Censorship works both ways. When i tried speaking against violence and genocide perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine i was shut down on Linkedin.
Even here on HN, i was almost banned when i said about children abduction by Russia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005062 - the crime that half year later ICC wrote the order against Putin.
You know how this used to work in the old days? Instead of publishing allegations yourself, you would take your story to a newspaper reporter. The reporter will then do the investigations then, if there is solid evidence, the story will be published in the newspaper. At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story, and citizens know the standing of the newspaper in their community, and how much credence to give to the story, based on that. Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up. This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years. Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.
I remember a story that was investigated and then published...it was spread far and wide. The current president of the US stole the election and our biggest adversary has videos of him in compromising positions. Then debunked. (Steele dossier) https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-russiagate-...
I remember a story that was investigated and then published...for some reason it was blocked everywhere and we were not allowed to discuss the story or even link to the news article. It "has the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation."(Hunter Biden Laptop) Only to come out that it was true: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-spent-a-year-pre...
I would rather not outsource my thinking or my ability to get information to approved sources. I have had enough experience with gell-mann amnesia to realize they have little to no understanding of the situation as well. I may not be an expert in all domains but while I am still free at least I can do my best to learn.
w.r.t. the Steele Dossier, it was always from the beginning purported to be a "raw intelligence product", which is understood by everyone involved in that process to mean it is not 100% true -- the intelligence is weighted at different levels of confidence. Steele has said he believed his sources were credible, but he did not claim the dossier was 100% accurate. He weighed it at 50/50, and expected that investigators would use it as leads to verify information, not as proof in itself.
And on that point the FBI investigations didn't even start on the basis of the Steele Dossier; they started on the basis of an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who during a meeting with top Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, became alarmed when Papadopoulos mentioned that the Russian government had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton and might release it to assist the Trump campaign. Downer alerted the Australian government, who informed the FBI. The Steele Dossier was immaterial the investigation's genesis.
So any claim that the dossier as a whole has been "debunked" is not remarkable. Of course parts of it have been debunked, because it wasn't even purported to be 100% true by the author himself. It's not surprising things in it were proven false.
Moreover that also doesn't mean everything in it was not true. The central claim of the dossier -- that Donald Trump and his campaign had extensive ties to Russia, and that Russia sought to influence the 2016 U.S. election in Trump’s favor -- were proven to be true by the Muller Report Vol I and II, and the Senate Select Intel Committee Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election, Vols I - VI.
> The current president of the US stole the election
Not a claim made in the dossier.
> and our biggest adversary has videos of him in compromising positions.
This hasn't been debunked. The claim in the dossier was that Russia has videos of Trump with prostitutes peeing on a bed Obama slept in, not peeing on Trump himself. The idea that it was golden showers is a figment of the internet. Whether or not the scenario where people peed on a bed Obama slept in happened as laid out in the dossier is still unverified, but not "debunked".
It was never “debunked”, that is far too strong a word. Is it true? Who knows! Should we operate as if it was true without it being proven? Definitely not.
> Hunter’s laptop
In what way was that story buried or hidden?
It was a major news story on every news and social network for over half a year. There was only consternation about how the laptop was acquired and who or what helped with that endeavor. The “quieting” of the story is BS and only came about a long time after the fact. Biden’s people sought (unsuccessfully) to have images removed from platforms but there was never an effort to make it seem like the allegations that stemmed from the laptop were misinformation.
You are spreading misinformation. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook actively buried and hid posts related to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. We can argue about whether Facebook did the right thing based on the information they had at the time but let's be clear about the facts: the CEO literally stated that they did it, so it's not BS.
I stand by what I said and I think you are interpreting my words uncharitably in order to “win” some argument I’m not a part of.
I am not going into a semantic argument with you over whether my exact wordings match whatever you think I said.
I will however say that both theses put forth by the comment I replied to are false. If you read either article you linked they actually support my point, the Hunter Biden news was extremely widely shared on Facebook and only throttled due to suspicions on Facebook’s part that it may have been inorganic. A particular article (but not the news) was blocked on Twitter based on an existing policy, discussion was still allowed and it was definitely widely discussed and shared.
Don't take my comment as a declaration for Trump and all he stands for.
My parent had posted "You know how this used to work in the old days? Instead of publishing allegations yourself, you would take your story to a newspaper reporter. The reporter will then do the investigations then, if there is solid evidence, the story will be published in the newspaper. At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story, and citizens know the standing of the newspaper in their community, and how much credence to give to the story, based on that."
Rather than call it an argument to authority, which it is very close to, I decided to highlight two cases where this authority that we are supposed to defer to was wrong.
Perhaps a better and direct argument would be to point out that during the COVID pandemic; Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were all banning and removing posts from people who had heterodox opinions, those leading the charge with cries of "Trust the Science".
This run contrary of what science and the scientific process is, Carl Segan saying it better than I "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else."
Now that I have quoted a famous scientist in a post to help prove my point about how arguments from authority are invalid, I shall wait for the collapse of the universe upon itself.
>At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story
the newspaper company is the bottleneck that the censors can easily tighten like it was say in USSR. Or like even FCC today with the media companies like in the case of Kimmel.
Social media is our best tool so far against censorship. Even with all the censorship that we do have in social media, the information still finds a way due to the sheer scale of the Internet. That wasn't the case in the old days when for example each typewritter could be identified by unique micro-details of the shape of its characters.
>Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up.
Why to believe anything not accompanied by evidence? The problem here is with the news consumer. We teach children to not stick fingers into electricity wall socket. If a child would still stick the fingers there, are you going to hold the electric utility company responsible?
>This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years.
The same can be said about modern high density of human population, transport connections and infectious decease spreading. What you suggest is to decrease the population and confine the rest preventing any travel like in the "old days" (interesting that it took Black Death some years to spread instead of days it would have taken today, yet it still did spread around all the known world). We've just saw how it works in our times (and even if you say it worked then why aren't we still doing it today?). You can't put genie back into the bottle and stop the progress.
>Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.
Yes, good thing people didn't decided back then to charge the actual printer houses with lies present in the newspapers they printed.
I am not saying we should go back to physical newspapers printed on paper. News can be published online... but whoever is publishing it has to stand behind it, and be prepared to face lawsuits from citizens harmed by false stories. This is feasible, and it is the only solution to the current mess.
It's horrifying that anyone would believe that censorship and control over news would be a solution to anything. The naivety of your comment is in itself an indictment of our collective failure to properly educate the polity in civics.
A determined instigator could easily continue pushing modern yellow journalism with little problem under the system you propose.
They simply need choose which negative stories they print, which opinions they run. How do you frame misrepresentation vs a differing point of view? How do you call out mere emphasis on which true stories are run. Truths are still truths, right?
It's not infrequent today to see political opinions washed through language to provide reasonable deniability by those using it.
Hell, it's not infrequent to see racism, bigotry and hate wrapped up to avoid the key phrases of yesteryear, instead smuggling their foulness through carefully considered phrases, used specifically to shield those repeating them from being called out.
'No no no. Of course it doesn't mean _that_, you're imagining things and making false accusations.'
> We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years
At this stage you are clearly just trolling. Are you even aware of the last 100s of years? From Luther to Marx? You are not acting in good faith. I want nothing to do with your ahistorical worldview.
Even here on HN, i was almost banned when i said about children abduction by Russia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005062 - the crime that half year later ICC wrote the order against Putin.