51 Comments
Jul 16, 2021Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

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.

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Jul 16, 2021Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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Have you actually read and or listened to Robert Kennedy jr ?

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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.

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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?

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