Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US?
Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work.
If we try the Reddit route, then we could have incredible bias in moderated communities.
What about fitting the StackOverflow model to social media?
Another route is how X provides for the Community Notes feature. Would that have worked? Is Community Notes still susceptible to the same bias?
How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airborne spread (like the measles)?
The question is what limits are made.
Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists.
All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies.
Etc.
The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book.
Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
That costs money.
Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can be placed in a "free speech zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured.
The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.
Do you have any examples of this happening?
As for limits, I think by now we have collected enough data from social media use to know what kinds of posts border on outright immoral and are a negative to society. Some of these have been captured and prohibited by law. It wouldn't be that hard to use the existing laws and norms as a test bed.
But again some people don't want free speech because they are afraid their feelings may be hurt in an exchange. Mostly boils down to that.
Right to be heard implies a coercion to be heard. That’s the paradox of free speech.
Snowden chose exile over torture, and so has been separated from his family for over a decade.
Many people were tortured that didn't even work as journalists; just victims of bad metadata or the wrong name.
Many countries and organizations even consider so-called "standard practice" in American jails to constitute torture. Solitary confinement, sometimes for years. Refusal of basic medical care, nutrition, sanitation. Physical abuse from guards. Unmarked graves behind the jail [5].
Nowadays even environmental lawyers can get put in jail for the crime of winning judgments against fossil fuel companies (Donziger [6]).
* - Wasn't physically tortured, but he did reveal torture and was heavily retaliated against for his trouble.
...
0 - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/01/02/chelsea-manning-torture-...
2 - https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-dd3111dc6...
3 - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-officer-is-...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Hajj
5 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/families-in-disbelief-afte...
6 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-chevron-...
Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate, as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns and especially the potential side effects of the vaccines. Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously, but it wasn't censored. I remember several high profile articles on it.
Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
It's a google search away friend. I'll source one thing for you though, pick whatever you think is craziest.
> How is it that I was reading science papers and media reports on them daily at the time, covering all these things you claim were censored?
How would I know?
Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Pinterest, Spotify and Amazon, among many more, have admitted to removing content. Many of those cases were extremely high profile. Facebook removed and suppressed nearly 200 million posts [0], many of them true. Twitter censored scientists for saying true things that the Biden Admin didn't like, as documented in the Twitter Files (which were heavily smeared as a "nothingburger"). [1]
> Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate
It shouldn't have been. Aerosol scientists emphasized early on that respiratory activities like talking and breathing produce tiny droplets (aerosols) that can stay suspended in the air, potentially spreading the virus. This knowledge should have been applied sooner. Air purification in classrooms and nursing homes could have been a thing almost immediately, but even now it hasn't been seriously pursued. (Outside the top private schools anyway.)
> as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns
For all the debate, they still got rammed through pretty much everywhere. Since then, everything that many people had been saying came true, and now we have a generation of children that teachers are describing as "feral" with the most genuine concern.
Excess cancer deaths, widespread mental health crises, a huge transfer of wealth to the rich, economic hardship for many, a huge rise in domestic violence. The people who predicted this were smeared seven ways to Sunday, and you'd have to be in a strange bubble to have missed it. Perhaps the censorship worked after all?
> especially the potential side effects of the vaccines.
Again, this has been explicitly acknowledged as a topic which got heavily censored, by the companies that did the censoring no less. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc all did it, and all report being asked to remove things that "could be seen as" going against whatever position was du jour.
> Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
Some information moved a lot faster than other info... Because of acknowledged mass suppression and censorship.
There's no damn good reason that I and many others could take a glance through Daszak's paper and recognize it as bullshit immediately, but it took years to be acknowledged as such by media and academia.
It also took a long time for those Whatsapp chats where top scientists admit to being told to say that a lab-leak was "impossible", even though they suspected it was quite likely.
To this day, the conversation about funding GOF research has not had its time in the sun.
> The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously
Serious people took it seriously from day one. There was never a good reason not to, and many good reasons to demand an immediate investigation of WIV, GOF research in general, and the role of our own money funding the exact type of research that could create a coronavirus like this.
> I remember several high profile articles on it.
So do I, and I remember them being pretty easy to see for the hack jobs they were as well. The NYT had a genuinely good one after like a year and a half, long over due.
> Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
Again, you can name one specific thing that I have claimed and ask me to source it for you; I won't do everything. All of this is easily findable.
I didn't even get into some of the gnarlier stuff, like how all across the West nursing homes were seeded with sick patients resulting in a huge number of early deaths. That was a suppressed story you might have missed, even though there were bits and pieces of it written up. Again, there's been very little accountability for that since.
What's pure fantasy is that we had some sort of reasoned debate, followed best-practice protocols, and came to measured decisions.
* * *
0 - https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1170
1 - https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-files-platform-suppressed...
Chelsea was published on Wikileaks as well.
Daniel Hale was published on The Intercept. They faced no consequences, but they also failed to protect Hale's identity. Hale was then made into something of an example (despite many honors from people praising his bravery).
Al Jazeera (Sami al-Hajj's publisher) have been repeatedly lethally targeted lately (with US made and funded weapons) without much comment from US media.
Most of your writing is a bias filled rant, complete with misinformation (no, the consensus for science was that the lab leak was extremely unlikely, and still remains so today as far as I've seen, again, a few individual researchers thinking it likely does not make consensus).
You seem heavily invested in going against consensus and best practice, and I'm genuinely not interested in that position as I disagree with it. While things could have been better, given the circumstances the scientific community and world governments generally did a good job at protecting people.
On the topic of what should be allowed on social media, there is room for debate there, but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you. I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
You think best practices were followed? ... Really?
And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
> but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you
Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
> I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Or if there'd been any serious attempt at investigation - gathering data, scientifically.
Or if we hadn't sent millions of dollars to fund research into this exact thing, and then lied about it as the pandemic raged. That data could have been very useful for policy.
There's a lot to it, and you've shown no sign that you actually understand the arguments. It's all appeals to authorities, who have consistently shown us just how captured they can be for some time now. Think of the 2008 financial crisis, or ivy-league colleges sending riot squads on peaceful protesters, or the APA 'legitimizing' and assisting torture, or the Supreme Court tolerating obvious bribery, Congressional insider trading, etc etc.
> StackOverflow
> Twitter Community Notes
These are all examples of vertically integrated corporate-run centralized platforms and therefore have inherently unilateral centralized moderation with the same sets of legal requirements regarding alignment of policies and enforcement. They are all the same model, effectively.
> Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
Nobody. Hopefully.
There are moderation models which do not have these restrictions but they are inherently incompatible with these platforms.
The fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads/etc) is one example of a different model. I personally think it's obvious this is not a complete answer, easily observed by drama-driven defederation politics.
We need to be exploring and adopting improved moderation mechanisms and tools for networks like Nostr, BlueSky, Matrix, and keep do the same for the infrastructure layer.
Couple the recent UN convention against cybercrime[0] and the EU "SecEUrity Package"[1] with the arrest of Pavel Durov and I hope some of you reading this will wake up to the shift in relevance and urgency of the topics of decentralization and more serious use of E2EE and signatures. This includes taking a critical look at the TLS layer, PKI, and the roles of companies like CloudFlare and Akamai. I'd say a thing or two about the intertwined constriction of the financial rails, deprecation of cash, and the relevance of cryptocurrency... But let's keep that at that.
[0]: >>41211976 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un...
[1]: https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
Freedom of speech and freedom from speech are two sides of the same coin, just as freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. Moderation isn't a violation of free speech, nor is it a farce. It's free speech being exercised as it was intended.
> And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
Snake oil comment. You feel you get to be the judge of what is valid not actual consensus of experts. Nope. No thanks.
> Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
That's how it is currently. I'm not sure how you change that without going to something like communism, which surly you are not suggesting.
> Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
100% yes. State secrets exist for a reason. If you mean decisions on what information people are allowed to disseminate then still yes. There are lots of classes of information that are rightly restricted. Excluding state secrets, things like child porn and other people's personal information are good examples. If you are advocating for some sort of anarchy then go find yourself your own island to ruin please.
> Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Said like every crank with a pet theory. If you want your idea to be taken seriously it's on YOU to convince people and demonstrate evidence of them. It's not others obligation to listen to your crap, let alone fund you to "research" and spread your ideas.
Free speech doesn't require a platform to work nor any intermediary. It is a boundless idea.
Cool, ok.
"Millions upon millions of posts might have been deleted, researchers threatened, media and social media leaned on in various ways, all documented, but the consensus is accurate. Science is a popularity contest, and you're snake oil".
Sssure.
"Money is speech, and the only alternative I can imagine is communism".
Sounds like a you problem tbh. A deep one.
"State secrets can include genuinely bad stuff, so 100% of everything they censor must be bad. Go ruin an island if you want better".
Sane take bud. I actually hate improving things where my family and I live. Also my solution to scientists being censored at global scale was in fact to move to a private island and become a dictator. How did you know? So impressive.
"The lab leak theory is for cranks. If those censored, pressured and threatened scientists wanted people to see their evidence, they should have demonstrated their evidence. Also they don't have a right for their evidence to be seen, or a right to investigate for evidence."
I'm out.
It's not hard to imagine social media discussion being made a lot more meritocratic, and a lot less censorious.
Vital scientific perspectives on topics that affect literally billions of people ought not be secretly censored for political purposes by non-scientists. That isn't really a huge demand; it's pretty basic freedom and science and health stuff.
Nowhere in my comment did I claim free speech requires a platform or an intermediary, they happen to be relevant in the context of the discussion we're having, just as television would be relevant to a discussion of free speech in broadcasting. Free speech doesn't require telecommunications infrastructure, yet it still applies, and broadcasters (even of public access stations) have the right to refuse to air content they don't want to.
You're the one putting limits on free speech despite also calling it a boundless idea.
Anyway, you're entitled to yourself and W's interpretation. Me, I go with the ACLU on this one.