Yep. It seems to have started with the 2016 election which left popular opinion being that there's a huge part of the population who are too stupid to think for themselves and must be shielded from bad ideas in case they believe them and harm the rest of us with them. Now that such an idea is readily accepted, censorship is easily seen as the morally right thing to do in lots of cases. The feeling is that we're protecting ourselves from real harm by people who really don't have the ability to correctly evaluate the information they receive. Just like China doing it for social harmony. It's not just terrorism and child porn that people tolerate censorship for anymore, it's for 5G and flat earth conspiracy theories, anti-religious ideas, nationalism, and all sorts of "misinformation".
That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious. But the real, longterm solution is education, not censorship. But we have to admit that we are in an ultra-connected world like never before and fake, easy news are even more easily spread. So, critical thinking is a necessary skill to be taught.
> That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious.
Twitter and media hyperbole aside how exactly is the current admin that much different than the previous? Bush #2 had fake WMDs and leveraged that to go to war. A war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and a ridiculous amount of money. The last admin bailed out Wall Street (with few concessions), re-signed and expanded the Patriot Act, floated the Paris Climate Accord as a victory (but Naomi Klein tells otherwise). Over both of these admins and prior income inequality has increased.
We've been getting shot in the foot, the head, the arse, etc. I'm not a DJT voter or fan but the idea that he's the problem is naive. If W.DC had been doing their job there would have been no opportunity for DJT to rise. Trump is a symptom. Let's not be foolish and blame the symptom.
I didn't dismiss them. I asked how those are so much worse than the transgressions of the previous two admins? I'd like to remind everyone that an estimated 100,000+ non-white skineed _civilians_ were killed in Iraq. Alledged hate crimes vs real war crimes.
Bush caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with the Iraq war, and you're upset about some tweets?! Why do people have such a distorted view of right and wrong?
Agreed. As for why, it's obvious. It's the media. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when Trump signs off on extending the Patriot Act. A law that was renewed and expanded by the previous admin.
Maybe they shouldn't have been forced to choose between Hillary/Biden or Trump if you wanted them to choose "wisely". The responsibility for losing to Trump falls solely on the Democratic Party, and the talk of footguns and education comes off as extremely snobbish. Stop blaming others for your failures.
Consider that it is far easier to spread misinformation/disinformation than it is to educate, and that over time there are going to be even more powerful forms of disinformation in the form of deep fakes. People have a hard time distinguishing real from fake now, it's only going to get worse from here.
On one hand you can say that nothing should be censored and the onus is on the viewer to critically evaluate information. But the reality is that misinformation/disinformation is causing real harm to people, populations, and civilization itself.
For example, propaganda on Facebook in Myanmar has fueled mass killings against the Rohingya. Anti-vax misinformation is lowering vaccination rates and causing a resurgence of diseases that were almost eradicated. Should companies like Google and Facebook just turn a blind eye to all of that and watch brutality and backwardness thrive and tear down progress? At what point should the line be drawn?
Make no mistake, there are malign actors out there who are weaponizing misinformation as we speak. If we choose not to do anything about it, they will have an out-sized role in shaping the future to their ends.
It certainly is a very difficult question to figure out where the line should be drawn, and even then it's a moving target. But it's a question worth wrangling over, and ultimately if mankind is going to meet the challenges of now and the future, the threat of disinformation has to be met one way or another.
