Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Not sure why you're an apologist for lying, but OK.
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I'm not an apologist for lying. I'm leery of employing what I think is an authoritarian fix for it.
Free speech, the most important right we have, is built around the notion that ideas will compete with one another. The cure for one person lying is another person saying "That's a lie."
What you seek to do is prevent speech. You seek to use a referee to filter speech and ban lies from getting traction. The aim is noble, no doubt. But I don't need to tell you just how dangerous that thinking is to a free society.
And it's no excuse, or defense, to say, "Facebook already filters commercial speech." That the company sins in that regard doesn't mean the sin should be extended to political speech. (There's also an argument that filtering commercial speech is acceptable because it's just self-protection, as such speech could be defamatory, whereas political speech rarely rises to the level of defamation because the subjects are public figures.)
It is, however, a valid defense for FB to say "We can pick and choose what we want to filter and what we don't." FB has that right. Again, it should not engage in that sin, as I noted above, but technically, legally, it can do that.
I think FB should not filter any speech at all. I think that doing so, in any regard, risks normalizing the idea that certain speech should be precluded. And I don't want any speech precluded, for a simple reason: A human will have to do the filtering. And humans are biased, fallible, and yes -- arrogant.
I can be quite arrogant. I think I'm smarter than a lot of people in a number of regards, just like many of us here. A person like me should never be in a position to filter what speech others see. I'd seek to preclude that which I didn't like. Such a dishonest filter would bend free speech into propaganda of the most insidious form. It would also further infantilize an already childish and frivolous public. Look at these people on the left and right in this country. Look at the deplorables, and the people who think of themselves as elites. These people are to a large extent poorly informed, biased sorts. Joiners and opportunists of the worst stripe. You don't allow any one of these groups to acquire the power to filter speech. You let them battle it out - throw their dimwitted ideas at each other, fight over politics and lob their self-reinforcing data and media narratives at each other - and hope that out of the mess of competing bullshit, some mix of policies that keep the Republic rolling emerges.
I can't think of a world scarier than one in which people like us were awarded the power to filter what the people we think are below us should get to read. A world in which you or I was able to save the knaves from lies by limiting what they consume - on any platform - is a fucking horror movie. I'd rather live through a dozen Trump administrations.
