Something i rarely see come up: misinformation is itself an assault on free speech. You are confusing the minds of people who have a right to the truth and therefore the freedom to express themselves. If someone believes a lie that was told to them, their thoughts aren't really their own. They were manufactured by a people whose goal was to gain something out of their ignorance. By contrast, if you were told the truth, you actually have the axiomatic foundations necessary to produce unique thought.
Your right to spread misinformation cannot be justified on the grounds of free speech.
That is impossible to police. The topic is Freedom of Speech. You need to ban these topics or there will always be battles, as there should be.
Greatgirl also makes an important point. It also appears she only made this point once, here, and has no other "violations". The comment wasn't provoking or ill-meaning. It most certainly did not "trample curiosity".
Ah. In Russia there is a `fake news' law. They just put label `fake news' on anything they don't like, and censor it. Glad to know that Russia has free speech.
As other comment rightly pointed out, your implication requires censor.
Also it implies that misinformation is decidable, i.e. there is a strictly objective rigid method of telling what it The Truth™ everybody agreed upon. Could you show me such a decision procedure?
...and none of which produce irrefutable dogmas or relies on censure to validate itself. In fact it's the opposite: the scientific method, reason and philosophy relies on the availability of stupid ideas to reinforce the "truth" of the non-stupid ones.
my standard approach is to follow the old, standard
"The burden of proof is on the proposer."
Or, it is not up to me to try to debunk such a claim. And I'm not obligated either to debunk the claim or accept it.
So I want to discard essentially all claims that don't come with solid information, the "proof".
Right, such proof can be good stuff in pure math and in parts of mathematical physics but less good elsewhere.
If there is a claim such as
The tap water is toxic.
as long as we have sources of safe water, we might make a decision to avoid the tap water and go with the safe water until we have more evidence about the tap water.
And that is where it seems we are stuck on practical decision methodology and procedures.
Yeah, but what's a proof? What if Putin try to poison Navalny (as he did), but will deny it? Everybody believes that, but there is no proof that he is in charge.
Does it mean that this is misinformation until proven otherwise, and Russian censorship is justified?
Your example appears to be similar to my example of the tap water: In a case of a threat but without proof, we may make a decision that will help us be safe.
Otherwise, in a case without threat, we are reluctant to devote the resources to develop a proof and just ignore the claim that has no proof.
> Show me a rigid decision procedure proving it right or misinformation.
You and another commenter missed a crucial part of my sentence: dialectics.
The method of isolating the contradictions of a system so as to arrive at the best possible answer. No one said there is a quick formula for this, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
Dialectics is a good method for two people who want to uncover the truth of a situation, but judging when two people are engaging in dialectics is subjective so it isn't a suitable tool for politics in the way free speech is.
It is much easier to tell if someone is free to say what they think than it is to tell if they are properly employing dialectic techniques.
> No one said there is a quick formula for this, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
If you can't tell truth from lies how are you sure something is misinformation?
What's the point of the term misinformation then? Most people agree upon the shape of earth anyway, but questionable topics are questionable due to, you know, lack of persuading argument which would persuade the bulk of people.
There's a wealth of information on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. They literally publish the data, the analysis, the follow-up, for a great many vaccines. There exists no technology to add tracking equipment into a vaccine because of the size, power, and transmission requirements.
5G cannot cause infection by the coronavirus because it is merely a non-ionising radiation. It is a waveform of specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum and cannot carry viral nanoparticles through the airwaves, penetrating the skin, and infecting the body.
I won't even bother to debunk flat Earth or Moon landing hoaxes because they're beneath me.
Your argument is in bad faith as you've either read none of the disinformation that is perpetrated or you're pretending that most of the claims are verifiably, irrefutably incorrect.
You know, this infallible social institution which never pushed society towards cringeworthy ideas, which never revised previous theories (wiki has a whole article on superseded theories). And who said reproducibility crisis? It doesn't exist, science is perfect, ergo we know.
Like when Swedes practised eugenics and sterilised innocent people, that was just a bad science, yeap. Hopefully today we have perfect science so this couldn't happen.
Not to mention that science is not applicable to everything, most questionable questions are not scientific, hence I don't know who is arguing "in bad faith" by cherry-picking grotesque examples.
> Your argument is in bad faith as you've either read none of the disinformation
No, your arguments are completely orthogonal to what I said.
You are saying that some people tell lies.
I'm saying that there is no objective decision procedure which tells truth from lies.
If you don't see the difference, it means you are too dumb for me to continue this argument "in bad faith".
Why is moon landing hoax less admirable? The US, a large wealthy government, was in a cold war with Russia at the time. It would seem to mean the US had the means, and the motivation to fake a moon landing.
But for actual evidence that it's true (supporting the claim that it's true) - I don't see as much evidence that it's false (supporting the claim that it might be true).
Would "lots of people would need to be involved" the only rebuttal in that case?
you didn't reply with a procedure. You cherry picked one example, and argued one point.
So other than making proactivesvcs the arbitrator of misinformation, what process do suggest to replace the status quo?
I would describe the status quo as: everyone is allowed to publish information unrestricted. everyone else can review any information and either ignores it or amplifies it.
The more people who have critical reasoning skills, the better the system works.
> Your right to spread misinformation cannot be justified on the grounds of free speech.
My response has long been that from the media, etc., I want solid
information, up to, say, at least common high school term paper writing standards with complete quotes, with context, with credible references to objective, original sources. Then I want the author to have a long established solid reputation.
In practice, that approach does not work very well. First, nearly nothing in the media meets such standards. Second, even with the high school standards, it is still too easy to manipulate, deceive, or lie to an audience.
My view of deception in politics is that it stands on a foundation of the audience wanting only headlines or very short articles. Then, writing deceptive material is easy.
It would appear, then, that at least for now, stopping the deception in politics would be easy since the deception depends on just no more than short news articles and, thus, should be easy to debunk for the fraction of the audience willing to read some material a little longer and more complete. At this point, until the means of deception react, there may be some potential via such longer materials.
And if found to have published misinformation, if one does not publish a retraction that is at least as prominent as the falsehood, one should suffer punitive consequences and be prohibited from being employed or contracted in any media organisation.
The devil is in the detail here, though. Who is going to decide what is misinformation and not? In all practical cases it would seem to be that this person and/or organization is soon going to be a censor. Also, truth is not quite enough to decide what is true, weirdly enough. There is a gazillion facts in the world and just by selecting a subset of these one can paint a rather different picture. Everybody has their own subset. Then there is the matter where facts end and interpretation begins. This line is never 100% clear. One could also philosophically argue that every fact is at leas partially interpretation. If I have noticed a subset of the gazillion facts and drawn a conclusion from that but you have noticed a different but potentially overlapping subset you might well draw the opposite conclusion and then start asserting that I am spreading misinformation. Also, it is quite possible to draw a different conclusion from the same fact when one has different basic views. In practice this is not possible in any practical way.
It seem to me the main problem are that there are things like troll factories and also that everybody is just getting information from their own bubble. The latter could maybe be addressed in a small way if we forbid these big companies to spy on people so much. For the first problem I just do not see a solution. Maybe the only thing that can be done is waiting until peoples BS-detectors have calibrated themselves somewhat to the new online world that we are living in. Which may or may not happen.....
> The devil is in the detail here, though. Who is going to decide what is misinformation and not?
I think that it is separate question - should the government have power to censor misinformation? Is it good or bad for this company to censor that misinformation?
However, that does not mean that misinformation campaign itself can not be considered "an assault on free speech" or whatever else.
First, I quoted someone upthread who set the term. Second, in contemporary English, the word assault is used figuratively in the meaning of "attack" including "verbal attack".
It does not require the prohibition to happen. It does not have to succeed either.
We only have a whole system of evidence-finding and scientific discovery to solve that question, but ok, let's ignore all progress of the last 200 years.
If you want to deprive people of their right to free speech, you'll have to do it through the courts. Saying that human judges won't be necessary because you'll 'use science' is inane.
Philosophy, logic and science are all applied by persons and the results tend to vary depending on who is applying it. I suppose logic could be a bit more on the objective impersonal side of things but philosophy and science are definitely not. That is, only if logic is actually logic in the sense of logic. If one start talking about tings like 'logical falacies' (e.g. ad homininem, argument from authority and so on) as often is done on forums like these one is already very far from anything objective. For one thing, one is probably inclined to be much more severe in pointing out 'logical falacies' in statements that one disagrees with rather than in statement that one agrees with.
This is implying there is always a Right™ answer or way to do something - especially when it comes to policy, for example, there's plenty of space for nuance that has no objective right or wrong. Life isn't math, regardless of how much our polarised world wants it to be so
Your assertion falls apart when I ask you if there is a Right™ answer to "Is the Earth flat?".
There are irrefutable answers to some questions. Others are backed up by a mountain of reproducaeble data, collected and re-checked over years, decades, by many people who go out of their way to disprove their own hypothesis and wriggle out of their own data. When they cannot reasonably do so, we are left with a fact.
Most of them are not perfect, immutable or immortal, but even if not, no rational person can accuse them of being wrong.
> Your assertion falls apart when I ask you if there is a Right™ answer to "Is the Earth flat?".
No it doesn't, I didn't claim there are no issues or questions where we know the answer. The empirical kind, like the one you present, are a good example for that. But policy isn't about whether the Earth is flat or whether climate change is real, but about how to tackle them in the best way possible, which depends on what you value.
> There are irrefutable answers to some questions.
I didn't claim that wasn't the case, though you can continue with your strawman if you'd like.
> Most of them are not perfect, immutable or immortal, but even if not, no rational person can accuse them of being wrong.
So what happens if we have multiple theories that no one can accuse of being wrong because we simply don't have enough insight into some very complicated matters? Which one do we put in practice? Or do we wait years before we gather the data for it, by which time it might be irrelevant anyway
> But policy isn't about whether the Earth is flat or whether climate change is real, but about how to tackle them in the best way possible, which depends on what you value.
I think the US is somewhat special at the moment in that it appears to have two dominant political factions which seem to be almost polar opposites in their goals and values. This is not the normal state of things in policymaking in this extreme form.
Also note that values are not as arbitrary as you make them out to. A large part of the history of civilization was in some way about determine which values are good ones to have and which aren't.
One standard which we honour today are the human rights.
Of course you can have a value system which rejects basic human rights, but then I don't see a lot of reason to respect people following that value system or make accomodations for them.
"This is implying there is always a Right™ answer or way to do something" suggests to me that you assert there is not a right answer when there certainly are in some cases. I definitely agree that some policies require nuance and changes with new data.
> So what happens if we have multiple theories that no one can accuse of being wrong because we simply don't have enough insight into some very complicated matters? Which one do we put in practice? Or do we wait years before we gather the data for it, by which time it might be irrelevant anyway
I wasn't addressing your statement that policy is often difficult to pin down, only the inference that there are no right answers.
We have been attempting our best to come towards the most correct answers for everything, since forever. To suggest all of a sudden that this method is irrelevant is odd. It is to suggest that we should no longer pursue truth and instead lay everything on the table and say it's all correct and you should just pick whatever makes you feel the best.
We can't pursue Truth where there is no objective Truth to be pursued, we have to figure out what a good course of action is right now, without spending centuries to solve a problem that destroys society tomorrow.
I wasn't really talking about free speech in particular, though it applies there as well. Is there a general consensus in philosophy on what The Truth About Free Speech is? Where the limits *need* to be? How to implement it in the context of large social media corporations?
There isn't some grand set of values that everyone has to agree with, btw, unless you're willing to sacrifice everyone else's mental frameworks and perspectives (which might be a sacrifice you're willing to take, but I guess not everyone is so keen on :) )
No single person, group or authority. It is an ongoing determination by many people from a host of backgrounds, biases and intentions who still all agree on what is reasonable and what is not. It is determined by merely asking oneself "do I have doubt that is logical, fair and as unbiased as possible?". Gather enough of these people - from as wide a field as possible - and you have reason.
> it is an ongoing determination by many people from a host of backgrounds, biases and intentions who still all agree on what is reasonable and what is not.
Dialectics. Immanent critique. The method of isolating the contradictions of a system so as to arrive at the best possible answer. No one said there is a quick formula for this, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
And it's humans who decide what "science" is based on their incorrect p value selection and corruption and mishandling of statistics even if they mean good.
Irrelevant. Misinformation is information that is known to be false by the spreader. They can not make the argument that they honestly thought it to be true.
That's a special case that we can discuss when necessary.
I think it's useful enough for practical purposes that we can clearly classify something as misinformation where the spreader knew what they were doing.
Yes, but much is created by bad actors knowingly spreading misinformation so it will go viral. I do not fault those who do not know better but I fault those who do or should by the result of their position. All leaders and candidates have an obligation to check there information. All purported news agencies or pundits as well. There is a different burden depending on audience an reasonable affect.
Since you seem to be splitting hairs: if I think the Earth is flat and I tell people this, my belief makes no difference to whether it is misinformation or not.
My belief means that it is a falsehood rather than a lie.
The original post discusses harm as a boundary condition.
Things like libel, slander, false statements of fact, false advertising, etc have long been considered beneficial as a limitation on free speech (e.g., not protected by the First Amendment)
The term "misinformation" contains an argument that there is a broader set of statements (not yet considered libelous or false in the eyes of the law), which should be regulated by an appointed group or new set of laws.
The backlash is against this new zeitgeist: a campaign against misinformation is certainly one that dials back the liberal view on freedom of speech, more so than the current boundary conditions already established.
You seem to assume misinformation is perpetrated with cynical malicious intent. Misinformation may also be the result of people earnestly being misinformed or generally just ignorant.
> misinformation is itself an assault on free speech.
Misinformation is a type of free speech. Whether purposeful (medical experts lying as to whether we should wear masks) or accidental (weather forecasting,) misinformation is merely a facet of freedom, to use wisely or not. Some instances are made illegal (e.g. in a stock exchange,) whereas most instances are seen as harmless (Santa Claus) or used to prevent greater harm (this shot will only hurt a little, Louise.) What's healthy is to reserve a bit of skepticism towards the information you get till you can confirm it is 'truthful' or not.
> You are confusing the minds of people who have a right to the truth and therefore the freedom to express themselves.
That is a most silly argument.
One does not loose any freedom to express oneself if one believe in a falsehood, for if that were true, no man would enjoy any such freedom as all believe at least some falsehoods.
I'd argue that if you have been misled then you have not formed an opinion: you have been tricked into accepting someone else's opinion. I do not think that a delusion is truly an opinion.
Perhaps, but how does that limit one's freedom to express one's opinion? It only limits one's power, not freedom in forming it.
Having the freedom and the power to do things are two entirely different things. A mute and deaf man is considerably hampered in the power to express his opinion, but not in his freedom to.
Similarly, freedom to own property is an entirely different matter to whether a citizen have the capital to purchase it.
Ah, I did not put across my point very clearly. I was not trying to imply that believing in a falsehood should mean one should be prohibited from speaking it (with exceptions). I meant an opinion born from manipulation is not truly one's own, and to express it is not expressing one's own opinion, rather someone else's.
If you only believed lies, your thoughts can never truly be free. However if you believe some truths, your thoughts as expressed and built on top of those truths are free, whereas those built on top of lies are not. Freedom here means freedom of expression. You can still tell lies, but you will never truly be free to produce confident thought because your mind is trapped in a prison of delusion.
No. I'm fine with someone orating their opinions. Blogging about them, writing to newspapers with them. What should not be allowed is that they are framed as factual statements, repeated by those in public offices or used to make policy.
This. We should call this "fake speech". American absurdism is rooted in fake speech with the intent to cheat and steal. It's perfectly permisible for politicians, businesses, and even individuals to say whatever they need to say to get what is not rightfully theirs. And they all get away with it, because the law hasn't caught up with fake speech yet.
Why did this happen? Because they intended to. But the law only punishes what they did, and provides loopholes for not ever admitting intent, so long as they lie about it. That lie is the true crime. That lie is profitable.
Irnonically, in modern America, it takes a fake news show to be honest about the news, and a comedian to be honest about modern culture. That's also absurd. Hilarious, but absurd.
"When telling the truth, if you don't make them laugh, they will kill you."
Your right to spread misinformation cannot be justified on the grounds of free speech.