My favorite aspect of this week's, um, kerfuffle, is that state and corporate cooperation to censor citizens is part of the dictionary definition of literal fascism.
Wow, that was excellent. Thank you very much for that. As someone who has actually studied fascism as a political system and not simply an epithet, I've long pointed out to anyone who would listen (both of them) that all the combatants in WWII, except the Soviet Union, were essentially fascist states: in the west and the Pacific, it was fascists fighting fascists, fascists all the way down!
One of the most interesting differences between the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s and today's emerging oligarchies is the industries that partnered with fascist governments back in the day actually made things. Except in China and Russia, today's oligarchs owe their wealth primarily to media and entertainment, retailing and advertising.
Yep. I did get the vaccine, but I did have reservations, and my hesitancy had nothing to do with anti-vaxxers--whom I've always regarded as ill-informed and scientifically illiterate--and everything to do with the behavior of the CDC and WHO (and not just in reaction to their covid behavior, although that certainly didn't help).
Unfortunately, I've noticed doctors tend toward an authoritarian/paternalistic mindset and tend to blame the patient.
I’m curious what, if anything, could be done to address the issue of the primacy effect (where you remember what you learn first more readily than what comes after) in light of the oversaturation of information online. To me that’s the bigger problem: if people are inundated with bad and/or poorly sourced information, what they remember more readily are the splashy headlines (Like lab leak = conspiracy theory) and then they never revisit the subject.
I’m not cool with censorship. I do get where the administration is coming from on the issue of vaccination. But surely there’s got to be a more responsible way to handle the dissemination of information, right?
The other day I read a vox article about censoring hate speech online after the England soccer team lost and the three Black players who missed their PKs were facing some racist harassment. But tons of people online essentially shouted down that racist behavior and flooded the players’ feeds (and even some real life public spaces) with supportive messages. And the author of the article was like, this seems to be a great example of community policing, but is that good enough? And I’m like, yeah. It is. That’s democracy: the people give voice to whatever they want, and the majority voices win. The fact that the majority voices were not racist ought to be considered a win and proof of human progress.
I actually link in the piece to a petition from that Countering Hate group about that exact incident (the soccer match). Their prescription? To bad everyone who's ever said anything racist online from social media for life: https://www.counterhate.com/noyellowcard
There are tons of problems — obviously — with speech on social media, including but not limited to misinformation. I don't pretend to have a comprehensive program for addressing it, but censorship is so clearly a medicine that is far worse than the disease.
Oh yeah my bad I missed that link. That’s another prime example of the left going so far left we’re back at far right. I guess the far reaches of both ends of the spectrum are “shut them up no matter the cost” the only difference being who the “them” are.
It’s also an interesting quirk (feature?) of wokism that we’re meant to be compassionate and offer paths of rehabilitation to incarcerated people but when it comes to ideological “crimes” there is no redemption. You could also say there’s no redemption offered to men accused of sexual misconduct (emphasis on accused) in this moment.
The intel community is probably tired of pretending that they're not spying on us. They would love to be able to do what they've already been doing out in the open. The First Amendment it just an obstacle. They're going to get around it by hook or by crook. Seems like we're taking a page out of the CCP's book. It also reminds me, once again, of "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul.
"The democracies are, of course, careful to assert that they are using these techniques only because of the state of war (or COVID. Or the Russians). But there are always wars of one kind or another: war preparations, cold war, hot war, new cold war, and so on, ad infinitum. Indeed, cold war is as productive as hot war in forcing the democracies to imitate the dictatorships in the use of technique."
Section 230 should be repealed or reformed but it creates an after the fact solution based on individual action to hold a private company responsible for what's on the platform. So what kind of additional regulation (or something else?) can address misinformation (some of it really is dangerous) in some way without squelching free speech.
No. And accordingly I have no opinion of him other than what I cite him for here, which is as someone who the government would like to shut up, which is now evidenced by the fact that he's one of the 12 people Psaki referred to in her press conference.
Calling Kennedy an anti-vaxxer is like calling Tulsi Gabbard an Assad apologist. Kennedy is in the unfortunate position of knowing way too much about the pharmaceutical industry and the people who are a part of it and being willing to speak out about it. This puts him at the top of that list.
Fair enough, I don't know much about him. I was referencing him to make a point about 1A, not to disparage him. And I designated him an "anti-vaxxer" just to clear up any confusion over someone who isn't familiar with him and is scratching their head over my suddenly talking about the Kennedys.
Maybe if you put anti-vaxxer in quotes it would help. The way it reads it just continues the way he is disparagingly characterized.
But...totally agree with the point of your article! What is happening is very similar to how China censors.
From "The Intermingling of State and Private Companies: Analysing Censorship of the 19th National Communist Party Congress on WeChat"
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020:
"Censorship on Chinese social media should not be framed as a top-down monolithic system of control in which companies passively comply with government orders, but rather as the product of interaction between the government and private companies. The result is not necessarily an air-tight system that is precisely controlled by the state and always reflects government policy strategies. The regime of self-discipline pushes responsibility for censorship down and on to private companies. The government can signal sensitive events that should be managed through its directives and reprimands of companies, but the actual implementation of censorship is done at the company level, which can lead to over-blocking and the intentional or unintentional failure to comply with directives even around the most politically sensitive events. Our study shows that the underlying decision making behind social media censorship in China cannot be explained from only the perspective and agendas of the government or private companies; rather, it has to be seen as an intermingling of the two."
Another great article. I agree it is "creepy as fuck," but it's also scary as hell. I tried to find a court case I read about in which the SC declared that if a direct line can be drawn between government demand and corporate censorship, then the First Amendment applies to that corporate entity. That seems to be our only hope at the moment. At first I was kind of excited about the new head of the FTC, Lina Kahn, but I think she was installed more as a threat to reinforce this kind of behavior than as any real counter to it.
I just don't get what you're asking for. Youtube is a private corporation, and as such should they not have the freedom to decide what content to host or not host? How could it possibly be otherwise?
If I owned a company hosting content, I'd kick Weinstein off too. He's wandering WAY outside his area of expertise on ivermectin, but people listen to him because they think he does know something, and becasue he stood up to woke bullies so he must be a good guy. Wrong.
Would I not have that right, as owner of a content-hosting company? Because I wouldn't want what I consider to be misinformation to be spread around by my company?
And if I would have that right, why doesn't youtube?
It's not a matter of whether YouTube *should* have that right; they *do* have it. There's no real point in talking about whether that's a good or a bad thing; that's just the legal reality. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the US government telling *all* of the tech companies to implement censorship against people who are speaking out of compliance with the government, which is materially the same as the government doing the censoring itself. This is exactly what the First Amendment was meant to preclude, except the drafters couldn't foresee a future in which all public expression was conducted in the private — and therefore constitutionally unprotected — sphere.
This is just historically wrong. Protected "speech" has ALWAYS meant the written word, the PUBLISHED AND DISTRIBUTED written word, not some dude shouting in the public square; and today's tech companies are no different than yesterday's book and newspaper publishers in that regard.
The government has always had the power to lean on them, and historically has for issues deemed (by the government) to be for the good of public safety.
I'm just not seeing any fundamental difference today.
Why do you think protected speech only extends to printed content? It's way more liberally construed than that. The Supreme Court has ruled campaign donations to be a form of protected speech.
I didn't say that! YOU said that things are different now because all discourse spaces are privately controlled, whereas in the past one could go shout in the public square. I'm saying that discourse spaces have ALWAYS been under private control: the book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishers, then the radio and TV station owners, and now the internet content services. It just isn't different now in any fundamental way than it ever was.
I don't follow the analogy. Newspapers and TV stations are publishers and broadcasters. That's not the equivalent of public discourse, which is ordinary, non-journalist people talking to one another, which is what takes place in the privatized space of social media now.
Actually, they cannot overtly do it. The government cannot coerce or direct a private company to censor people. If they do, that company becomes subject to the Bill of Rights as a state actor. It's happened before with a book seller (I couldn't find the case). But now we get to see if the Supreme Court actually cares about precedent. If they do, Psaki handed the adversaries of Biden's administration and Facebook the ammunition they need by explicitly stating they are communication with Facebook and pointing posts out that need to be taken down. (I don't think it matters whether or not Facebook did it.)
Do you actually think the Democrats on that bench are voting against essentially Democrat censorship? We're screwed both ways because neither side is really interested in allow dissent if they can control those who censor.
It's different in precisely this way: except during WWI and WWII, the US government never dictated to the media what they could or could not report on, or how.
And how, exactly, is the government "dictating" to media? What happens to a company (like, say, substack) that doesn't go along with these "dictates"?
Answer: nothing at all. The Surgeon General's "advisory" is exactly that: advisory. Even media company is free to ignore it at all, like substack is doing right here.
Could they perhaps recategorize them as public utilities? Public utilities are private companies, but they can't discriminate. IDK. Section 230 repeal could go either way, either increasing censorship to avoid being sued as publishers or a completely open forum.
Which will just end free speech on the internet completely. Content would have to be far more closely monitored than it is now. Do you not get that's WHY both Trump and Biden want to repeal 230? They both want to silence their critics.
My favorite aspect of this week's, um, kerfuffle, is that state and corporate cooperation to censor citizens is part of the dictionary definition of literal fascism.
https://unherd.com/2021/07/how-the-democrats-fell-for-mussolini/
Wow, that was excellent. Thank you very much for that. As someone who has actually studied fascism as a political system and not simply an epithet, I've long pointed out to anyone who would listen (both of them) that all the combatants in WWII, except the Soviet Union, were essentially fascist states: in the west and the Pacific, it was fascists fighting fascists, fascists all the way down!
One of the most interesting differences between the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s and today's emerging oligarchies is the industries that partnered with fascist governments back in the day actually made things. Except in China and Russia, today's oligarchs owe their wealth primarily to media and entertainment, retailing and advertising.
Sad!
>"all the combatants in WWII, except the Soviet Union, were essentially fascist states"
Your defintion of fascism is so broad that it becomes completely meaningless.
I keep pointing this out. People don't understand what fascism really is, but this fascism in its natal form.
The thing is, online nuts aren't convincing me to avoid the vax for now, this Biden admin is! Their messaging from day one has been atrocious.
Yep. I did get the vaccine, but I did have reservations, and my hesitancy had nothing to do with anti-vaxxers--whom I've always regarded as ill-informed and scientifically illiterate--and everything to do with the behavior of the CDC and WHO (and not just in reaction to their covid behavior, although that certainly didn't help).
Unfortunately, I've noticed doctors tend toward an authoritarian/paternalistic mindset and tend to blame the patient.
I’m curious what, if anything, could be done to address the issue of the primacy effect (where you remember what you learn first more readily than what comes after) in light of the oversaturation of information online. To me that’s the bigger problem: if people are inundated with bad and/or poorly sourced information, what they remember more readily are the splashy headlines (Like lab leak = conspiracy theory) and then they never revisit the subject.
I’m not cool with censorship. I do get where the administration is coming from on the issue of vaccination. But surely there’s got to be a more responsible way to handle the dissemination of information, right?
The other day I read a vox article about censoring hate speech online after the England soccer team lost and the three Black players who missed their PKs were facing some racist harassment. But tons of people online essentially shouted down that racist behavior and flooded the players’ feeds (and even some real life public spaces) with supportive messages. And the author of the article was like, this seems to be a great example of community policing, but is that good enough? And I’m like, yeah. It is. That’s democracy: the people give voice to whatever they want, and the majority voices win. The fact that the majority voices were not racist ought to be considered a win and proof of human progress.
I actually link in the piece to a petition from that Countering Hate group about that exact incident (the soccer match). Their prescription? To bad everyone who's ever said anything racist online from social media for life: https://www.counterhate.com/noyellowcard
There are tons of problems — obviously — with speech on social media, including but not limited to misinformation. I don't pretend to have a comprehensive program for addressing it, but censorship is so clearly a medicine that is far worse than the disease.
Oh yeah my bad I missed that link. That’s another prime example of the left going so far left we’re back at far right. I guess the far reaches of both ends of the spectrum are “shut them up no matter the cost” the only difference being who the “them” are.
It’s also an interesting quirk (feature?) of wokism that we’re meant to be compassionate and offer paths of rehabilitation to incarcerated people but when it comes to ideological “crimes” there is no redemption. You could also say there’s no redemption offered to men accused of sexual misconduct (emphasis on accused) in this moment.
The intel community is probably tired of pretending that they're not spying on us. They would love to be able to do what they've already been doing out in the open. The First Amendment it just an obstacle. They're going to get around it by hook or by crook. Seems like we're taking a page out of the CCP's book. It also reminds me, once again, of "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul.
"The democracies are, of course, careful to assert that they are using these techniques only because of the state of war (or COVID. Or the Russians). But there are always wars of one kind or another: war preparations, cold war, hot war, new cold war, and so on, ad infinitum. Indeed, cold war is as productive as hot war in forcing the democracies to imitate the dictatorships in the use of technique."
Fauci ramping up the censorship pressure:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/17/us/fauci-polio-coronavirus-false-information/index.html
Once again, a total misunderstanding of what "censorship" means. Hint: it's NOT a public health official expressing an opinion.
"Censorship pressure".
Section 230 should be repealed or reformed but it creates an after the fact solution based on individual action to hold a private company responsible for what's on the platform. So what kind of additional regulation (or something else?) can address misinformation (some of it really is dangerous) in some way without squelching free speech.
Have you actually read and or listened to Robert Kennedy jr ?
No. And accordingly I have no opinion of him other than what I cite him for here, which is as someone who the government would like to shut up, which is now evidenced by the fact that he's one of the 12 people Psaki referred to in her press conference.
Calling Kennedy an anti-vaxxer is like calling Tulsi Gabbard an Assad apologist. Kennedy is in the unfortunate position of knowing way too much about the pharmaceutical industry and the people who are a part of it and being willing to speak out about it. This puts him at the top of that list.
Fair enough, I don't know much about him. I was referencing him to make a point about 1A, not to disparage him. And I designated him an "anti-vaxxer" just to clear up any confusion over someone who isn't familiar with him and is scratching their head over my suddenly talking about the Kennedys.
Maybe if you put anti-vaxxer in quotes it would help. The way it reads it just continues the way he is disparagingly characterized.
But...totally agree with the point of your article! What is happening is very similar to how China censors.
From "The Intermingling of State and Private Companies: Analysing Censorship of the 19th National Communist Party Congress on WeChat"
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020:
"Censorship on Chinese social media should not be framed as a top-down monolithic system of control in which companies passively comply with government orders, but rather as the product of interaction between the government and private companies. The result is not necessarily an air-tight system that is precisely controlled by the state and always reflects government policy strategies. The regime of self-discipline pushes responsibility for censorship down and on to private companies. The government can signal sensitive events that should be managed through its directives and reprimands of companies, but the actual implementation of censorship is done at the company level, which can lead to over-blocking and the intentional or unintentional failure to comply with directives even around the most politically sensitive events. Our study shows that the underlying decision making behind social media censorship in China cannot be explained from only the perspective and agendas of the government or private companies; rather, it has to be seen as an intermingling of the two."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/intermingling-of-state-and-private-companies-analysing-censorship-of-the-19th-national-communist-party-congress-on-wechat/9D63E906590D2E388C29DCED5D7E62FE
Another great article. I agree it is "creepy as fuck," but it's also scary as hell. I tried to find a court case I read about in which the SC declared that if a direct line can be drawn between government demand and corporate censorship, then the First Amendment applies to that corporate entity. That seems to be our only hope at the moment. At first I was kind of excited about the new head of the FTC, Lina Kahn, but I think she was installed more as a threat to reinforce this kind of behavior than as any real counter to it.
I just don't get what you're asking for. Youtube is a private corporation, and as such should they not have the freedom to decide what content to host or not host? How could it possibly be otherwise?
If I owned a company hosting content, I'd kick Weinstein off too. He's wandering WAY outside his area of expertise on ivermectin, but people listen to him because they think he does know something, and becasue he stood up to woke bullies so he must be a good guy. Wrong.
Would I not have that right, as owner of a content-hosting company? Because I wouldn't want what I consider to be misinformation to be spread around by my company?
And if I would have that right, why doesn't youtube?
It's not a matter of whether YouTube *should* have that right; they *do* have it. There's no real point in talking about whether that's a good or a bad thing; that's just the legal reality. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the US government telling *all* of the tech companies to implement censorship against people who are speaking out of compliance with the government, which is materially the same as the government doing the censoring itself. This is exactly what the First Amendment was meant to preclude, except the drafters couldn't foresee a future in which all public expression was conducted in the private — and therefore constitutionally unprotected — sphere.
This is just historically wrong. Protected "speech" has ALWAYS meant the written word, the PUBLISHED AND DISTRIBUTED written word, not some dude shouting in the public square; and today's tech companies are no different than yesterday's book and newspaper publishers in that regard.
The government has always had the power to lean on them, and historically has for issues deemed (by the government) to be for the good of public safety.
I'm just not seeing any fundamental difference today.
Why do you think protected speech only extends to printed content? It's way more liberally construed than that. The Supreme Court has ruled campaign donations to be a form of protected speech.
I didn't say that! YOU said that things are different now because all discourse spaces are privately controlled, whereas in the past one could go shout in the public square. I'm saying that discourse spaces have ALWAYS been under private control: the book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishers, then the radio and TV station owners, and now the internet content services. It just isn't different now in any fundamental way than it ever was.
I don't follow the analogy. Newspapers and TV stations are publishers and broadcasters. That's not the equivalent of public discourse, which is ordinary, non-journalist people talking to one another, which is what takes place in the privatized space of social media now.
How did people engage in public discourse before social media? (I have an answer, but I need to hear yours to engage constructively.)
Did you miss the bit where the US government is apparently dictating to private companies what speech should be censored?
And how is that any different than it was 20 years ago? Or 50? Or 100?
Actually, they cannot overtly do it. The government cannot coerce or direct a private company to censor people. If they do, that company becomes subject to the Bill of Rights as a state actor. It's happened before with a book seller (I couldn't find the case). But now we get to see if the Supreme Court actually cares about precedent. If they do, Psaki handed the adversaries of Biden's administration and Facebook the ammunition they need by explicitly stating they are communication with Facebook and pointing posts out that need to be taken down. (I don't think it matters whether or not Facebook did it.)
Bingo! All these supposed threats from the government are empty. The trumpified SCOTUS is not going to go against the 1% (Zuckerberg et al).
Do you actually think the Democrats on that bench are voting against essentially Democrat censorship? We're screwed both ways because neither side is really interested in allow dissent if they can control those who censor.
It's different in precisely this way: except during WWI and WWII, the US government never dictated to the media what they could or could not report on, or how.
Any more questions?
Yeah: why do you not know history? All sorts of stuff has been withheld from publication at government request, here's a 2014 NYT article about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/public-editor/when-the-government-says-shhh.html
And how, exactly, is the government "dictating" to media? What happens to a company (like, say, substack) that doesn't go along with these "dictates"?
Answer: nothing at all. The Surgeon General's "advisory" is exactly that: advisory. Even media company is free to ignore it at all, like substack is doing right here.
Potentially Section 230 repeal.
Could they perhaps recategorize them as public utilities? Public utilities are private companies, but they can't discriminate. IDK. Section 230 repeal could go either way, either increasing censorship to avoid being sued as publishers or a completely open forum.
Which will just end free speech on the internet completely. Content would have to be far more closely monitored than it is now. Do you not get that's WHY both Trump and Biden want to repeal 230? They both want to silence their critics.
* "Even" should have been "Every"