An internet that puts truth before freedom will end up with neither. An internet that puts freedom before truth will end up with a great measure of both.
By martinj - found on the Hulk.
Just a couple of highlights
“…Mainstream journalists were delighted to join in with the histrionics. This was an opportunity to declare social media ‘unsafe’ and in need of the same corporate regulation they enjoyed. The real threat, of course, was never falsehood but truth, the political truths mainstream journalists must avoid. Independent outlets that genuinely speak truth to power are a huge embarrassment to corporate journalists who love to talk that talk, but whose wages compel them to avoid that walk. Here was a chance to throttle a growing threat to their professional credibility.”
" Rather than a traditional left or right-wing bias, what we are witnessing is a notion of truth and falsehood cut to suit the political tastes and business aspirations of the adjudicators. This was underlined by the suspension of the Twitter account of an odious but nonetheless elected president of the USA, at the behest of unelected corporate bureaucrats. No doubt this observation will prompt incredulous howls defending Twitter’s decision. We will be told Trump was suspended because his lies were an incitement to violence. But this response shows just how politically partisan such interventions will always be. Show me the US president who didn’t lie as a means of instigating violence. Obama in Libya? Bush Jr in Iraq? Clinton in Sudan? Bush Sr in Iraq? Reagan in Nicaragua? Carter in Guatemala? Ford in East Timor? Nixon in….where do we start!? Historical factors adjusted, would all these Presidents have had their Tweeting-rights suspended?"
" Censorship of social media is the latest in a sequence of puzzling amendments to the constitution of liberty. Much as democracy may need to be protected from excesses of democracy, ‘freedom of speech’ has now been recast as something that can only be achieved through corporate regulation of speech. This is quite a turn-around from the cold-war. Our boast then was that only Communists needed to ‘jam’ foreign radio stations. The Soviets were free to beam-back their hilarious propaganda, how could it harm us? We didn’t need sheltering. We were free thinking Westerners and that freedom gave us the acumen to tell truth from falsehood."
Telling as Martinj’s examples are, it’s really the overall thread of the post that I think is most relevant:
" Regardless of your political colours, if you care about liberty and democracy you should be concerned. The private ownership of these platforms is an irrelevance, a distraction. The town council may own the Agora but this does not give it the right to dictate the terms of the debates, not in a democracy. No one predicted that democratic discourse would drift onto platforms as fatuous in origin as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but that is what has happened. It is no longer possible to avoid these platforms and still fully participate in politics. Big-tech’s right to censor them is an afront to democracy. We need a quick reversal, starting with the withdrawal of their most pernicious power – the right to identify and censor falsehood."