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> Thinking that "people are easy to manipulate, thus we must prevent lies from spreading to protect society" is too paternalist and (in my limited experience) does not reflect reality If the last few years have proven anything, it's that people are far too easy to manipulate. Otherwise we wouldn't have successful political campaigns built on outright lies. I honestly don't have a solution for that - i don't think there's a way to filter information so that individuals susceptible to misinformation don't get anything but truth ( actual facts, not whoever's in charge today's version of it), but i also think that it's the only way to have a fully functional society ( i don't think that a society that believes the Nigel Farages, Marine Le Pens, Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros of the world is functional, it's really trivial to see through their shit and lies, yet far too many people don't). > You are right in that propaganda is a very powerful weapon (I openly admitted that on my previous comment) but, then again, we are all adults that should be able to navigate the ocean of misinformation to find out what is true in order to form our own opinions Ideally, yes, we should, but sadly not everybody does. > Having all the Nazi propaganda available today is an invaluable tool to prevent it from happening in the future In theory, but in practice most people have very vague notions of WW2, often with plenty of misinformation sprinkled in ( e.g. Holocaust deniers, people thinking the US won the war singlehandedly, people who deny there were collaborators, etc.). I absolutely think that had Nazi propaganda been limited, they wouldn't have gotten as successful. It took years of Nazi propaganda in people's homes for mass deportations and mass murder to become somewhat acceptable. >As you say (and this might be a bit far fetched, but bear with me) in this instance, voicing their hatred was beneficial for them, at that time, but not for "genocides in general", as now (thanks to how public their whole ideology became) we have data to fight it, were something similar to happen in the future Plenty of people have taken pages of the Nazi handbook on dehumanising, violence, exploiting democracy and freedom to sow discord, and i really don't think it has helped - if anything, the comparisons to Nazis are usually portaid as overexagerations. |
You favor limiting the spread of misinformation today to prevent major issues *now* (because, as you pointed out, it has been demonstrated that people can be manipulated).
I favor open access to all type of information (even factually incorrect one) to prevent censorship and make it impossible for any particular government or group to control what citizens have access to (who decides what is good? Maybe, in 500 years, the "world government" decides that people with green eyes must be exterminated and that any opposing voice must be silenced).
You want results "now" and I aim for results in the "next hundred years".
But I can perfectly understand your point of view as other popular questions can also be reduced to a similar disjunctive (ex: "should our generation give up some commodities to leave a better world to our grand-children?").
It's a difficult question... and I think it is safe to say that it's OK for us to agree that we disagree :)