Re free speech: Social media is an existential problem to our civilization. The chinese solution of mass censorship, that the west seems to be outsourcing to private corporations’ dumb algorithms, is not my preferred solution, but I honestly don’t know if it’s worse than the status quo.
The amount of misinformation I see forwarded even on my family whatsapp group is awful. Not even the older members of the family really buy it, but it definitely contributes to cynicism. Then there’s the Q horror stories, crazy conspiracy crap and so on. This is not sustainable, society can’t function with constant disruptive weaponized propaganda being thrown at us.
Maybe the Taiwan strategy of having an official government meme police that doesn’t ban fake news, but sends out official responses to it very quickly can work. Maybe not. I feel like the US government, for instance, doesn’t have the popular trust that the Taiwanese government has to pull something like this off.
I’m terrified by the idea of serious mass censorship, but misinformation is tearing apart western democracy. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, maybe us younger people are more resilient. Then again, zoomer/milennial online mobs for dubious causes spring up all the time as well. I think it’s wishful thinking for younger folk to say fake news is just a boomer problem.
Something needs to happen. The truth is not beating falsehood by a wide enough margin(or sometimes at all!). Dismissing this as just 1984 ministry of truth memes is silly. Anti-vaxx shit alone has probably killed tens of thousands of people. Stupid Q conspiracies led people to storm the capitol in the US. This is only going to get more severe as time goes on.
If we don’t want the world to adopt China’s model, we need to be very serious about creating an alternative.
Good points. I think we should compare the two worlds (China model vs. free speech wild west) more explicitly to see how they fare. My intuition right now is that I’d vastly prefer the free speech wild west to the china model, even if this gets tens of thousands of people killed on the regular because of believing stupid memes. Basically, as bad as that situation is, totalitarianism seems a lot worse… But I’m not sure.
I agree with you that social media is an existential problem to our civilization. In my mind, it is as dangerous as climate change, yet taken far less seriously.
However, I think that the west/China dichotomy is a false one—there is likely a way to evolve the (western/democratic) system as it is into one that continues to allow the free flow of information, and at the same time limits harmful information. It seems easy to discount this because social systems take much longer to develop and implement than, say, a new car design. I hope that, given how fast the Internet evolves, we won’t have to wait long for an alternative to appear though.
How many got killed after the population supported invading Iraq based on Colin Powell’s very official little lies that Iraq had WMD and was linked to 9/11? According to Wikipedia:
U.S. military deaths: 4,576
Iraq excess deaths: aournd 500,000 according to Lancet and PLOS Medicine, including at least 100,000 violent deaths
Re free speech: Social media is an existential problem to our civilization. The chinese solution of mass censorship, that the west seems to be outsourcing to private corporations’ dumb algorithms, is not my preferred solution, but I honestly don’t know if it’s worse than the status quo.
The amount of misinformation I see forwarded even on my family whatsapp group is awful. Not even the older members of the family really buy it, but it definitely contributes to cynicism. Then there’s the Q horror stories, crazy conspiracy crap and so on. This is not sustainable, society can’t function with constant disruptive weaponized propaganda being thrown at us.
Maybe the Taiwan strategy of having an official government meme police that doesn’t ban fake news, but sends out official responses to it very quickly can work. Maybe not. I feel like the US government, for instance, doesn’t have the popular trust that the Taiwanese government has to pull something like this off.
I’m terrified by the idea of serious mass censorship, but misinformation is tearing apart western democracy. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, maybe us younger people are more resilient. Then again, zoomer/milennial online mobs for dubious causes spring up all the time as well. I think it’s wishful thinking for younger folk to say fake news is just a boomer problem.
Something needs to happen. The truth is not beating falsehood by a wide enough margin(or sometimes at all!). Dismissing this as just 1984 ministry of truth memes is silly. Anti-vaxx shit alone has probably killed tens of thousands of people. Stupid Q conspiracies led people to storm the capitol in the US. This is only going to get more severe as time goes on.
If we don’t want the world to adopt China’s model, we need to be very serious about creating an alternative.
Good points. I think we should compare the two worlds (China model vs. free speech wild west) more explicitly to see how they fare. My intuition right now is that I’d vastly prefer the free speech wild west to the china model, even if this gets tens of thousands of people killed on the regular because of believing stupid memes. Basically, as bad as that situation is, totalitarianism seems a lot worse… But I’m not sure.
I agree with you that social media is an existential problem to our civilization. In my mind, it is as dangerous as climate change, yet taken far less seriously.
However, I think that the west/China dichotomy is a false one—there is likely a way to evolve the (western/democratic) system as it is into one that continues to allow the free flow of information, and at the same time limits harmful information. It seems easy to discount this because social systems take much longer to develop and implement than, say, a new car design. I hope that, given how fast the Internet evolves, we won’t have to wait long for an alternative to appear though.
How many got killed after the population supported invading Iraq based on Colin Powell’s very official little lies that Iraq had WMD and was linked to 9/11? According to Wikipedia:
U.S. military deaths: 4,576
Iraq excess deaths: aournd 500,000 according to Lancet and PLOS Medicine, including at least 100,000 violent deaths