> Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here.
Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation.
And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.
Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation.
And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.