[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?

[blisterpeanuts]

I don't know whether HCQ works. I've read many anecdotal reports from the field that it has had positive effects on patients. A Ford Foundation study (reputable, peer reviewed) did find positive correlations. Several other studies did not, but every one of the negative studies were flawed.

The bottom line is, if all of this discussion is suppressed, then the truth will never come out and we are in an Orwellian "1984" situation.

You have to allow expression of ideas, even when it's infuriating. "He's so obviously wrong, he is harming society with his misinformation. People could die!" It's not your place to decide this, nor is it mine. Let the ideas flow, and the good ones will eventually predominate.

[aconbere]

Last comment I swear. Let's break down the pieces.

HCQ - Discussion on HCQ are not being suppressed broadly. We are proving that right now. The drug continues to be studied, I bet we could find recent publications. What's being suppressed is the broadcasting of health missinformation on places like youtube.

If you go on YouTube and tell people that arsenic cures headaches and people subsequently dig out their rat poison and die. We would hold you accountable for that missinformation.

HCQ does not cure Covid-19 based on numerous studies. Videos and posts saying it does poses an urgent health risk to the population in at least two ways. First it's a powerful and potentially dangerous drug that people should not be administering themselves. People who seek out the drug on their own, through the grey market, or via other pathways certainly out themselves at risk. Second, it is actively disruptive to the attempts at corralling this pandemic. People who have followed this advice after infection might reasonably believe they are cured, going on to spread covid-19.

I can't figure out 1: what is the slippery slope that's being applied here? Doctors don't need youtube to figure out real cures. Scientist arent having their work suppressed. All we have is some dangerous medic advice ... Which is exactly the kind of thing youtube can and I say should consider removing. If these folks believe they have great ideas there are many journals to publish them in. Or they could attempt to convince the NIH.

Unrestricted Freedom - Your position seems to imply all freedoms are at play but I just want to make it clear that all rights imply restrictions of freedom on behalf of others to protect those rights. If I have a right to life, we restrict someone's freedom to shoot me, etc. So hopefully we can focus on unrestricted free speech.

Within free speech we have a number of restrictions at the state and federal level. Libel, slander, giving medical advice, etc. And I'll assume this is also not the argument.

Finally we have free speech on platforms like facebook, youtube, and Etsy. These are not protected in the constitution of the united states but I believe we're discussing the ethical choices these platforms make on their own behalf.

What do you currently see as tbe risk? What is the harm being done? Who is suffering from the removal of these messages?

Because I can tell you what I see on the other side, the risks to leaving them up. I outlined the harm with HCQ, that people will believe that HCQ cures covid-19, people with no medical training of their own. That this will potentially harm them and their country people. And that by pushing these conversations to happen in other domains does no harm to their merit as ideas

But I think the much bigger risk right now is that our social platforms are enabling fringe groups to form and grow like a cult. Where the folks inside start to lose perspective and the group think empowers ideas that are dangerous to our society. There is no good evidence of wide spread voter manipulation in this presidential election, HCQ does not cure covid-19. But there is a faction of the United States today getting advice from randoms on the internet, being fed lies from pod cast.

Our new social platforms seem to be enabling a wide spread cult in a way that we don't understand. Where inside the cult there's been a domain sheer from reality. I worry that like successful propaganda campaigns used on other nations this could end up radicalizing enough of our population to cause meaningful and irepareable harm to our society.

How do we respond to that?