[goldenbikeshed]

I don't get this. Here in Germany for example holocaust denial is illegal.

Assume you are in a country where it's not, say the USA. Assume you slowly witness a rise of naziism that as usual comes with holocaust denial. Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

What the anti-vaxxers and their misinformation are doing has lead to the absolutely unnecessary loss of thousands of lifes. Depriving them of any platform is morally imperative.

[gfodor]

You don’t have a monopoly on truth. The “anti-vaxxers” are not a monolithic group, and some people who are skeptics of consensus views on the various questions involved will probably be vindicated as other non-consensus views have been so far, which is normal in any chaotic situation where data is limited.

[LightG]

Tell that to the regularly highlighted examples of Covid-19 and/or vax deniers who end up ... dead.

Scientific, rational debate is ideal on these subjects ... but is that even possible anymore when people are jumping off the deep end so much. David Koresh would be envious.

[burnafter182]

Selection bias, plain and simple.

[Izkata]

Exactly, they have just as many examples of people who publicly say the vaccine is safe, who end up hospitalized or dead within a few weeks due to adverse reactions to the vaccine.

[machiaweliczny]

Anecdotal but I know of noone who died due to vacinne (only heard about blood clot). I also don't know of fit and < 40 years old that died although astma friend 30yo was heavily hispitalised. Heard of many older/fat people who died. Some people close to dying sypposedly got helped by Amantadine.

I took 2 shots of Moderna and I am shareholder but I still think that banning debate is stupid. I still have doctor friends who personally don't feel the risks is in vacine favor for them personally.

IMO YT should be forced to allow filering of content by each user. I hate it so much that I am served stupid crap from time to time. This would be much better that this erosion of basic rights. There should be ability to share curation algos but that's obviously against ad driven,supply driven monipolies. Fuck em.

[Loocid]

I would love to see some stats on this, because I'm very confident you couldn't find "many". There have only been 8200 deaths in the USA following a vaccine dose, and they aren't even confirmed to be caused by the vaccine. Compared to the 690k COVID deaths I think you're much, much more likely to find people that are antivax that died from COVID, than provax that died following a vaccination.

[josephcsible]

> they aren't even confirmed to be caused by the vaccine

Keep in mind this is also true of deaths following COVID. Remember this one in particular? https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycl...

[chefkoch]

Can you provide examples?

[Manuel_D]

> Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

Not me, but I could easily see it making other people suspicious. It directly plays into the anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of communications. Pass such a law and the first thing they would do is point to its passage as proof of whatever conspiracy theory they're espousing.

The correct response to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech: refute those arguing for bad policy, counterprotest those espousing hate. Imprisoning Hitler and his cronies didn't work in Germany, and far right groups like AfD still gain traction in the country.

[res0nat0r]

Eh as mentioned above, folks who already want to be convinced Bill Gates is implanting microchips in vaccines to track their movement (as they complain about this via their phone on facebook lol), aren't going to change their minds.

Deplatforming works and helps stop disinfomration. The racist Richard Spencer and the rightwing clown Milo Yiannopoulos both say they're broke and unemployed now thanks to everyone banning their racist content. These things are fine to do and work.

[mdp2021]

> Deplatforming ... helps stop disinfomration

And also confirms the scepticism of those who have grown diffident of dominant narratives.

Deplatforming can also stop information.

--

The issue is an old epistemological issue: it is the "demarcation problem". We have been there. It's not trivial.

[res0nat0r]

In this case though, vaccines save lives and aren't a different narrative, so it's fine to delete disinformation that is getting people killed.

[mdp2021]

No: the words of Halprin were not that "information will be censored that denies that «vaccines save lives»". And if such position existed, I want to hear about it: it may come from a fool, it may come from someone reliable, I cannot know in advance.

And "saving lives" must be put in context: it is a generic objective, not a justification for censorship.

[Manuel_D]

I'm very skeptical that deplatforming effectively curbs misinformation. If anything it magnifies it via the Streisand effect. It kicks off headlines, "This is the _______ that big tech doesn't want you to hear!" Focusing on individuals like Spencer and Yiannopoulos is missing the forest for a couple trees. Look at how widespread these people's ideas, as well as anti-vaccine sentiment, had become despite (and perhaps, because of) attempts to crack down on it.

[h0h0h0h0111]

A large percentage of the population believe an invisible being in the sky created the universe in 7 days, why is everyone so surprised that a percentage of the population believe Bill Gates is implanting microchips in vaccines?

[hellojesus]

There is absolutely no reason a government should make such things as denialism illegal. An act like that would certainly breed doubt immediately because the only reason to make something like that illegal IS because you're hiding something.

People are allowed to make their own choices. If they belive the holocaust isn't real, fine. When they discuss it, refute them.

In the US, the only time the line is crossed is when discussion calls for immediate and specific violence, could directly cause harm, or falls into the slanderous/libel and even that can be difficult to prove. I can see no reason for the above illegality of speech to expand.

Something like making holocaust denial illegal is borderline compelled speech. Sure, you could just not talk about the holocaust, but if you want or need to talk about it you must now espouse the official position of the government. Absolutely terrifying to think about.

[codyswann]

> the only reason to make something like that illegal IS because you're hiding something

That is the most illogical statement I've read all month.

[Koshkin]

I think they meant that the limiting of free speech often serves to suppress the public voicing of an 'inconvenient truth.'

[hellojesus]

Yes, exactly. Making something illegal is serious.

The result of making something like this illegal is: 1. Person is not allowed to talk OR 2. Person is allowed to talk but is now compelled to only espouse a message approved by the government.

Illegal speech in the US is speech which does harm or has a direct incitement to harm such as specifically calling for a violent action, shouting fire in a crowded theater, or lying about someone to harm their reputation and cause financial impact.

To make something like denialism illegal would require you to show that, by allowing someone to say it, they are causing direct and immediate harm. That's not the case here at all. Saying the holocaust didn't happen doesn't cause people to then go commit genocide. At worst it convinces people some horrific event didn't happen, but that horrific event is still horrific conceptually.

Denying vaccines work may convince people not to get them so maybe you'd argue direct harm there? But it's not clear to me how you can measure the harm since it's arguable that said unvaccinated person may get covid and be totally unphased. What about those people that got covid prior to the vaccine? How could you argue direct harm from them when they already have the antibodies sans the vaccine?

[t43562]

There's a problem and solutions with consequences. Every law limits freedom in one way or another. It's a case of how probable and sever is the problem compared to the consequences of the law.

In Germany the problem is Nazis and a choice about how to stop them doing it again. We have seen that such people can convince nearly an entire population (so the problem is likely) and start a world war (so the problem is extreme). Why would anyone debate the need for a law that limits a freedom in a case we consider pretty unworthwhile anyhow (limiting the freedom to deny the holocaust).

As for vaccines it's again a calculation where we know the problem is extreme (huge economic losses and deaths) and the likelihood increases based on how many people don't vaccinate - or whether people in specific jobs don't vaccinate. The calculation shouldn't be that hard.

[Koshkin]

> how to stop them doing it again

But the Germans are not more prone to becoming "nazis" (again) than any other nation.

[hellojesus]

Edit: now I can reply to Cody.

Cody, what other reason would exist to make denial of the holocaust or anything else illegal if not to hide something?

[QuarterReptile]

If those in the positioning of governing achieve a sufficient disdain for the governed, they convince themselves that the populace is too stupid to pursue truth. You may find this a stretch, but it's roughly consistent with calling the voting public "deplorables."

[codyswann]

I think it's already been touched on, but the reason Germany made it illegal is to prevent Nazism from happening again. The German government wasn't trying to hide anything. The German government was trying to prevent Nazi's from hiding something.

[mdp2021]

Paradoxically, but somehow yes, you should then nurture serious doubts about the situation - censorship means somewhere, something is clearly wrong. If a reaction is wildly disproportionate, you should raise suspicion. If the reason alleged for the disproportion is "what would be the reaction of people", you (though maybe not you specifically) should flee as if chased by the devil.

Your terminology is confusing: there is hesitance. The hesitant want clear, trustworthy information. Lack of clarity over the clash of what is seen and what is narrated reinforces hesitance.

The censorship of those who claim the impossible easily hits those who claim the possible, and the first can be used as a strawman against the second. This is one of the practical reasons why your «moral imperative» is invalid: these months showed that you cannot set the threshold.

[SuoDuanDao]

>Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

It would change my bayesian priors. Not enough to change my opinion entirely, but it would move me more towards the middle.

Imagine flat-earthers were suddenly banned from all public fora. Currently, I'm able to see the arguments they make, and they're decisively unconvincing. If I knew a lot of people believed something that strange but didn't know why, it would absolutely be more convincing than now, when I hear the arguments. I think the same is true of any seriously badly-reasoned belief.

[goatlover]

So you'd be more convinced there was something to flat-earth arguments if they were banned? Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that you can access? Some of which you can verify for yourself. I don't see any good reason why such views would change your bayesian priors just because something was banned. Something which I'm sure you could find elsewhere if you really were curious.

My assumption would be such views were banned (at least on certiain widely viewed platforms or in schools) because a sizable section of society thought they were not only obviously false but also promoted harmful views, like neo-nazism in the case of Holocaust denial.

Those views are so badly wrong that they're anti-science and anti-history. There's no reason to give them credence.

[datavirtue]

I'm still not convinced there are people who think the world is flat. It feels like a gaffe. Am I in denial?

[SuoDuanDao]

...I wish I knew. It's really hard to tell what other people believe at a fundamental level, and there's certainly a humorous undertone to nearly all flat-earth evangelism I've encountered. But what's telling is that I've pretended to be a flat earther myself when mocking climate sceptics. In terms of the basic trust in many other people OR basic competence in the realm of physics required not to hold a belief, climate change scepticism and round-earth scepticism actually seem fairly close to me. And I'm sure there are sincere climate sceptics.

Flat-earthism is a noncontroversial and extreme example of a belief that gets less believed when its proponents have the full benefit of free speech, but I think there are many more like it.

[leetcrew]

I mean, it certainly looks flat (or at least, not curved) to me when I look out my window ;)

it's pretty rare for an ordinary person to have the opportunity to directly observe the curvature of the earth. I personally don't notice it when I fly commercially. you can indirectly observe it with binoculars on the beach by watching ships (dis)appear over the horizon, but a) you have to recognize the implication, and b) this can be confounded by a mirage/shimmer effect.

it's not hard for me to imagine that some extremely skeptical people might doubt that the world isn't simply how it looks: flat.

[goatlover]

We have satellites imaging the Earth as they orbit it. We have astronauts on the Space Station. People fly and sail all over the world. Maps and GPS work based on the Earth's curvature. There's no conspiracy by NASA or whoever which could possibly keep the truth from hundreds of millions of people who know for fact the shape of the Earth.

[saalweachter]

> There's no conspiracy...

Just goes to show how powerful the conspiracy is.

[joecool1029]

There's a guy in my area that legally named himself Hitler and drives around in a car covered with swastikas. He's not gained any followers, just ridicule and a bunch of court orders for being shitty to his children. Nobody wants to be him.

Building the tools to better censor is a slippery slope that moves quickly from silencing extremists to silencing activists.

>Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

Pulling the h-card out as a cudgel in every single political argument has reduced people's ability to reflect or care about it. Same as the 'think of the children' arguments. It's an emotionally manipulative and dishonest debate method.

[machiaweliczny]

I watched yesterday as programmer in Belarus gets killed by having unfavorable view of government.

Please protect 2nd amendment, free speach and privacy. Also would be nice to solve internet polarisation and economics of propaganda somehow.

[angelzen]

Who is the arbiter of good / bad speech? What is the process through society figures out what speech is good and what speech is bad?

[duhast]

Level of virality and black box algorithms.

[robrenaud]

Americans tend to believe that the counter to bad speech is good speech. But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.

Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable.

America is not nearly there. Empirically, free speech has failed, as an insane fraction of American citizens are vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

[hellojesus]

Have you considered that the number of vaccine hesitant people has increased specifically as a result of the ever-increasing suppression of dissent? To me it seems like that's exactly what's happening.

The US should have handled this exactly like a sane country: - No lockdowns. You determine your individual risk level. Businesses are free to require masks if they want to. (I really would only be okay with a compelled wfh order, if possible.) The gov owes a lot of people a lot of money for compelling them not to work. The gov wouldn't owe money if consumers just stopped shopping places because they didn't feel comfortable not wearing a mask in a business that didn't require them. - Vaccines rollout is: take it if you want. We recommend it. It appears to be safe. Here is the data. If you don't want it, fine, but we are business as usual so you're accepting a higher risk.

[arcatech]

What you're proposing is really not an effective way to handle an outbreak of an airborne respiratory virus.

[gfodor]

Well, apparently, neither is what we have done. But at least in the scenario mentioned above, we don't find ourselves slipping into totalitarianism.

Perhaps there is no way, in a liberal society, to have a silver bullet? It turns out principles matter in such situations.

[tastyfreeze]

What they are proposing is how our nation is supposed to work. Everybody is responsible for assessing the risks for their self. If everybody does this then it is an effective way to handle an outbreak.

[Mountain_Skies]

>vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

This is a smear. Communities of Color are vaccine hesitant and for the most part do not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It's gross of you to ignore the legitimate concerns of Communities of Color and to declare them election conspiracy theorist. You're attempting to lump together diverse groups into a single "not like me" group for your own ideological convivence. This is disgusting.

[gfodor]

You don't even need to think the election was stolen to argue that opt-out mass mail in voting is a transparently hilariously stupid idea if you care at all about a secure chain of custody secret ballot. You know, the thing we explicitly designed elections around after realizing how important it was given widespread abuse and fraud.

Lumping all these groups of people together as was done here is a great example of the mindless zombie tribalism going on, which in large part is a result of propaganda.

There is a pretty large closure of ideas that now get you pegged as "one of the Bad People" for even stating them publicly, without strongly held support. For example, even suggesting that our election systems in the US are horribly broken or just merely flawed, a widely accepted bi-partisan position just a few short years ago, puts you into the bucket of being a "horse-paste consuming, anti-vax, insurrectionist, conspiracy monger." I wish this was a strawman, but it ain't.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable. ... Empirically, free speech has failed ..."

The problem being that democracy, even representative democracy, also only works if almost everyone is reasonable and (tying back to speech) informed. Once you give up on the population being reasonable, it's a short step to saying that someone "reasonable" ought to control what they see and rule over what they do "for their own good, of course". Even if that happens to be true, down that road lies madness.

[burnafter182]

Free speech is used as a dialectic medium to exchange information without having considerations of direct action taken against you (at least by the government). It is, effectively a deductive process. "Spreading" misinformation is not the same as discussing the obverse of the populist topic. Were you to fabricate tables, charts, and number which are used to conclude you're misinforming. This misinformation only extends in its ability to convince to the unscrupulous. Were you to, with due skepticism, promote the discussion of this data and provide an analytic outlook you're not misinforming, you're discussing, you're empirical. As an aside: if you're empirical and your opponent makes attempts to shut you up, what do you conclude? Make a tree, discuss the probabilities you assign to it.

Hilariously it seems to be that empiricism has failed. One does not generate a meaningful framework of human morality from non-transcendent scientific conclusion other than utilitarianism which in itself is conceptually flawed because each human presents hundreds or thousands of immeasurable and constantly moving targets. This is intractable. It is also why, despite the leaps and bounds in technological advancement, people still have to put in their 40 hours. It is why a CEO can rake in ~300x that of the company's average employee. It is why a large swath of the population must undergo the risks of debt peonage. It's why people feel that populist ideology should be inflicted on everyone, despite various circumstances - by the very definition a slave master relationship, the same sort of relationship virtually everyone rails against. Which brings me to the final point, I am not your property, and I suspect neither of us wants to be the property of the government or of corporations. I will assume they neither you nor they have property rights over me and thus I will consume and defer as I so please, but do go and inflict your blind ideology on to me.

[SuoDuanDao]

The other half of the population probably believes you are evidence that free speech has failed. Would you give up your own free speech to show the strength of your convictions?

More seriously, what would be your solution to a country where two major power blocs both believe that free speech is acceptable so long as it stays inside their respective overton windows?

[machiaweliczny]

It's not free speach that failed it's engagement algorithms that don't allow for negative signal to extremists.

Why there are only likes and not option of "I think this is stupid" or "I don't think it's true".

[CivBase]

When the "good speech" has devolved into dunking on people with social media posts using fax and logic, I can see why it no longer works as a counter to bad speech.

Confirmation bias is a helluva drug. It encourages people to agree with those they like and disagree with those they don't. Sometimes those biases can be overcome with time and patient reasoning but in the hyper-connected, engagement-driven world of social media that rarely happens. In-group/out-group preference kicks in and people start defending those in their group against attacks of character, lending a false sense of legitimacy to their ideas - the ideas born of confirmation bias instead of logic. At a large enough scale, this results in a social divide perpetuated by echo chambers.

[naasking]

> But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.

The problem isn't the evidence, the details of which many people wouldn't understand or care to know, it's the credibility of the people making recommendations based on that evidence, and the way they have conveyed those recommendations.

The public-facing people championing public health have long since lost credibility but they aren't being replaced in an effort to restore public trust. That's the problem.

[commandlinefan]

> Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

Well, to play devil's advocate - if it did, and anybody were to say it did, saying so out loud would also be illegal in Germany.

[QuarterReptile]

Which paves the way for the argument that many/most people also disbelieve the Holocaust, but they have to keep quiet because of the threat of government hanging over them.

[axus]

Hasn't the number of would-be holocaust deniers been increasing in Germany?

China is an example of platform-denying taken to the extreme,

[goldenbikeshed]

No it hasn't. It would perhaps have if the strategy of history falsification that the far right kept trying since about the 60ies would have worked. These laws were one factor in making sure no such history falsification took place on a broad scale.

[adolph]

There in Germany y’all do lots of stuff:

Scientologists in Germany face specific political and economic restrictions. They are barred from membership in some major political parties, and businesses and other employers use so-called "sect filters" to expose a prospective business partner's or employee's association with the organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_Germany

[amaccuish]

And that's... bad?

[ekianjo]

> Depriving them of any platform is morally imperative.

Who are you to judge what needs to be censored?

[raxxorrax]

Here in Germany we also had Blockwarts if we stick to tasteless comparisons.

[logicchains]

> I don't get this. Here in Germany for example holocaust denial is illegal.

Didn't the "Alternative For Germany" get like 10% of the vote there, and they're pretty much Nazis? Doesn't seem to be working.

[distances]

Come on now, they aren't open Nazis or holocaust denials. They're run-of-the-mill European right wing populists against immigration, EU in general, and most things progressive.

[goldenbikeshed]

They have been moving towards holocaust denial since 2015, actually.

[coding123]

We're now comparing anti-vaxxers to nazis.

[bwship]

No comorbidity has caused the life of thousands of people. Drinking slurpies and eating ding-dongs all day, the chickens have come home to roost. 80% of Covid deaths involved obese people. Stop blaming people who won't get the vaccine for the troubles. I got Covid from a friend who had the vaccine, lo and behold, we had the exact same symptoms, including losing taste, fever, cold sweats, etc., and he actually had it a little worse because he had headaches from it as well. Vaccine works, mmmhmm, ok, better get booster 3 and 4 and 5...to be sure.