Alex Jones and Infowars gets 'disappeared' - are we headed in the right direction?

[epronovost]

The solution to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech; good speech.

This has proen to be completly inefficient as a strategy. You cannot counter disinformation with more information. That's how disinformation works. You create so much noise it's impossible to hear anything. There are two ways to control information. Either you censor it so that only one version, your version, is accepted or you drown people in so much information that no matter what happens you will manage to impose your message to a large portion of the population. Both censorship and disinformation are tools to control what information people have access to. Both require different strategies and measures to be neutralised as much as possible.

[Dr H]

The key point you raise is that of consequences.  While all speech may be permitted, the intelligent person realizes that speech of any sort may have consequences.  If I use words in a situation which I have reason to believe are likely to provoke hostile reaction, and somebody slugs me for them, I really can't complain; there's no one to blame but myself.

The problem is that the power that the arbiters of these social medium platforms enjoy is not analogous to that you enjoy in your own home, which is both rather limited, circumscribed, and shared ubiquitously.  All that making such an analogy shows is that we can use bad analogies to overlook and ignore relevant disanalogies.

I'm not sure I get your point.  Are you suggesting that the arbiters of social platforms should have less power, or that the ubiquitous "I" should have more?

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The solution to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech; good speech.

This has proen to be completly inefficient as a strategy.

It's true that preserving freedoms is often an inefficient process.
Doers that mean they're not worth preserving?

You cannot counter disinformation with more information.

If that's true, then I guess we'd better start teaching creation "science" in biology classrooms; nobody wants to listen to all that evidence-supported evolution stuff.

That's how disinformation works. You create so much noise it's impossible to hear anything.

Disinformation is just deliberate misinformation.  It's been with us for as long as human beings have had language, if not longer.  Making a lot of noise is one strategy, but it's not required.

Sometimes it's who you can get to swallow the hook that's more important than how many people swallow the hook.

There are two ways to control information. Either you censor it so that only one version, your version, is accepted or you drown people in so much information that no matter what happens you will manage to impose your message to a large portion of the population. Both censorship and disinformation are tools to control what information people have access to. Both require different strategies and measures to be neutralised as much as possible.

That pretty much seems to assume a binary scenario -- it's either "their" information, or "our" information.  I don't know of too many situations that lie along such neat black/white lines.  

I submit that a better approach is to train as many people as possible in critical thinking, let all the information flow, and then trust them to make up their own minds.

[Minimalist]

Did Stormfront come back?  I thought those sad nazis finally gave up because they were too poor?

It's still out there.  Hey, nazi shitheads need a web site, too.

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To amend the above, the NFL may apply fines and employment termination, but they cannot compel standing or kneeling.

Not to mention they also have to abide by the contract they have with the NFLPA. 

They aren't doing so well enforcing the rules they did try to ram through.



Week #1, this year.

[epronovost]

Then, you will have to realise that 30% of humanity has the time, the interest and the capacity to develop rahter good critical thinking skills, enough to counter disinformation. Another 30% will be capable of achieving a certain level of critical thinking, but won't reliably be capable of countering disinformation if they have been exposed to bullshit early in their lives or if it comes from a person close to them and then there is a last thirty percent who simply don't have the time, the interest or the natural aptitude to develop good critical thinking skills and will be easily manipulated by people and that's all that is needed to destroy the freedom of vulnerable minorities. If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish. If one has to accept that  some humans are dicks, others are simply dull. In my opinion, to keep a society free and equalitarian, you need people with good critical thinking skills, or at least as good as possible, but also a measures to prevent dangerous hateful speech from spreading as to avoid vulnerable groups to suffer for the freedom of some dude to be a monster toward his fellow man.

[Seraphina]

Then, you will have to realise that 30% of humanity has the time, the interest and the capacity to develop rahter good critical thinking skills, enough to counter disinformation. Another 30% will be capable of achieving a certain level of critical thinking, but won't reliably be capable of countering disinformation if they have been exposed to bullshit early in their lives or if it comes from a person close to them and then there is a last thirty percent who simply don't have the time, the interest or the natural aptitude to develop good critical thinking skills and will be easily manipulated by people and that's all that is needed to destroy the freedom of vulnerable minorities. If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish. If one has to accept that  some humans are dicks, others are simply dull. In my opinion, to keep a society free and equalitarian, you need people with good critical thinking skills, or at least as good as possible, but also a measures to prevent dangerous hateful speech from spreading as to avoid vulnerable groups to suffer for the freedom of some dude to be a monster toward his fellow man.

What happened to the other 10%?

-Teresa Pedantic

[epronovost]

Then, you will have to realise that 30% of humanity has the time, the interest and the capacity to develop rahter good critical thinking skills, enough to counter disinformation. Another 30% will be capable of achieving a certain level of critical thinking, but won't reliably be capable of countering disinformation if they have been exposed to bullshit early in their lives or if it comes from a person close to them and then there is a last thirty percent who simply don't have the time, the interest or the natural aptitude to develop good critical thinking skills and will be easily manipulated by people and that's all that is needed to destroy the freedom of vulnerable minorities. If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish. If one has to accept that  some humans are dicks, others are simply dull. In my opinion, to keep a society free and equalitarian, you need people with good critical thinking skills, or at least as good as possible, but also a measures to prevent dangerous hateful speech from spreading as to avoid vulnerable groups to suffer for the freedom of some dude to be a monster toward his fellow man.

What happened to the other 10%?

-Teresa Pedantic

They are better at math than me

[vulcanlogician]

10% are the Nazis.

[Minimalist]

If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish.

Yup.  We know.

[Angrboda]

Saudi Arabia’s information war to bury news of Jamal Khashoggi

For the past several days, the Saudi Twittersphere has been awash with patriotism. Saudi accounts have tweeted, in Arabic, a “#message of love for Mohammed bin Salman” and encouraged one another to “#unfollow enemies of the nation.” The latter hashtag started trending at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, peaked at about 5 p.m., and by Wednesday had been mentioned 103,000 times.

This might have been because Saudi citizens, consumed by national indignation, took to their smartphones to show their support for the crown prince in his moment of difficulty: The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Post columnist, under exceptionally grisly circumstances, has not been good for the international reputation of the royal family. But it’s equally possible that those hashtags were pushed by bots — fake, computerized accounts — as well as by paid, professional Internet trolls. After President Trump visited Riyadh in 2017, Marc Owen Jones, a Persian Gulf expert at the University of Exeter, tracked the accounts enthusiastically welcoming the U.S. president to Saudi Arabia. “Eighty to ninety percent of them were bots,” he told me.

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None of this is secret, not in Saudi Arabia, and not anywhere else. Censorship, in its 21st-century form, isn’t carried out by old men in hidden offices, marking up newspaper articles with red ink. It is carried out by young men with mobile phones, working in the open, whose “patriotic” assaults on the “unpatriotic” are there for everyone to see. It’s also evolving constantly, as regimes observe one another’s methods. On Wednesday, Twitter released data on thousands of recently banned Russian and Iranian accounts; according to the analyst Ben Nimmo, it appears that the latter were learning from the former.

The question is why Twitter isn’t interested in their Saudi equivalent. Or, more to the point, why fake accounts and false identities are tolerated at all. We aren’t that far away from a time when it will become too dangerous for many people to risk the use of social media — and we’ve already reached the point where social media reveals very little of what people really think and believe. Maybe tens of thousands of Saudis really do want to pass on a #message of love for Mohammed bin Salman. But if they don’t, how would we know?

[Dr H]

Then, you will have to realise that 30% of humanity has the time, the interest and the capacity to develop rahter good critical thinking skills, enough to counter disinformation. Another 30% will be capable of achieving a certain level of critical thinking, but won't reliably be capable of countering disinformation if they have been exposed to bullshit early in their lives or if it comes from a person close to them and then there is a last thirty percent who simply don't have the time, the interest or the natural aptitude to develop good critical thinking skills and will be easily manipulated by people and that's all that is needed to destroy the freedom of vulnerable minorities. If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish. If one has to accept that  some humans are dicks, others are simply dull. In my opinion, to keep a society free and equalitarian, you need people with good critical thinking skills, or at least as good as possible, but also a measures to prevent dangerous hateful speech from spreading as to avoid vulnerable groups to suffer for the freedom of some dude to be a monster toward his fellow man.

So... you propose that the people which someone (who?) decides are capable of critical thinking, become the ultimate arbiters of what information everyone else (the poor, ignorant peons) is allowed to view and consider?

Is that what we really want?  A group of self-defined elites, telling everyone else what they should and shouldn't do -- what they should and shouldn't think, in fact -- "for their own good"?

Why am I having this odd sense of deja vu?  

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If you let NAZI speak openly, loudly and reach a lot of people, no matter how much you try to counter them, there will be enough people who will swallow their bullshit to prevent marginalised minorities (especially if htey have a lengthy history of oppression in the area) from seeing their freedom and safety diminish.

Yup.  We know.

"I have a natural instinct for science."