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by Aeolun 515 days ago
I’ve always been in favor of censoring based on facts. It’s just a shame that one side of the political divide is a lot more prone to… completely ignore the truth. That means it looks like you’re censoring their speech, when what you are really censoring is nonsense.
1 comments
Dracophoenix 514 days ago
Who decides what a fact is and by what manner is information determined to be factual? In 2020, many major social media sites censored the New York Post's story regarding the Hunter Biden laptop scandal citing the report as political mis- or disinformation. The same laptop that many denied the very existence of became a lynchpin in securing Hunter Biden's guilt during his subsequent tax fraud case.
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cauch 514 days ago
I personally think it's a bad example: they censored this story while there were wild speculations. But at the end, it had negligible impact on the news. As soon as it appeared that the story was not a political mis/disinformation, it was not suppressed anymore.

If anything, it just shows that they are censoring based on facts: if there are established facts about Hunter Biden's laptop, then the information cannot be censored.

It is obvious to me that any brand new story is first "unestablished". They are indistinguishable from rumors. If you start choosing and picking "this story sounds nice to me, so let's not censor it even if it's not confirmed yet, this story is not confirmed yet either but let's censor it", then, it is arbitrary. The fact that a story starts as not confirmed and then turn out to be confirmed is not the proof something is wrong, on the opposite.

I think it's the problem of people who think "facts" are just "opinions" and that you can modify them as you want. They don't understand how "facts" work, and that it requires time for the confidence to grow. I also think that they sometimes get confused because they want very much to believe in some "opinions" or "fake news", but then people are saying, correctly, that this is not based on facts, so their only resort is to pretend this "opinion" or "fake news" is as factual as the other facts, but therefore it means that indeed, "facts" have no objectivity, everyone can just say "it's a fact" or "it's not a fact" based on what they want to hear.

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