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by rasengan 1570 days ago
This is how free speech dies.
4 comments

This is such an insane war on "misinformation".

I would give anything to go back to usenet and that everything would be taken with a grain of salt because it is usenet.

That is never going to happen though. We are society of automatons now who have mostly outsourced their thinking to the mob/group mind of social media.

If you read Le Bon or Freud's work on group psychology it may as well be talking about social media in 2022.

"The feelings of the group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that the group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. It goes directly to extremes, if a suspicion is expressed, it is instantly changed into an incontrovertible certainty."

With Thunderous Applause.
Free speech has nothing to do with whether a website chose to join an international sanction.

The actual censorship is Putin's 15 year punishment for news he doesn't like.

I wish enough of HN understood free speech at a level to pass a test in 8th grade that we would embarrass one another when getting things this wrong.

It really hampers our ability to function in the real world, the way we reject any constraint involving text and then say "but muh free speech"

This isn't intelligent or correct

Oh, I thought it was the blanket ban on Russian news by the EU.
That's also not censorship.

Censorship is when *an individual is told by a government that they may not publish*.

A government telling another government that they can't broadcast in the first government's space is something really quite different.

When governments + corporations team up, your lines of distinction are meaningless.
Correct. Elon Musk has said he will ignore EU law and not block Russian internet on StarLink.
It’s been less than a single ~~generation~~ human lifespan since WW2, stop pretending like our species has transcended simply because we can send some 0s and 1s across the world.

There is war. People are dying, and you’re here commenting about free speech and your lack of access to 0s and 1s.

Edit: My usage of the term “generation” was pointed out to be wrong

Um it's been four generations since WWII
2022-1945 = 77

Average lifespan in my country = 78.79 years

Seems like it’s one generation to me.

A generation is usually counted as somewhere between 20 and 25 years. As in, enough time for an infant to grow into an adult and then have their own children.
2022-1945 = 77

people give birth around age of 25

    1: the adults in 1945
    2: their babies became parents in 1970
    3: their babies became parents in 1995
    4: the babies of the parents in 1995 are now adults and are giving birth to the next generation
there have been 4 generations since ww2