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by theprincess
1347 days ago
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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. |
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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.