[aconbere]

Wait... What's the claim you're making here?

This policy does not seem to make any statements about political slogans unless you're including within that categorization; harmful miss-information such as anti-vaccine claims and holocaust denial.

[blisterpeanuts]

They're banning objects that challenge the presidential election results, slogans like "Stop the steal".

"Harmful misinformation" is cancel culture.

[aconbere]

I think we can probably agree on appropriate limits to free speech.

Libel and slander are easy limitations for us to agree on. It seems pretty clear to me that we should offer protections to individuals on truthfulness of others speech.

What about package labeling? Company's are required to post truthful listings of their ingredients and labels if their products are shown to do harm. Is this an appropriate limitation of speech?

I suspect we could also agree that there are missinformation and disinformations that if distributed at a wide scales can also be seen go cause harm to individuals. Holocaust denial for instance is a fairly obvious rhetorical tool used to discredit the Jewish experience, promote anti-semitism, and recruit people into organizations seeking to do harm to Jewish people.

Anti Vaccine propaganda also does harm to members of our society as it reduces the efficacy of our public health programs and promotes the spread of deadly disease.

So my last question is only to ask what is the appropriate line for us as a society to draw? It appears Etsy has landed on "harmful falsehoods". This seems relatively sane to me, and I would expect most of the argument to lie in the word harmful rather than falsehood. I worry however that you're implying we might also be arguing about falsehoods.

[blisterpeanuts]

All of the examples you give are slippery slope grey zones between someone's right to express their views and something that some deem harmful to society. This is a centuries-old debate and not one that can be settled quickly and easily.

As a Jew who lost some family in the Holocaust, and whose father and his parents barely got out of eastern Europe in time, I absolutely despise those who just flatly deny historical truths like the number of people tortured and killed by the Nazis. But I'm very mixed about silencing them. Sometimes silencing people has a way of amplifying their voices ever more.

But I also despise Big Tech and Big Media for obviously pushing people to vote against Trump. There's plenty of evidence of this, ranging from suppressing and distorting his speeches to literally suppressing any good news during his tenure.

And by the way, Facebook and Youtube host thousands of Muslim "scholars" who deny or belittle the Holocaust, who accuse Jews of nasty behavior, etc. They are not suppressed or silenced. However, watchdogs like MEMRI and PalWatch that expose these louts are frequently suppressed, their material removed as "hate speech", ironically. Why? Because a cancel mob is constantly trying to take them down, for being supposedly islamophobic which is a trigger word. These same mobs seem to have no problem with the widespread belief across the Muslim world that the Holocaust was a hoax, that 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, and similar conspiracy theories.

The same entities that suppress anti-vaxers also suppressed most information about hcq. Why? Because Trump advocated it. Even a group of medical doctors, who have treated thousands of patients with hcq and seen positive results versus covid19, were silenced and their video taken down from Youtube and other mainstream outlets.

Freedom of speech is a fragile thing, easily broken. It's too bad so few young people have studied Voltaire and others who originated the concept that "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."

[aconbere]

I've read voltaire, but I've also read Rawls. And while I'm sympathetic to voultair's notion of freedom at any cost, I don't believe it holds up well to modern scrutiny.

Voultair's works predate successful democracies, large scale propaganda campaigns, and the internet. I choose these three examples because I believe these are at the heart of the current crisis.

Now I can see from your comment that you have a specific viewpoint of our current political climate. I empathise with your experience, and the feeling that the world is moving in a way that seems counter to your own understanding.

But, I worry that you are finding yourself in the position that I'm most concerned for. You are acting in a small way as a network repeater for exactly the kind of missinformation I'm worried about spreading.

And while I think a widespread doctoral conspiracy is far less likely than the possibility that HCQ is a bad drug to combat Covid-19. I'm far more concerned about the harm that we're doing to our democracy by rejecting the outcomes of what, by nearly all accounts, appears to be a successful election. One that again, for it to be a false narrative would require a huge conspiracy including members of both parties across numerous states. And it's not even so much the faith in the election but the deep resentment afterwards that scares me. How do we repair the divide in the country when truth is being questioned as subjective. What is the shared ground we work from?

[blisterpeanuts]

Well, the suppression of HCQ is absolutely an abuse of platform power.

Regarding "false narrative" of election fraud: the U.S. has had election fraud and general irregularities and inaccuracies almost from the beginning. It's only when the electorate is split this evenly and the stakes are this high that people begin to pay attention.

The voices that are being suppressed for example on Youtube are not fringe radical conspiracists; they're more mainstream conservatives (who are nonetheless tarred unfairly as "fringe"), people like Mark Dice, Anthony Brian Logan, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, and many others.

I suppose when a platform gets a billion views a day, it can afford to piss off some elements and the bottom line will not be affected. But it is creating ill will, calls for boycott, and eventually an echo chamber effect that does not bode well for dialogue and tolerance.

Look what Reddit did, for example: they shut down TheDonald which was the largest, or one of the largest, subreds with 800,000 participants. The participants dumped Reddit and forked their own reddit-like site, TheDonald.win which began small but has grown enormously.

[aconbere]

Can we just focus in on a small portion of this. Since I think we'll both die before we can convince the other of our position.

I'm not a doctor, I'm not an export, but in my searches I can find no, reputable, peer reviewed studies that support HCQ.

I can't think of any reason there would be to suppress HCQ.

I think that if HCQ was a realistic cure we would have substantial reports of it's deployment in tbe rest of the world.

This seems to me to be largely a fantasy that is being used to attempt to put some pretty paint on the current administrations failures during this pandemic.

Is there something I'm missing? Why is this abuse of platform?