Skip Navigation

You're viewing part of a thread.

Show Context
69 comments

  • Oh we're 100% on the same page about books, there is no equivalent to that with the dems. But I was talking about the larger idea of censorship, not books specifically. I don't think that you can say with honesty though that specific institutions are specifically attending to drive narratives in ways that Democrats want them to. Cable media is an easy one, tech companies are another. Shadowbanning and suppression of specific topics have and are happening, and are censorship. They algorithmically and explicitely tamped down legitimate persuits like discussing lab leak, until it actually became the most feaseable beginning of COVID. They suppressed the hunter Biden bullshit (I'm not taking that on its merits, just saying it happened, and near an election).

    On another note, I'm not your enemy here. I responded to something that I thought I could add something to. You obviously did the same. We can make Lemmy a more healthy place to talk than Reddit was.

    • What lab leak?

      "our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"

      https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

      Public censorship of ideas is not evil. Never has been, never will be. Should you be able to find out about bad ideas in a library? Absolutely. Should we allow social media to amplify and legitimize those ideas? No. I want Mein Kampf freely available for people to read. I don't want Neo-nazis to be able to use online platforms to recruit vulnerable teenagers.

      https://gizmodo.com/why-censorship-is-part-of-everyday-life-section-230-1850095976

      Preventing the non-consensual sharing of nude pictures of a man on a social media platform in no way "suppressed" information about Hunter Biden. I was very well aware of the entire argument without ever being on Twitter or having those photographs shared. Twitter is not a news organization and they were right to restrict sharing of those pictures.

      I'm sorry, but you come in here parroting an awful lot of bad talking points commonly shared by people who most certainly are my enemies, however you choose to think about yourself that allows you to sleep at night. It doesn't matter how kindly you speak about it, some ideas deserve to be refuted.

      • All ideas deserve to be refuted, which is why suppression isn't the answer.

        As far as the specifics of your claims, I don't think anything has been definitively show to be true regarding the origin of COVID. The paper you linked said that the first hotspot they found were in the wet markets, assuming that's the case, it still doesn't say if it was naturally produced or as part of a "gain of function" research program that was in place at the time.

        https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/

        Check this out for a deeper dive into the intercepts work on corona virus origins. There is no smoking gun, no gotcha moment, in fact it may be a natural origin. My point wasn't that it did happen in a lab leak, but that lab leak turned out to be a viable theory of origin, in spite of how it was portrayed by officials, the media and social media.

        https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-covid-origins/index.html

        The above article is quite a different point of view from what was being said by officials earlier in the pandemic. Again my point isn't to argue lab leak, but to say that if the establishment had it's way, this question would have been wiped away and never investigated. The complexity of the issue would have been lost to the public. That seems like censorship to me. Not book burning, but still censorship.

        I 100% agree with your point about amplification though. That's a complication in the issue here because they are incentivised to push divisive, exreme views in order to drive engagement. There is a lot of discussion to be had there.

        Regarding my mention of Hunter Biden, I wasn't lamenting that images of him were removed from social media. That's just basic cleaning up of feeds that needs to happen. I mean the fact that despite being verified by the FBI it was treated as bearing all of the hallmarks of Russian mis-information at the behest of other law enforcement agencies. It was then suppressed.

        I don't know. You can assume that I'm parroting in bad faith if you want, but I hope you don't.

        • All ideas deserve to be refuted

          This kind of uncritical placing of all ideas on the same footing, deserving of the same treatment is not enlightenment.

          • Isn't the process of refuting something properly by definition critical rather than uncritical? Not all ideas are equal by a long shot, I'm just saying someone shouldn't decide for us which ones we can engage with.

            • No individual human being has infinite time to dedicate to sifting through every insane conspiracy theory and terrible political theory that has ever been thunk. We, as a species, need to decide what we should and should not spend our limited time engaging with. Sometimes, that means listening to experts who have taken the time to study the subject in more detail than we will ever have time in our lives, and trusting their word on the matter.

              For example, no one feels like they have to waste public time refuting the existence of aether (yet, anyway, though I'm sure the flat earthers will get around to it.) For another example, smart people who study history for a living identify several of key characteristics common to fascist political parties that look suuuuuper familiar to anyone looking at the modern day Republican party in the US.

              We do not have infinite resources. Infinite time, infinite brain power, infinite public discourse. Just as it is widely recognized that it's fine to limit discussions of pro-anorexia groups for the public good, so too is it fine to limit the reach of harmful ideas like vaccine conspiracy theories, Neo-nazi recruitment of young people, whether or not people with this characteristic or that characteristic have equal rights and deserve life and freedom, climate change "debate"...

              And some "ideas" that might not seem that harmful on their face should be suppressed when it is clear they are being deliberately used to lead people down paths toward much more harmful ideas for the profit of grifters. (Like Qanon and the Alt-Right YouTube pipeline)

              It is ok for us to moderate what is said in public. We have always done this because it is necessary to a functioning, healthy society.

              • Yeah, this argument is getting at what's underlying my concern I think. There is a huge vacuum of trustworthy authority right now. It seems like institutions have been lighting themselves on fire left and right. This may be a problem that simply comes from the existence of the internet. 50 years ago everyone just trusted that Walter Cronkite was telling them the truth every evening, he was a big arbiter, likely because they didn't have any other sources of information the internet makes available. He may have been acting in good faith, he may have been parroting defense department talking points, who knows. Now we have a website to cater to every intellectual pretaliction. That isn't helpful to find definitive truth. Add to that, over and over we've found existing authorities to be completely self serving (e.g. the government lying about WMD in Iraq, CDC obfuscating it's funding of gain of function research early in the pandemic, recent revelations of perhaps long running corruption concern in the supreme court). Maybe that's because they've gotten worse, maybe they've always been like that and we didn't have enough information to notice it. So, like you said, all of this is happening and we no longer have arbiters to sift out this wheat from the chaff as it were. That's a huge problem.

                So what's the solution? I certainly don't want Republicans to be removing books from their shelves because they deem them "harmful to the children" or whatever the fuck. But at the same time, I don't want self serving billionaires (the shitshow that twitter has become) or newly revealed corrupt institutions making those decisions for me either. So what's the solution?

                I think right now it's basically an unsolved problem, with all of us just floating around to the sources that suit us best, allowing for the divides between us to absolutely explode in breadth and width (I have family that has strait faced told me that COVID was created and released on purpose to kill Republicans...shit like that). I know that I've struggled with who to "trust" consciously. And maybe that's the real difference between our perspectives is just that. Maybe that's what this all comes down to is that you don't trust American right wing institutions (rightfully) and I've lost faith in all of them. I don't know what the move is, but we need to figure something out fast.

        • The irony of linking to The Intercept in a post talking about what an idiot Greenwald is...

69 comments