It’s great to see not only this ruling but balanced reporting on it from NYT. I’m optimistic that the turn towards accepting tyranny is finally ending.
The opinion NYT is reporting on is clear that the censorship in question went beyond Covid: "Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side-effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story" ... "Individual Plaintiffs seek to express views—and have been censored for their
views—on topics well beyond COVID-19, including allegations of election fraud and the Hunter Biden laptop story."
Yet the NYT only mentions covid and the discourse on HN-- which at the moment is substantially making excuses for the administration on the basis of "but covid!"-- is worse off for it.
I’m reading it a bit differently. Yes the censorship of political speech related to political figures is bad but we’re coming out of a period where much more fundamental rights were violated due to a slightly stronger than usual respiratory virus. The seriousness of the covid reaction is an order of magnitude greater than any alleged biden corruption. Until people are ready to reevaluate what happened, we’re still in danger of a return of extreme restrictions - since there are plenty of other things that have high death rates such as cars, drugs, and obesity.
The Fifth Circuit really isn't credible currently as they just make up rules as they go along depending on if it fits the politics they like. This sums it up nicely:
> The Fifth Circuit Court has now held that it's unconstitutional for the federal govt to influence platforms' moderation decisions, while also holding it's constitutional for Texas to compel platforms to leave up content they want to take down. Impossible to square that circle.
It's as if this crazy court ruled on one hand that the USPS can't refuse to deliver your mail just because they don't like your opinions, but at the same time the court ruled that Texas is allowed to force the USPS to deliver everyone's mail regardless of their opinions?
An important thing here though is that it doesn't matter that the views the government was imposing were right or wrong. 1A prohibits the imposition.
The fact that the NYT article only touches on one point has turned the HN thread into a debate over if tweets about masking, vaccine cardiac side effects, or whatever were right or wrong.
But that's immaterial to the law here and it's important because there is clear polarization between posters on the underlying facts. But we don't have to agree on the substance of the censored speech to recognize that the state's use of coercion to suppress views it disagreed with is plainly unlawful. The 1A doesn't only apply when we agree with the speech being protected -- in fact it's most important when we don't: Speech almost everyone agrees with is going to get communicated no matter what the government does to censor it, it's unpopular views that are the most in need of 1A protection.
So I think NYT does us a disservice by falsely portraying this as being about 'covid misinformation', as it invites everyone to substitute a discussion about the states power to censor here with yet another debate on covid -- a debate itself which has been tainted by politics and censorship.
COVID matters as we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.
Objectively it is different.
Additionally you are going to have a hard time justifying that the federal government shouldn't do anything about disinformation. We cannot allow foreign adversaries to include our politics by saying "but the first amendment".
So while we cannot be too broad with our actions and any action should be carefully monitored for violation it isn't fundamental that the government cannot say "please don't give a platform to disinformation".
Generally speaking most of the things involved weren't deleted but deplatformed. Most commonly by not recommending them or adding a warning to them.
Deletion did occur but my understanding was it wasn't a significant portion of the actions taken by platforms.
> COVID matters as we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.
Don't agree at all. Especially when the very same public health "experts" proved themselves entirely incompetent fools who don't understand their own data.
What these "experts" did was absolutely insane. It blows my mind so many people went along with it with nary a hint of intellectual curiosity and still to this day defend it.
Yes mistakes were made. The mask kerfuffle was a black eye on the CDC 100%.
But calling it overall insane and pretending everyone was ignorant at the time only makes sense if you are ignoring everything that wasn't eventually confirmed true.
> ...we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.
No, "we" don't agree in the slightest. In fact, in my view, a "crisis" is exactly when government boundaries are most important and need to be strictly enforced, not relaxed, in order to prevent significant abuse.
We shouldn't allow the government to act quickly? That is nonsensical, going slower during a crisis makes zero sense.
You can argue what boundaries should be relaxed and how far to relax them but "hold the government to a tighter standard ahead of time during a crisis" is the opposite of helpful.
We normally hold the government to a strict limit due to there being no time limit.
To be fair saying "there was election fraud" is disinformation at this point, we very carefully checked and the only real problems were people following Trump's advice and voting multiple times for him (on extremely small scales that didn't matter for the overall election so not material)
There is nuance in the laptop story. There were things said that were objectively disinformation so if those things were targeted it could make sense.
Now the White House ideally would have kept and arms length to put forward a "not protecting my own" attitude but there is a wide gap between ideally and illegal coercion.
The first amendment protect the right of the people to say wrong things, not just right things. The legality of the government suppression doesn't depend on the things being said being right or not.
People who said wrong thing may have committed crimes or subjected themselves to liability for doing so-- freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. But the government doesn't get to go shutting down speech it deems wrong if it did the first amendment would have no force, because inevitably whatever is censored is viewed as "wrong" in some respect by whomever is doing the censoring.
They weren't prevented from saying wrong things or even penalized for lying.
They were deplatformed. You don't have a first amendment right to use platforms as you like and those platforms have the same first amendment right you do to decide what is brought forward as emphasized by that platform.
Should the government be allowed to influence that and in what way is an interesting question but it is less the end users rights and more the platforms rights in question here.
Getting removed from the algorithm isn't censorship.
Platforms can deplatform you, they're not beholden to the first amendment. The government cannot. The case made here is that it was the government that performed the deplatforming by coersively deputizing the platforms to act on their behalf.
It's uncontroversial that the government cannot lawfully force private parties to do what it cannot lawfully do itself. The controversy here is mostly over if the governments actions were sufficiently coercive here for this to apply.
which is a penalty for "lying" and prevents them from saying "wrong" things.
in that time What's "wrong" and what's a "lie" could change within a few weeks (do masks help? in march 2020 people were called lunatics for believing so, in October 2020 people were called lunatics for not believing so. or consider the absurd psyop about the accidental lab leak hypothesis)
The misinformation/talking-points ideology is bipartisan norm for Russia and China discourse. There are numerous articles and studies now claiming to measure disinformation purely based on alignment: rough alignment with “enemy” = dis/misinformation, with no justification or discussion.
The NYTimes ran one such article about a week ago on China. The “fact checking” done by orgs like VoxUkraine amounts to similar alignment tests as well. You would think the results showing widespread wrongthink by your own population would be an indication of disagreement rather than a disinformation campaign working on a citizenry already justifiably motivated against Russia: https://voxukraine.org/en/the-ability-of-ukrainians-to-disti...
> Research Results
> Overall, the majority of respondents, both in Ukraine and abroad, agreed with pro-Ukrainian messages and disagreed with pro-Russian ones. This indicates a general tendency of the population to distinguish Russian propaganda narratives. However, when analyzing each narrative separately, the following concerning signals were noticeable:
> 43% of respondents in Ukraine and 36% abroad disagreed with the statement “Nazi and/or neo-Nazi ideology is not widespread in Ukraine”;
> 29% of respondents in Ukraine and 35% abroad disagreed with the statement “The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2013-2014 was NOT a coup”;
> 26% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “Russia is fighting against the West/NATO in Ukraine”;
> 25% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “The West is using Ukraine for its own purposes in the war against Russia”;
> 32% of respondents abroad agreed with the statement “Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine”.
This is all to say that I think your optimism is misplaced.
> There are numerous articles and studies now claiming to measure disinformation purely based on alignment
You are phrasing this as "being on Russia's side means you believe the propaganda" as if that somehow turns it into not a disinformation campaign.
How can something be disinformation in that mindset? You eliminated the category completely.
You phrase as if it is a marginal thing showing their bias is showing at the top, but then go to list the most egregious examples of disinformation as evidence... I mean at least your last three aren't explicitly false, so not all disinformation.
Disinformation is about false statements.
Neo-Nazi ideology being in Ukraine hasn't been meaningfully backed up by Russia nor is their any international precedent for such a thing being a justification for invasion. Remember the Nazis invaded first.
Revolution of Dignity was a coup by definition. If Hong Kong declared it was independent of China it would be a coup. It doesn't matter your feelings on the treaty saying it would be X years before control was taken or anything of that nature. Unilaterally leaving a parent entity is the meaning of coup.
Proxy wars are weird so your next two questions are odd. There is ambiguity in the question. Is the West using Ukraine to reduce Russia's power acting as a sort of proxy war? Certainly but since Ukraine is objectively the defender here that doesn't seem problematic, the alternative would be to let be invaded which while bad for the West is also bad for Ukraine.
I don't have any data on suppression based on language but also don't think mistreatment justifies invasion. We have economic pain points to push instead.
A coup is a change in leadership enacted outside of the accepted legal method for that unit of governance it has nothing to do with leaving the patent unit.
Perhaps that was insufficiently clear. Every nation has an acceptable legal method for choosing new leadership
> A coup d'état, or simply a coup, is an illegal and overt attempt by the military or other government elites to unseat the incumbent leader by force. A self-coup is when a leader, having come to power through legal means, tries to stay in power through illegal means.
The proper turn when an existing power structure attempts to detach itself from its superiors is secession
> You are phrasing this as "being on Russia's side means you believe the propaganda" as if that somehow turns it into not a disinformation campaign.
> How can something be disinformation in that mindset? You eliminated the category completely.
Not at all. VoxUkraine state accurately, though as a minor point I would dispute the terminology somewhat, that there is "pro-Ukraine" and "pro-Russia" propaganda. The truth or falsehood of individual pieces of each side's propaganda is a separate matter. As an extension, it's also the case that one side's propaganda may use lies to promote statements that are nonetheless true! If you insist on the "disinformation" label, then I think we often must go into Rumsfeld-ian territory and talk of "true disinformation" and "false disinformation".
So my original point was, statements may be true/false regardless of whether they are part of an evil/enemy/exaggerating propaganda campaign (likewise, statements may be false/true regardless of whether they are part of a propaganda campaign from an ally). I openly acknowledge the propaganda campaigns. I just consider VoxUkraine to be engaging in their own propaganda campaign, and making some false statements. Russia's propaganda campaign makes laughably false statements regularly (their "denazification" justification being one of them).
On the key topic you raise of justification for the war, I want to note that that was not part of the quoted text from VoxUkraine, so I made no argument about justification. I think there was no moral justification for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, certainly none of the ones they presented. Unfortunately, I don't think that lets NATO, etc., off the hook, as you are morally responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, even if a predictable consequence is an immoral act from another party, but that is a more complicated matter.
And these questions came from VoxUkraine's polling. If you have quibbles with the phraseology, they're not with me.
I could write more to respond to your specific points, but because they seemed to mostly revolve around justification of the invasion and polling phraseology, I'll hold back for now, given my comments above. I also spent a few minutes editing this response for clarity and completeness, but am finished now.
> Unfortunately, I don't think that lets NATO, etc., off the hook, as you are morally responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, even if a predictable consequence is an immoral act from another party, but that is a more complicated matter.
Is there a "moral" act here? What should they do?
Certainly providing arms will result in loss of life but that is twisted logic IMHO.
You pointed to the phrasing as problematic so I handled why responses would be mixed. You implied that the fact different responses came in was indictive of it being a political thing.
Nothing you have said has been consistent or clarifying simply muddying the waters by misdirecting.
IIRC the story wasn't as told. Specifically while peace talks were possible the West reminded Ukraine before they began they needed to make clear that there were certain uncompromising demands.
In particular Russia had to leave Ukraine completely. Russia was not willing to put that on the table so peace talks sputtered out.
Note that this doesn't mean the West prevented peace talks. There would have been a lack of fighting for a month or two while the peace talks were going on, sure, but they wouldn't have gone anywhere.
Ukraine said from the moment the invasion slowed down at all they were only going to be willing to accept Russia leaving completely with no land left in their hands.
Russia in turn has always said they want a land bridge to the ocean at minimum.
Until one of those changed peace talks were futile.
A "moral" act by NATO, etc., before the war would have been to listen to the advance warnings and concede on some minor points like NATO membership (remember that NATO membership means eventual bases in Ukraine, and questionable status for Russia's lease on Sevastopol), making the same kind of concessions that the US demands other nations make when operating on/near its border. You don't have to like or agree with the angry 800lbs gorilla to know that you shouldn't walk right up to it.
You claimed I was defining disinformation out of existence, and I countered that it exists as part of almost all propaganda campaigns, and is such a loaded/partisan term that it is not useful, IMO. My original point was "enemy propaganda" != "disinformation" and "agreement with one element of enemy propaganda" != "victim of a disinformation campaign". I think the polling responses were mixed largely because of genuine disagreement amongst Ukrainians, who are not a political monolith.
> A "moral" act by NATO, etc., before the war would have been to listen to the advance warnings and concede on some minor points like NATO membership
NATO did that when Russia demanded that NATO not offer Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans in 2008, complying with the Russian request. Russia responded almost immediately by invading Georgia, this is also a factor in why Ukraine, even after deposing Yanukovych, did not renew its bid to join NATO until after the Russo-Ukrainian War started with the Russian invasion in 2015. To quote a famous American statesman: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice... can’t get fooled again.”
> (remember that NATO membership means eventual bases in Ukraine, and questionable status for Russia's lease on Sevastopol)
No, it doesn't mean foreign bases in Ukraine (not all NATO members have foreign bases), and Russia's invasion on 2014, largely carried out from and in violation of the agreements governing the bases it had in Ukraine, pretty much guaranteed that their use of those facilities was gone if and when Ukraine regains control of Crimea.
Russia does not get to veto NATO membership, they are not at the table.
Saying if NATO just ignored Ukraine then Russia wouldn't have invaded us ridiculous. The entire reason Russia pushed to exclude Ukraine was to allow invasion. Otherwise they would have asked for a treaty guaranteeing Ukraine wouldn't be used as a forward base instead.
Disinformation was used because in the internet age propaganda isn't direct. When a Russian controlled newspaper posts propaganda it is obvious. When a Russian controlled social media post goes viral is it propaganda in the same way?
The West hasn't tended to use as much disinformation (I won't claim they don't use it at all) mostly due to not controlling their own news sources to the same degree.
Note how OP doesn't include anything about journalism. Journalists are considered an independent group in the US and so anything too nakedly false tends to result in everyone downplaying.
You can still pull off lies, we did have quite a few pointless wars after all, but it requires more focus and effort. They didn't outright lie about the situation just bent the truth about non public information.
But I would consider the "weapons" in Iraq to be just as much disinformation if it came out during the internet era just as much as it was propaganda before.
BTW "people believe it" isn't proof of anything. A non trivial percentage of people believe the earth is flat after all.
The opinion NYT is reporting on is clear that the censorship in question went beyond Covid: "Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side-effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story" ... "Individual Plaintiffs seek to express views—and have been censored for their views—on topics well beyond COVID-19, including allegations of election fraud and the Hunter Biden laptop story."
Yet the NYT only mentions covid and the discourse on HN-- which at the moment is substantially making excuses for the administration on the basis of "but covid!"-- is worse off for it.