The reason that centrists support private censorship now is very simple:
We are now facing disinformation campaigns that have apocalyptic consequences, and normal legal channels are quite ineffective at battling them.
"Well of course, it's not the government's job to decide between true and false, nor to enforce it!" you say.
Bullshit, I say.
Slander is illegal. False advertising is illegal. Fraud is illegal. Defamation is illegal. Perjury is illegal. Filing a false report is illegal.
There are a plethora of torts and laws where you will get sued or jailed for lying about something important (like a court matter) and in those cases the truth is a defense! That means a court decides what is true and what is false.
So we've admitted that we're willing to abridge free speech to protect truth. That's now established. But we're only willing to do it for cases where somebody can show clear damages, and where there's a clear target to sue.
A diffuse, widespread misinformation movement against a concept and not a person? Like climate change, or vaccines, or covid, or Judaism at large? Those aren't protected at all. And why not? Because there isn't a shareholder of climate change who can show that your misinformation has unjustly damaged his share price?
So given this legal vacuum, is it any wonder that the reality-based community has embraced private censorship? Nobody loves this solution, but the alternative is letting one third of the population doom the other two thirds by obstructing the kind of actions we need to survive.
> There are a plethora of torts and laws where you will get sued or jailed for lying about something important (like a court matter) and in those cases the truth is a defense! That means a court decides what is true and what is false.
Yes. Courts do that. They decide on what the facts are, and on how the law applies to those facts.
I don't have a problem with a court doing that. I have a problem with Facebook doing that. Even more I have a problem with some government agency telling Facebook to do that (unless the government agency is a court, and they have a finding of fact on that particular issue).
And, "the reality-based community"? Was that the community that agreed that masks wouldn't help? Or was it the exact same community a month later, that said that masks would help? I mean, it's good that they're trying to follow the evidence. But no, I won't let them censor, because they've been wrong before, and will be again.
The problem here is that there is not some clear-cut answer to "what is to be done" about climate change, and unless you restrict yourself to the benign observation that "the climate changes", everything else can be categorized as "misinformation" if you have a political objective. Agree that climate change is happening, but don't agree with a massive spending project to address it? Too bad, you've just committed misinformation.
>Nobody loves this solution, but the alternative is letting one third of the population doom the other two thirds by obstructing the kind of actions we need to survive.
I just don't get this at all. What doom? Are you implying the vaccine doesn't work and you can still catch COVID if a bunch of other people don't take it?
We are now facing disinformation campaigns that have apocalyptic consequences, and normal legal channels are quite ineffective at battling them.
"Well of course, it's not the government's job to decide between true and false, nor to enforce it!" you say.
Bullshit, I say.
Slander is illegal. False advertising is illegal. Fraud is illegal. Defamation is illegal. Perjury is illegal. Filing a false report is illegal.
There are a plethora of torts and laws where you will get sued or jailed for lying about something important (like a court matter) and in those cases the truth is a defense! That means a court decides what is true and what is false.
So we've admitted that we're willing to abridge free speech to protect truth. That's now established. But we're only willing to do it for cases where somebody can show clear damages, and where there's a clear target to sue.
A diffuse, widespread misinformation movement against a concept and not a person? Like climate change, or vaccines, or covid, or Judaism at large? Those aren't protected at all. And why not? Because there isn't a shareholder of climate change who can show that your misinformation has unjustly damaged his share price?
So given this legal vacuum, is it any wonder that the reality-based community has embraced private censorship? Nobody loves this solution, but the alternative is letting one third of the population doom the other two thirds by obstructing the kind of actions we need to survive.