I’m not saying that freedom of speech IS a bad idea, or that the government should simply censor ideas that are harmful, but the idea to just silence people for misinformation seems to be gaining traction.
To be clear: I am NOT pointing fingers and accusing any political party (including the D-Party) of being censorious, or accusing censorship and its proponents as malicious, nor saying there is a conspiracy out to promote censorship. It simply seems that, due to a surge in right-wing terror attacks and the Capitol riots, people have become more accepting of censorship, from Popper’s “intolerance of tolerance” to laws against homophobia and conspiracy theories, in search of a comfortable, safe state of society.
I also want to ask how censorship would be enforced. How would riots be dealt with? How would the police be handled? How would jails be prevented from overloading?
Also, this question is not directed at Anarchists. Some leftists don’t like censorship, and others do, and I want to ask those that do.
If this question is stupid, tell me why. I may end up seeing myself that this question is stupid, and if so, I’ll tell you.
I don’t think it is a stupid question. This is the main question, really. I don’t want any government to be the arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be censored. This is a difficult thing is, we as a species would (hopefully) want to reduce harm to others, and misinformation can cause major harm, especially to those who do not have the capacity or capability to sort through it/find good information. To be clear here, I am not for censoring misinformation, I want a better solution than that. And no, I don’t have any ideas on how to that other than to combat with good information and make the good information easier to access.
the problem with misinformation is that it takes no time to produce, but lots of time to debunk/fact check, and the debunking is working less and less
look at how people are still trying to refute the haitians eating pets bullshit…
This is true, unfortunately people also use the censorship as a line of “I’m being silenced!” And “They are suppressing the truth!”. Like I said, I don’t have a solution, I’m just not sure that censorship is even a good starting point.
The right has weaponised misinformation. It’s bitting them slowly now. But it will pick up in intensity, they are already fighting amongst themselves, and they only have themselves to blame.