people can't evolve to gain the intelligence needed to not fall for misinformation. You intrinsically think there are people who can't make decisions for themselves. Sounds like control

[majormajor]

The absolute "freedom is simple, and restrictions are all bad" position is nonsense. Ignoring that there are people who would use their freedom to infringe on others is naive and childish.

If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first.

[Tainnor]

While the "should all discourse be free vs. should it all be regulated" axis exists and people can be in different places on that scale (and almost all people are somewhere in between the extremes), there's also an orthogonal question, namely, who should be the party that makes and/or enforces the regulations.

Personally, I am very much in favour of regulating some forms of speech (regulating doesn't necessarily have to mean prohibiting btw), but I am very wary if big, quasi-monopolistic private companies are being tasked to do so, because their incentive structure now will lead them to over-restrict in order to avoid potential legal issues. If it's just a newspaper comment section, that's fine because there is enough competition, but for things like Twitter/FB/YouTube, I find it problematic, and this is why I find some of the more recent laws in the EU to be somewhat dangerous; we're basically asking unelected, unsupervised people from Facebook et al. to intransparently enforce laws.

[defen]

It seems like making Facebook a government regulated public utility is the only way to square this circle. Because otherwise we either unjustly infringe on Mark Zuckerberg's use of his private property (Facebook); or Mark Zuckerberg is the de-facto arbiter of global public opinion for a broad swath of the population.

[josteink]

> The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. ... Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis.

You will mostly find this worldview on the political left of the spectrum, and more often than not you will find the discourse they find to be “against freedom” to be the one held by their political opponent.

And when they promote their view in the form of a policy, they are effectively trying to outlaw people having opinions differing from theirs.

Rather current examples: identity politics and diversity policies. If you simply disagree with the basis of their argument, that disagreement is considered “hateful” in itself and your speech must be banned, no matter how civil.

How can one have free discourse, when the one righteous part has decided that only they are allowed to speak? There’s no freedom here. Not even close.