this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
956 points (98.9% liked)
Political Memes
5506 readers
2026 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not every private company can just do anything. ITAR still applies to SpaceX, the military industrial complex still wants political control over it's suppliers, telecom corps still need to adhere to network standards, and COPPA was applied to YouTube (and they dealt with that terribly).
As much as capitalism wants to push everything as far as the system will bear, we can change that. We can say that social platforms need special care, or government officials need to be held to a higher standard. The issue at this point is political will, wich is growing in many directions at the moment.
The problem with specifically controlling speech is that we don't have any system unbiased enough to be responsible for such a broad aspect of society. Some specific cases with some general rules might be useful though, but again I don't trust our current systems to make good rules. This is all speculation on how to prevent public manipulation, and it probably won't work well when used to root it out once established.
So we're going back to silencing them, except instead of going after these people themselves you want to go after the channels they use to spread their words. This is what I meant when I said "creative limitation". Instead of treating the principle of the freedom of speech as the broad imperative protecting the spread of ideas - even ideas you don't like, especially ideas you don't like - you interpret it in a narrow technical fashion so that you can find ways around it.
Where are you getting silence from? If speaking to an entire nation is a right, why don't I have that opportunity?
Hate speech and calls for violence are already exceptions to freedom of speech. You know, things that can cause irreparable harm. Blatant lies from government officials can also cause harm, yet you would say any impairment of a politician's ability to say literally anything is "silencing them".
I fully support your right to say almost anything as a citizen, but not as a doctor, teacher, lawyer, or other professional with power. A doctor selling snake oil to their patients shouldn't be a doctor, a teacher shouldn't be preseting flat earth as the truth, a lawyer shouldn't be giving poor council for their own benefit, and a politician shouldn't be spreading egregious lies to their constituents.
The method I proposed was a response to another method (modifying freedom of speech), which I thought was better, as it could leave freedom of speech intact as is. I then immediately point out that this method would still have issues, because determining truth is hard. Passing judgment on even the most ridiculously well supported scientific facts is something basically all courts shy away from, and I don't think the currect political landscape is capable of attempting reasonably unbiased legislation something so central to our culture. I wonder if such a determination is even possible to make reasonably in the style of government we've used for the last few centuries.
Where in this do you find a will to silence people I disagree with?