[jollybean]

Yeah, no this is authoritarianism in action.

People are not burning down Children's hospitals, moreover, the kinds of 'misinformation' you're alluding to generally fall way, way within the boundaries of 'hate speech'.

Twitter is a private company they can mostly do what they want.

Some companies rise to the point of 'kind of public service' and therefore we might need basic regs (i.e. at least guaranteeing that Twitter act consistently within their own stated rules).

The bar for hate speech out to be very, very high.

Calls for direct violence have always been illegal.

'Disinformation' is absolutely another issue altogether. Lying about moon landing conspiracy theories is irrelevant, but lying about school shooting victims being 'actors' is something a bit different, as is lying about the effect of vaccines during a pandemic, as is lying / providing medical advice without any kind of appropriate designation. Free speeches probably don't like it but those things do have an effect, and proportionality matters: if you want to say something to your neighbour, fine, but if you're going to go in front of 400M people and broadcast it, and it causes serious harm due to direct minsinfo ... most us don't want that. I don't suggest we have the answer there but I bet if we think about it we can find a reasonable way for the insane idiots to be among each other and for them to not scream non-factual things.

[klyrs]

They aren't burning them down, no, but there's a wave of harassment and threats aimed at Children's hospitals directly in response to misinformation about transgender care. In at least one case so far, it prompted a lockdown of the targeted hospital. Hospital lockdowns carry significant risk to patients in critical condition. This is terrorism, plain and simple, and the extremists are showing increasing disregard for bystanders.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/16/gender-care...

[theprincess]

I understand why you'd worry about this, but I see no other way forward. Alex Jones' lie caused families who lost children to be harassed by the nuts to watched him. Because he had his own publishing platform it's pretty easy to convince people that what he did was wrong and that he acted irresponsibly. The problem is that in the age of social media everyone can cause the same harm that Alex Jones did without owning anything. They can just spread a hateful lie, it can go viral, and then we're left picking up the pieces as a society. You could only investigate misinformation that already went viral I suppose since then it becomes more equivalent to being like Alex Jones and Sandy Hook. I don't know. It just seems obvious that something has to give because all the free speech absolutists have no answer other than to keep burying their heads in the sand as hateful lies spread like wildfire and drive more and more people over the edge: Mosque shooter in New Zealand, Grocery Store shooter in the USA, etc....

Maybe a private/social response will prevent disaster. I'm unsure. The closest historical parallel I can think of to this is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (a popular document that helped encourage Germany to liquidate Jewish people) being printed and distributed around the USA by Henry Ford. Luckily Henry Ford didn't manage to convince the US population that Jewish people were plotting to enslave them, but the Germans weren't so lucky which is probably why they're so wary of letting it happen again.

[jollybean]

I don't think you grasp the implications of what you are suggesting.

Basically, you're suggesting that 'being wrong' about something, is effectively a crime.

That's one hell of a slippery slope.

Alex Jones has an audience of 400M people.

You and I do not.

You and I absolutely should be able to say 'Sandy Hook children were actors'.

Maybe one of us is a total idiot and actually believes that. Is that a crime?

Proportionality etc. matter.

Also - you are hugely downplaying how much censorship Twitter enacts (I'm not saying this is good or bad, but they do it).

Just like the regular police keep a lid on crime, as in, if they were to disappear all hell would instantly break lose (in Montreal the cops went on strike and immediately there were mass bank robbing etc) - Twitter keeps the total insane hate speech and death threat people off the platform.

In 2020 - the 'Protocols of the Elder's of Zion' - should be hugely and widely disseminated if it were powerful. But it's not. Why? Because we have controls. Google, Twitter etc. tamp that stuff down.

We probably need 'some' laws, but we ought to be very, very careful about it and I suggest it probably be limited to inciting violence and medical misinformation.

[michaelmrose]

There is no reason to allow you or I to say Sandy Hook Children are actors. We already have standards established in civil court to distinguish between matters of opinion, debate, lies or flagrant disregard for the truth.

We regularly punish people in civil court for lies or flagrant disregard for the truth while leaving matters of opinion lie. The system prevents abuse by requiring the substantial safeguards and standards as it well could in similar criminal actions. It only takes 1 in 12 to negate any attempt to convict and the net result is people that share blatant lies will be over time fined into silence.