On August 11th, 1911, during a performance at Pennsylvania’s Canonsburg Opera House, a member of the audience misinterpreted a flash from a malfunctioning projector and shouted "Fire!" in the crowded theatre. Twenty-six people died in the resulting stampede.
Very good article, Steve. I have struggled with articulating arguments about censorship vs free speech. How and draw the line between allowing Free Speech and suppressing dangerous propaganda and disinformation. What clear guidelines/tests can be used, and more importantly, how to enforce.
The violence and disruption caused by the very deliberate lies from Trump and Vance about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield is just one example.
FEMA had diverted some of its funding to support of immigrants before the hurricane and now there is a shortfall, so we have the most common falsehood, the half truth.
If you are already inclined to believe that the Democrat Party is as crooked as a dog's hind leg it will be easy for that bias to let you accept the idea that FEMA is purposefully slow to have recovery that includes access to the poles for an election in a state that voted red in the last three elections. Of course that ignores the fact that the magnitude of the disaster makes quick recovery impossible and it takes no grand conspiracy to cause what is happening. Are the actual cases of non governmental help being turned away overzealous police and fire chiefs or grand conspiracy? Confirmation bias provides the answer. That is why disinformation, both official and unofficial, is so effective and people of course believe that their beliefs are the gold standard for truth.
This is the wrong pairing. Censorship is a bogeyman, the suppression of valid ideas and a tertiary considering in this matter.
The contrast that matters is not speech vs. censorship, it's speech vs. falsehood. The new tolerance for lying is the issue, promoted by that most soft-headed of arguments:
"If Trump wins the election, do you really want him deciding what you're allowed to say?"
The article isn't about anybody deciding what you can say. It's about deciding what's true. Shouldn't we all be interested in that?
I want as much true information out there as possible and as little false information out there as possible and the knee-jerk reaction always seems to be that it's impossible to figure out what's true or that there's no such thing as objectively dangerous speech designed to incite hatred or violence.
Like, just as an example, do you have a problem with a 200 million follower account boosting antisemitic conspiracy theories? Do you see how that's dangerous? Do you think it's possible to design policies that limit the ability of very large accounts to do things like that without somebody else deciding what you can say?
Many of these accounts have far bigger audiences than news organisation, which we DO regulate. Why does it concern you that we regulate these accounts too?
Yeah, I wasn't really arguing with you, Steve QJ, because I honestly don't know how I feel about a lot of your article. I love the idea of not letting people be intentionally dishonest, and I agree that there should be consequences if your lies hurt people. But in a day and age when people talk about "my truth" without batting an eye, and seeing how no one seems to be able to agree on anything (like something as simple as if masking is effective), I really don't see how we regulate any of this. So it's not that I disagree, exactly, I just don't know how anyone could set this up in a way that everyone could agree to. Chris Fox's comment (below) that who gets to decide is an evasion does not ring true to me. In fact, it feels to me like he's the one evading the point...?
(I have to say that I really appreciated you debunking the lie about not being able to yell "fire" in a crowded theater-- the persistence of that one has been driving me bonkers!)
I believe that the promotion of truth is a responsibility far outweighing any fanciful right to promote falsehood.
In my youth, I was much more passionate about free speech (FS) though never an absolutist. I was more tolerant of the "accidental falsehood" than I am now, but that is entirely over. I now believe that deliberate falsehood such as Trump commits every day deserves prison time and in cases where it inevitably leads to murder, to execution. I think the infanticide-as-abortion falsehood merits Nevada Gas. It doesn't happen and to say it does is so certain to incite murderous passion that the lie deserves extreme punishment.
The FS phrase has been separated from its origin, which was to allow criticism of powerful people and of government without arrest and a charge of sedition. That's all it meant. It was not protection for incitement nor deliberate commercial or political falsehood.
The idea that it protected murderous irresponsibility like inciting people to trample each other to death is unworthy of discussion.
I want the right to criticize political positions without awakening to cops around my bed. But I also want people who say that immigrants are stealing pets to stand trial and spend years in jail.
Sorry, but this just popped up. From FOX but it's right on time for this article. Moderate (censor) or loose "total control." Sometimes when people tell you the truth about themselves and agendas you should believe them. That damned first Amendment, Congress shall pass no law...
I agree with her about taking the phones out of schools. It did me no harm to not have that distraction in school. Force social media to censor what the government doesn't like? Total control she says. The founders foresaw her when they added the 1st Amendment.
This is difficult subject. I'll relate it to my days working in the field of electronic warfare. There are noise jammers that drown out or distort the victim signal. It is a form of censorship. There are also deception mode jammers. They start with a signal that is seemingly legitimate before if pulls of your lock with a false signal. It is a form of false news. Our problem is finding truth in a world of noise and deception. We can only turn to discernment, and it has its built-in jammer, confirmation bias. It affects us all and only fools deny it.
Borrowing from thoughts from China, the official press is the running dog lackies hoping to be tossed scraps of meat from those in charge. I'll limit my reason for finding the official press untrustworthy to three.
1. My government told me that the communist North Vietnamese attacked our Navy ship. Nobody can do that, except on nearly the day I enlisted in the Marines, Israel attacked the USS Liberty. The Gulf of Tonkin incident probably was a lie and the attack on the USS Liberty was explained away as an accident (pure bullshit). But as a patriotic young man I went to the other side of the world to kill communists based upon the words of my government.
2. Some of my training as a Marine was about "venereal disease" where we saw films that showed the penises of black men rotting off from syphilis. The Tuskegee Syphilis study where these men were told they were receiving treatment. Horrific injustice.
3. Years later when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force in the Electronic Test Environment my job was analyzing jamming. Between missions I was listening to the Voice of America. It was broadcasting a speach in the UN Security Council that was making America look bad. The signal seemed to fade but my spectrum analyzer displayed a strong signal way above the grass. The noise was modulated in at the source. I checked across the band and every VOA signal sounded like it was in a fade. The VOA jammed itself until the speech ended.
I said that I would stop at three. The list of reasons to not automatically trust the official press is longer.
At the other extreme there are the detractors of government stories. A mix of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones types. A blend of truth and lies no better or worse than governments. One difference is that it is OK for governments to turn young men into killers but it's not for others.
All of that to reach this thought. When you hear the words disinformation and debunked do you ask yourself, is that true? The answer to our conclusion is highly biased by our existing beliefs. No matter how hard we may try, no one is exempt. My bud Chris objects to the question, "Who decides?" but it is fair to ask, is there any reason to assume that the government is a reliable decider of what we should hear? I find none. I'm not an anarchist, but relying upon government is walking with a tiger. I long for a world of truth, but it makes me sound like a Miss Universe Pageant contestant to say it because it is a dream that starts in a brass bowl pipe.
"A mix of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones types."
I really don't understand why you put these four men in the same category. Or maybe you weren't trying to equate them. Either way, these people are wildly different and represent completely different parts of the free speech conundrum.
As for whether I ask myself whether "disinformation" or "debunked" claims are being accurately described, of course I do. Without wishing to toot my own horn, I think I do this far more carefully than average because I often use the information I consume to write articles, which means I'm more motivated than average to get the details correct. And also means I'm painfully aware of how much sloppy and/or dishonest reporting there is out there.
The problem is that a growing number of people on the left and the right are happy to describe information as "debunked" or "disinformation" simply because they dislike it. And they demand almost no standard of evidence beyond "the people on my side are saying it."
This has led to a discursive environment where we almost literally can't talk about anything. And that, in turn, means we can't solve any problems.
Immigration, election security, COVID, climate change, racism, trans inclusion, Israel Palestine, you name it, it is almost impossible to find any consensus on any of the issues that we face. Some people, again, on the left and the right, seem to have given up on the notion of truth entirely. And while I'm much more tolerant than Chris of questions like "Who gets to decide," I agree with him that this question is almost always just used as a minimally thought out distraction. In almost all cases, anybody with a functioning brain and a willingness to look at the evidence can agree on what's true.
There is, in fact, such a thing as the truth. There is such a thing as objective reality. There is such a thing as a lie.
It's so weird to me that some people don't grasp how dangerous it is to cede these points. It's exactly the same mistake that "woke" people make about "lived experience" and "truth" just being a form of "power."
Yes, there are also lots of areas that are just matters of opinion. But a world where we pretend that 2+2 = 5 is just a matter of opinion or whether vaccines work in general is just a matter of opinion or whether a former president who spent four years undermining faith in democracy, never producing a shred of evidence, and then admitting that he'd been lying all along, did anything wrong is just a matter of opinion, will very obviously collapse under the weight of its own stupidit.
The four that I mentioned are obviously not the same but the association is that they are critics of government, its secrets and lies to the public (sometimes accurate). Just as I think it is foolish to accept an accusation of disinformation because of who said it, it is also foolish to dismiss it on those grounds.
I'm certain that you know that I'm certain that you consider things carefully and take a nuanced view of things. As I wrote, I am not an anarchist but without regard to political tilt, I also see government as an entity that often puts out disinformation and does not always act in the public interest. Humans are quite good at rationalizing bullshit when it suits their purpose while believing that that is not what they are doing.
I am more biased toward the idea of incompetence or denied bias than grand conspiracy, but conspiracies do exist, it's even a crime when combined with conspiracy to commit a crime.
Political parties (plural) are not above dirty tricks and lies from government are sometimes associated with partisan politics. And sometimes disinformation is to protect legitimate classified secrets. On two occasions when I asked the right people about documents that seemed technically incorrect I heard the words, "You found it. It's like that because..." I had no trouble supporting the disinformation when I knew why it existed, but it was non political.
In other comments I pointed out that Whitehouse claims of disinformation might also be disinformation. Does that mean it is to hide political conspiracy or an attempt to deny human incompetence to maintain faith and confidence? I make no claims because I don't have evidence I'd take to peer review.
I'm not just assuming the role of curmudgeon, I just think that far to often accusation of disinformation is disinformation. That relates to the article and the difficulty of determining what is true. Deception leads to loss of confidence in people honestly seeking truth and to high confidence in people who want to believe something they agree with is correct.
As for the importance of deciders, history books are written by the victors and they decide what is in them. As with many things, lies of omission are common. They are as much a lie as blatant falsehood, perhaps worse because they are less obvious.
What is it that is so frightening about other people getting to decide for themselves what is truth, good or bad advice, misinformation, and so on? Why on earth is this so triggering to so many otherwise rational people? Why are the “experts” so dedicated to protecting me from “harmful” opinions that they feel comfortable calling for “consequences” for those who spread those ideas while suspending my own rights to be exposed to them?
I have always enjoyed your writings Steve, but this one is a swing and a hard miss.
We don’t need a Mommy, like the Democrats want to be for us. We don’t need a Daddy, like the Bush/Cheney regime strove to provide. We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all.
"We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all."
I truly can't understand how it's possible to write this sentence with a (metaphorically) straight face. Whichever side of the political aisle you're on, you must be able to point to millions of people who you don't think are responsible adults. People who, if they gained control of government, would bring all of your nightmares to life.
But the problem isn't that these people are just evil. It's that they're horribly, dangerously misinformed about the world. And they do not, even for a second, recognise that freedom comes with responsibilities.
So if you want to know what's frightening about a world where bad actors are free to pump out lies and propaganda to millions of people every day, ask yourself why the BLM rioters set swathes of America on fire because they thought tens of thousands of innocent black people were being gunned down by cops. When the *actual* number of unarmed black people killed by cops per year is in the teens.
Ask yourself how vaccines have almost totally eradicated several serious, life destroying diseases, and yet thousands of parents are now too scared to give these potentially life-saving vaccines to their kids, leading to new outbreaks of those same diseases.
Ask yourself how we've arrived in a position where several countries are passing laws that remove the distinctions between men and women to such an absurd degree that male rapists are being housed in women's prisons. Or where we can no longer agree on the fact that men don't belong in women's sport. Or where depressed children who don't conform slavishly to gender stereotypes are being encouraged to sacrifice their health and reproductive organs to a cult.
Seriously, where have you been??!!
There are millions of people who need "experts" on every single complex political and/or scientific issue. Because they're frankly not smart enough to figure out what's true. As George Carlin famously put it, "Think of how dumb the average person is, well, half of them are dumber than that!"
And all of us, every single person who would dare make a claim to intelligence, recognises that they need "experts" on some things. Because no-one alive has the time or intelligence to "do their own research" on every topic.
So yes, the world *is* complicated. It was complicated even before it became impossible to tell whether the information you were consuming came from a Russian-bot or a real person. But now, in the age of deepfakes and bot farms and algorithmic social media bubbles, I don't understand how anybody doesn't see it.
Of course I agree with your observation that many people make horrible decisions based on untrustworthy information they gleaned from some sort of media, or elsewhere.
My objection to what you wrote was in your ending line where you rhetorically asked something to the effect of “shouldn’t they face consequences “, referring to the purveyors of (what you seem to be categorizing as dangerous) disinformation.
No, hell no, “they” (from whatever camp) should NOT face consequences for telling lies. Fox, WaPo, and every other legacy news outlet makes it a habit to lie about just about everything. And guess what? Without censorship, their influence is fading…..that’s why everyone is on Substack or Rumble or Medium, because, believe it or not, we are smart enough to know that neither Don Lemon nor Sean Hannity has any interest beyond peddling whatever crap gets them clicks.
Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history? When the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and said “Thank God we had censors or we wouldn’t have survived.” I’m serious, not trolling here.
Censors are always protecting something other than the truth….always…..
The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less. If people do bad things based on what they hear, that’s on them. To take one of your examples, many people, black and otherwise, did not riot and burn down stuff when they heard warped, false statistics about police killings. They did other, more rational, legal things, and probably are thankful they didn’t get caught up in the insanity of the moment.
Why do you need consequences? Who decides? What are the penalties for pushing lies in the name of truth when you get caught later on (e.g.weapons of mass destruction)? How many people died for that official lie, which was pedaled as Gospel truth by the guardians of probity and righteousness (like Ari Fleischer, Dubya, John Bolton, etc)? How many lives destroyed by a total lie, which was pushed and ratified and certified by every single organ of our government, media, military for YEARS? Do they get to determine the consequences for us who promote or consume what the pro-censorship crowd is today calling lies? Look at the pro-“consequences ”coalition coalescing around Harris……if Bolton, Cheney, Brennan + Harris, Clinton and Kerry doesn’t frighten your pants off….what will?
"The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less"
Just noticed that I missed this point. No, this is absolutely catastrophically untrue.
The antidote to bad speech is not simply *more* speech, it's *better* speech. Which is what I'm advocating for. Partly because nobody has time to consume an infinite amount of bad information in the hopes of getting to the good stuff, and also because we are not perfect information processing machines that aren't influenced by the repetition of nonsense and lies. Even obvious nonsense and lies.
This is actually a great idea of what I'm talking about. We all know that words doesn't become true just because they've been repeated often. But it sometimes feels like they are.
If you are trying to find a signal in amongst the noise, the solution is not to add more noise. You have two options. Reduce the noise, or strengthen the signal. Most speech, and this has always been the case, is noise. But in the social media age, there is an exponential increase in noise, and especially in the reach of noise, and still roughly the same amount of signal. The reach signal has increased a bit, but depressingly enough, not as much as the reach of noise has.
I'm advocating for efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio. And before you "who gets to decide" me, there are lots of things we have managed to figure out the truth of throughout history. The fact that some things are ambiguous doesn't mean we have to pretend that everything is. I'm not talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or how many prostitutes Donald Trump had sex with. This is just reality-TV crap that "responsible adults" should be smarter than.
I'm talking about things that affect decision we make about our health, or about whether we can have faith in the democratic process, or whether its okay for a former president to undermine millions of people's faith in democracy because his ego couldn't handle his very obvious loss. Information like this is incredibly consequential. And we need to be more careful about it than we are currently being.
"Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history?"
Why are you so focused on censorship?? I haven't at any point, mentioned or condoned censorship. This is just a very common knee-jerk reaction to ANY suggestion that we need to do something about the information crisis that we're facing. The line where I talk about consequences, if you'll notice, is accompanied by several very clear, specific examples of material harm.
And the problem is, I *can't* give you any examples from history, because we are in a completely unprecedented situation. It is already well established that there should be consequences if you shout "fire" in a crowed theatre with, say, 200 people inside, cause a panic, and someone dies in the resulting stampede, right? This is uncontroversial. We can all see the connection between cause and effect.
But if you shout "election interference!!" into a megaphone that instantly reaches hundreds of millions of people, and you keep doing it over and over again for six months, and in the resulting panic, a bunch of people try to hang the vice president and storm the Capitol and 4 (?) people die, that's just free speech, right? We just shrug our shoulders and pretend that there's no connection between these events whatsoever. It's just insane.
And this is before we address the question of deep-fakes and foreign interference and AI.
The world has changed. In terms of information, it has changed more in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 200. And if you think we can deal with the challenges ahead by just being "responsible adults," you are simply not paying attention. Which is especially strange given that, as I said earlier, you can already see preliminary versions of the harm they can cause around you right now.
Consequences, in the case where you cause some clear, material harm, say, should be the same as the consequences that currently exist. Again, I don't know what you're so afraid of. If you tell somebody to kill someone, and they do it, you can't just cry "free speech." You're liable. As you should be.
That's not to say that you can't express a controversial opinion. You're allowed to say, for instance, that vaccines are dangerous. But if you do so repeatedly, with zero evidence, and have no specialist knowledge, maybe we should at least put a disclaimer stating this on your claims *before* they're released to millions of frightened, occasionally irrational people during a pandemic who are absolutely not qualified or responsible enough to appraise those claims accurately.
And to be clear, I include myself in those people. I consider myself to be pretty smart, I have a solid scientific background, but I'm not a doctor. 'm humble enough to understand that I can't appraise information about cutting edge vaccine technology reliably. I don't have a strong enough background to compare different testing protocols. So what I need, what almost everybody needs, is some indicator of how trustworthy the person I'm listening to is and how well verified their claims are. Again, the online world COMPLETELY LACKS these measures. This is the problem I'm pointing to.
I think that people who take advantage of this problem and cause harm by doing so should face consequences for the harm they cause. Again, this is THE SAME SITUATION WE HAVE NOW for offline speech.
The ratio of misinformation due to ignorance and agenda driven disinformation has reached a level that we all should be aware of it, the difficulty is in determining truth since sometimes the way to sell a lie is to make it an outrageously big lie.
I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse.
As an afterthought, when I was in Vietnam I saw and heard communist propaganda purposed to create racial disharmony in American troops. Sadly, some of it was true. It is always most effective to mix truth and lies.
"I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse."
Yep, it's very hard to know who to trust nowadays. But I do think there are some incredibly obvious examples of untrustworthy people in the public sphere, people who we know, for an indisputable fact, have spent years telling the exact opposite of their true views to millions of people. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz spring to mind.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have people like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Judith Butler, Hillary Clinton, I don't think these people, with the exception of Clinton, are as flagrantly dishonest, but they make yp for it by being spectacularly intellectually dishonest which makes their arguments completely moronic.
This is the thing about speech. I'm not at all arguing to limit the kind of speech that ordinary people enjoy. I'm arguing for some checks and balances on people like these, who are enormously influential and simultaneously incredibly damaging to society. It's like the checks and balances that govern trillion dollar financial transaction vs those that affect your purchases.
And I'm not even arguing these people shouldn't be able to say what they want, I'm arguing that their audiences should be reminded that these people have said the exact opposite, or that their arguments have no basis in facts or evidence, or that sweeping generalisations about any group of people are intellectually bankrupt.
We should remind their audiences of these facts on a regular basis. And if they're still dumb enough to follow them, well, at least it's something.
"What is it that is so frightening about other people getting to decide for themselves what is truth, good or bad advice, misinformation, and so on?"
The immaturity of this question takes my breath away. Truly, you are adrift in the philosophical doldrums.
As if there is anything "subjective" (spits) about truth. As if whether or not Haitians are grilling pets or Democrats are committing infanticide are matters of opinion.
Why do people need protection from "harmful opinions?" Because they aren't intelligent or educated enough to live safely without such protections. Because they are so easily manipulated by unscrupulous applicants of the new science of persuasion that they are incapable of staying atop even the most essential information they need to make rational decisions. Because they can be talked into voting themselves into slavery and into placing entertainment at the center of their monstrously empty lives. Because they would rather fill trash cans with single-use plastic bags than spend 20¢ on a cloth bag they can use hundreds of times.
"Responsible adults" are as rare as turtles with feathers, almost as rare as that fictional bullshit called "common sense." You aren't promoting intellectual independence, you're promoting conceit. For you, I have four words of advice: go to a mall. Look at the vacancy in so many eyes, pushing the next generation of pollutants in strollers and no idea what they came there for.
Substack doesn’t end notifications to me anymore…censorship.😊….so I’m late to reply….
The best I can make out from your screed is that you, the enlightened savior hero, and your ideological friends, will race to the rescue of us ignorant peoples, to save us from disinformation and lies and untruths and unpopular opinions…..a sort of modern, updated, “white man’s burden”. We only get freedom when our positions align with yours. We don’t quite deserve it yet. Out of the goodness of your heart, you are going to spend some of that precious “me” time to censor out inconvenient truths, unpopular options, outright lies, just because you care. For many years, I have harbored the opinion that the lowest form of life is a white liberal, and your commentary hardened that belief of mine into ancient concrete.
The insanity of what you seem to be proposing, though you don’t quite spit it out, is mind boggling. The censors have NEVER been on the right side of history. The purported motivation of censorship doesn’t matter…..whether it is Woodrow Wilson or Joe McCarthy or George Bush or Hillary…..every one of those, and legions of others used their power and influence to crush the unpopular ideas and positions of others.
Where have you been these last 50 years? Did you ever hear of the Gulf of Tonkin? Do you remember the “truth” of the VietNamese attack on the US naval ships? Do you remember the “truth” of the Kuwaiti babies being slaughtered by invading Iraqi soldiers? More recently, do you remember the “truth” about the efficacy of paper masks from Dr Fauci? First they were no good, then good, then very good, then not good enough (you need two or three to be up,to date on your virtue signaling), then finally, well they don’t really work very well? All of these mutually exclusive pronouncements were considered “truth” for a couple of news cycles, and people were yanked off of YouTube and FB and Twitter and many other platforms for opining on the insanity of government pronouncements.
Just a few days ago, we see, in close to real time, outright fabrication of a response in the Harris 60 minute interview to cover up for the fact that Harris is yet more vapid, stupid, and incoherent than Trump. This is your “truth”??? We are going to trust those guys to filter truth from lie? Really? Or the 50 “national security experts” who weighed in on the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation only to find out, long after it mattered, that the contents as reported by the NY Post and others were 100% true?
Without the 1st Amendment, we have no country. Without robust debate, more speech, not less speech, we will never be able to make rational, informed decisions. Each one of us is responsible for what we do with the information we consume. It is not now, nor never has been the responsibility of you, your friends, or the authoritarians in government to sift through all the conversations, media articles, posts on the internet to save us. We don’t want you. Go home and shout out your TV. We are big boys and girls here…
I don’t need to go to a mall to see vacuous faces and empty lives. I live in Detroit. I am surrounded by the legacy of “trust me, we care for you” every single day. Broken promises are inextricably entangled with broken dreams…..We are ground zero in America for “look what happens when you trust the experts”. I do my best to lead by example, to help those who both need and appreciate, and to gently suggest that maybe, next time, don’t swallow as much of the Kool-Aid, whether it is coming from the preacher man, the Mayor, or the medical professionals who have made career customers out of most of us…..
I don’t try to shut down the speech of those whose positions I abhor; I try to present a coherent alternative. That position didn’t use to be controversial in America. Commitment to freedom, tolerance, diversity of opinions, a healthy skepticism of Big Everything, and a fierce opposition to censorship used to be bedrock principles of the Democratic Party in America. Now the party, along with the neocon Republicans have turned into the mouthpiece for the worst elements of society, clamoring for a level of censorship and control that was unthinkable even 10 years ago…
I'm not sure what it happening in this 'Stack but participation has dropped off a lot. This was at one time the most active Substack I was on.
Maybe it's the number of alternatives, as anyone who enrolls as a reader now has his own forum, though most are empty. Maybe Steve has said all he has to say about race. Maybe the overwhelming unwholesomeness of online discourse has become too offputting. Certainly there is more protection for trolls now than for plain speech.
My own online writing is near zero now, I had a heart attack six weeks ago and the hospitalization that followed gave me a very grave nosocomial Staph infection leaving me almost too weak to walk. But that's just me.
"I'm not sure what it happening in this 'Stack but participation has dropped off a lot. This was at one time the most active Substack I was on"
that's my fault. I was dealing with some personal issues that tanked my online activity. Most people are still around, but a little less engaged. I'm mostly back on track now.
Very sorry to hear about your health issues. Are you mending?
Chris, I am very sorry to hear about your heart attack and Staph infection. I sincerely you are able to fully recover, and feel better soon.
I rarely post comments, but have always found your input to be very constructive and enlightening. Unfortunately, I think that the drop-off in participation is likely due to so many other distractions and very heavy news cycle due to world and national events.
For me, even with very limited time due to so many other news/reading related distractions trying to keep up with current major geopolitical, national, techno, and societal events, I find time to read Steve's articles for his excellent writing and perspective. I have also appreciated the folks, like you, who contribute very thoughtful comments to the Stack.
For me -- in my off-work hours, I have been spending time on tech/security/Gen AI related topics, as the direction we are headed is a very big concern to me -- right up there, and related to, the ease of creating deep fakes and disinformation at scale. It infuriates me how disinformation and outrageous lies being allowed/accepted as 'normal' in current public discourse. I fear for our mental and physical health as individuals and as a society. We were not designed mentally for the current environment in which we find ourselves.
I think we are going to come to profoundly regret AI. Already it’s become routine to distrust what we see.
The reaction we need are that we are not getting nor likely to get is a revulsion against lies, misinformation, disinformation, in all their forms. It’s simply astonishing how Trump can say the things he does and suffer no consequences. He gets people killed.
AI replaces discernment with an algorithm that has little if any bias negation. Thus far I have resisted purposefully using it, but we are getting it good and hard anyway.
My apologies, as I'm just seeing this. I don't recall any concern. I think I was just happy to be able to comment since there is no paywall here. I want to read and comment more often! But as it is, I guess mine was just a joke that fell flat. I hurl those from time to time.
Very good article, Steve. I have struggled with articulating arguments about censorship vs free speech. How and draw the line between allowing Free Speech and suppressing dangerous propaganda and disinformation. What clear guidelines/tests can be used, and more importantly, how to enforce.
The violence and disruption caused by the very deliberate lies from Trump and Vance about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield is just one example.
Another example of dangerous lies coming from the MAGA polticians is about FEMA response to Helene. In this case, at least there are several media outlets pushing back, but I doubt these voices be heard (or believed) by Trump acolytes. ref: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/05/interested-parties-memo-fighting-hurricane-helene-falsehoods-with-facts/
I don't understand how they are allowed to spread disinformation that is causing very real harm, and face no repercussions.
The White House says that this is disinformation. An interview with a FEMA worker. Who do you believe and why? https://x.com/glennbeck/status/1842293685834416174
Some of the comments indicate a belief in conspiracy but it looks like typical government incomitance to me. Is the White Hose claim disinformation?
FEMA had diverted some of its funding to support of immigrants before the hurricane and now there is a shortfall, so we have the most common falsehood, the half truth.
If you are already inclined to believe that the Democrat Party is as crooked as a dog's hind leg it will be easy for that bias to let you accept the idea that FEMA is purposefully slow to have recovery that includes access to the poles for an election in a state that voted red in the last three elections. Of course that ignores the fact that the magnitude of the disaster makes quick recovery impossible and it takes no grand conspiracy to cause what is happening. Are the actual cases of non governmental help being turned away overzealous police and fire chiefs or grand conspiracy? Confirmation bias provides the answer. That is why disinformation, both official and unofficial, is so effective and people of course believe that their beliefs are the gold standard for truth.
"arguments about censorship vs free speech"
This is the wrong pairing. Censorship is a bogeyman, the suppression of valid ideas and a tertiary considering in this matter.
The contrast that matters is not speech vs. censorship, it's speech vs. falsehood. The new tolerance for lying is the issue, promoted by that most soft-headed of arguments:
"𝑊ℎ𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒?"
I don't understand why this is a soft-headed argument? If Trump wins the election, do you really want him deciding what you're allowed to say?
"If Trump wins the election, do you really want him deciding what you're allowed to say?"
The article isn't about anybody deciding what you can say. It's about deciding what's true. Shouldn't we all be interested in that?
I want as much true information out there as possible and as little false information out there as possible and the knee-jerk reaction always seems to be that it's impossible to figure out what's true or that there's no such thing as objectively dangerous speech designed to incite hatred or violence.
Like, just as an example, do you have a problem with a 200 million follower account boosting antisemitic conspiracy theories? Do you see how that's dangerous? Do you think it's possible to design policies that limit the ability of very large accounts to do things like that without somebody else deciding what you can say?
Many of these accounts have far bigger audiences than news organisation, which we DO regulate. Why does it concern you that we regulate these accounts too?
Yeah, I wasn't really arguing with you, Steve QJ, because I honestly don't know how I feel about a lot of your article. I love the idea of not letting people be intentionally dishonest, and I agree that there should be consequences if your lies hurt people. But in a day and age when people talk about "my truth" without batting an eye, and seeing how no one seems to be able to agree on anything (like something as simple as if masking is effective), I really don't see how we regulate any of this. So it's not that I disagree, exactly, I just don't know how anyone could set this up in a way that everyone could agree to. Chris Fox's comment (below) that who gets to decide is an evasion does not ring true to me. In fact, it feels to me like he's the one evading the point...?
(I have to say that I really appreciated you debunking the lie about not being able to yell "fire" in a crowded theater-- the persistence of that one has been driving me bonkers!)
"who gets to decide" isn't a point, it's an evasion. Always.
Loved this article. Thanks for sharing.
I believe that the promotion of truth is a responsibility far outweighing any fanciful right to promote falsehood.
In my youth, I was much more passionate about free speech (FS) though never an absolutist. I was more tolerant of the "accidental falsehood" than I am now, but that is entirely over. I now believe that deliberate falsehood such as Trump commits every day deserves prison time and in cases where it inevitably leads to murder, to execution. I think the infanticide-as-abortion falsehood merits Nevada Gas. It doesn't happen and to say it does is so certain to incite murderous passion that the lie deserves extreme punishment.
The FS phrase has been separated from its origin, which was to allow criticism of powerful people and of government without arrest and a charge of sedition. That's all it meant. It was not protection for incitement nor deliberate commercial or political falsehood.
The idea that it protected murderous irresponsibility like inciting people to trample each other to death is unworthy of discussion.
I want the right to criticize political positions without awakening to cops around my bed. But I also want people who say that immigrants are stealing pets to stand trial and spend years in jail.
Sorry, but this just popped up. From FOX but it's right on time for this article. Moderate (censor) or loose "total control." Sometimes when people tell you the truth about themselves and agendas you should believe them. That damned first Amendment, Congress shall pass no law...
I agree with her about taking the phones out of schools. It did me no harm to not have that distraction in school. Force social media to censor what the government doesn't like? Total control she says. The founders foresaw her when they added the 1st Amendment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hillary-clinton-says-social-media-companies-need-to-moderate-content-or-we-lose-total-control/ar-AA1rLYry
This is difficult subject. I'll relate it to my days working in the field of electronic warfare. There are noise jammers that drown out or distort the victim signal. It is a form of censorship. There are also deception mode jammers. They start with a signal that is seemingly legitimate before if pulls of your lock with a false signal. It is a form of false news. Our problem is finding truth in a world of noise and deception. We can only turn to discernment, and it has its built-in jammer, confirmation bias. It affects us all and only fools deny it.
Borrowing from thoughts from China, the official press is the running dog lackies hoping to be tossed scraps of meat from those in charge. I'll limit my reason for finding the official press untrustworthy to three.
1. My government told me that the communist North Vietnamese attacked our Navy ship. Nobody can do that, except on nearly the day I enlisted in the Marines, Israel attacked the USS Liberty. The Gulf of Tonkin incident probably was a lie and the attack on the USS Liberty was explained away as an accident (pure bullshit). But as a patriotic young man I went to the other side of the world to kill communists based upon the words of my government.
2. Some of my training as a Marine was about "venereal disease" where we saw films that showed the penises of black men rotting off from syphilis. The Tuskegee Syphilis study where these men were told they were receiving treatment. Horrific injustice.
3. Years later when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force in the Electronic Test Environment my job was analyzing jamming. Between missions I was listening to the Voice of America. It was broadcasting a speach in the UN Security Council that was making America look bad. The signal seemed to fade but my spectrum analyzer displayed a strong signal way above the grass. The noise was modulated in at the source. I checked across the band and every VOA signal sounded like it was in a fade. The VOA jammed itself until the speech ended.
I said that I would stop at three. The list of reasons to not automatically trust the official press is longer.
At the other extreme there are the detractors of government stories. A mix of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones types. A blend of truth and lies no better or worse than governments. One difference is that it is OK for governments to turn young men into killers but it's not for others.
All of that to reach this thought. When you hear the words disinformation and debunked do you ask yourself, is that true? The answer to our conclusion is highly biased by our existing beliefs. No matter how hard we may try, no one is exempt. My bud Chris objects to the question, "Who decides?" but it is fair to ask, is there any reason to assume that the government is a reliable decider of what we should hear? I find none. I'm not an anarchist, but relying upon government is walking with a tiger. I long for a world of truth, but it makes me sound like a Miss Universe Pageant contestant to say it because it is a dream that starts in a brass bowl pipe.
"A mix of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones types."
I really don't understand why you put these four men in the same category. Or maybe you weren't trying to equate them. Either way, these people are wildly different and represent completely different parts of the free speech conundrum.
As for whether I ask myself whether "disinformation" or "debunked" claims are being accurately described, of course I do. Without wishing to toot my own horn, I think I do this far more carefully than average because I often use the information I consume to write articles, which means I'm more motivated than average to get the details correct. And also means I'm painfully aware of how much sloppy and/or dishonest reporting there is out there.
The problem is that a growing number of people on the left and the right are happy to describe information as "debunked" or "disinformation" simply because they dislike it. And they demand almost no standard of evidence beyond "the people on my side are saying it."
This has led to a discursive environment where we almost literally can't talk about anything. And that, in turn, means we can't solve any problems.
Immigration, election security, COVID, climate change, racism, trans inclusion, Israel Palestine, you name it, it is almost impossible to find any consensus on any of the issues that we face. Some people, again, on the left and the right, seem to have given up on the notion of truth entirely. And while I'm much more tolerant than Chris of questions like "Who gets to decide," I agree with him that this question is almost always just used as a minimally thought out distraction. In almost all cases, anybody with a functioning brain and a willingness to look at the evidence can agree on what's true.
There is, in fact, such a thing as the truth. There is such a thing as objective reality. There is such a thing as a lie.
It's so weird to me that some people don't grasp how dangerous it is to cede these points. It's exactly the same mistake that "woke" people make about "lived experience" and "truth" just being a form of "power."
Yes, there are also lots of areas that are just matters of opinion. But a world where we pretend that 2+2 = 5 is just a matter of opinion or whether vaccines work in general is just a matter of opinion or whether a former president who spent four years undermining faith in democracy, never producing a shred of evidence, and then admitting that he'd been lying all along, did anything wrong is just a matter of opinion, will very obviously collapse under the weight of its own stupidit.
The four that I mentioned are obviously not the same but the association is that they are critics of government, its secrets and lies to the public (sometimes accurate). Just as I think it is foolish to accept an accusation of disinformation because of who said it, it is also foolish to dismiss it on those grounds.
I'm certain that you know that I'm certain that you consider things carefully and take a nuanced view of things. As I wrote, I am not an anarchist but without regard to political tilt, I also see government as an entity that often puts out disinformation and does not always act in the public interest. Humans are quite good at rationalizing bullshit when it suits their purpose while believing that that is not what they are doing.
I am more biased toward the idea of incompetence or denied bias than grand conspiracy, but conspiracies do exist, it's even a crime when combined with conspiracy to commit a crime.
Political parties (plural) are not above dirty tricks and lies from government are sometimes associated with partisan politics. And sometimes disinformation is to protect legitimate classified secrets. On two occasions when I asked the right people about documents that seemed technically incorrect I heard the words, "You found it. It's like that because..." I had no trouble supporting the disinformation when I knew why it existed, but it was non political.
In other comments I pointed out that Whitehouse claims of disinformation might also be disinformation. Does that mean it is to hide political conspiracy or an attempt to deny human incompetence to maintain faith and confidence? I make no claims because I don't have evidence I'd take to peer review.
I'm not just assuming the role of curmudgeon, I just think that far to often accusation of disinformation is disinformation. That relates to the article and the difficulty of determining what is true. Deception leads to loss of confidence in people honestly seeking truth and to high confidence in people who want to believe something they agree with is correct.
As for the importance of deciders, history books are written by the victors and they decide what is in them. As with many things, lies of omission are common. They are as much a lie as blatant falsehood, perhaps worse because they are less obvious.
What is it that is so frightening about other people getting to decide for themselves what is truth, good or bad advice, misinformation, and so on? Why on earth is this so triggering to so many otherwise rational people? Why are the “experts” so dedicated to protecting me from “harmful” opinions that they feel comfortable calling for “consequences” for those who spread those ideas while suspending my own rights to be exposed to them?
I have always enjoyed your writings Steve, but this one is a swing and a hard miss.
We don’t need a Mommy, like the Democrats want to be for us. We don’t need a Daddy, like the Bush/Cheney regime strove to provide. We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all.
"We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all."
I truly can't understand how it's possible to write this sentence with a (metaphorically) straight face. Whichever side of the political aisle you're on, you must be able to point to millions of people who you don't think are responsible adults. People who, if they gained control of government, would bring all of your nightmares to life.
But the problem isn't that these people are just evil. It's that they're horribly, dangerously misinformed about the world. And they do not, even for a second, recognise that freedom comes with responsibilities.
So if you want to know what's frightening about a world where bad actors are free to pump out lies and propaganda to millions of people every day, ask yourself why the BLM rioters set swathes of America on fire because they thought tens of thousands of innocent black people were being gunned down by cops. When the *actual* number of unarmed black people killed by cops per year is in the teens.
Ask yourself how vaccines have almost totally eradicated several serious, life destroying diseases, and yet thousands of parents are now too scared to give these potentially life-saving vaccines to their kids, leading to new outbreaks of those same diseases.
Ask yourself how we've arrived in a position where several countries are passing laws that remove the distinctions between men and women to such an absurd degree that male rapists are being housed in women's prisons. Or where we can no longer agree on the fact that men don't belong in women's sport. Or where depressed children who don't conform slavishly to gender stereotypes are being encouraged to sacrifice their health and reproductive organs to a cult.
Seriously, where have you been??!!
There are millions of people who need "experts" on every single complex political and/or scientific issue. Because they're frankly not smart enough to figure out what's true. As George Carlin famously put it, "Think of how dumb the average person is, well, half of them are dumber than that!"
And all of us, every single person who would dare make a claim to intelligence, recognises that they need "experts" on some things. Because no-one alive has the time or intelligence to "do their own research" on every topic.
So yes, the world *is* complicated. It was complicated even before it became impossible to tell whether the information you were consuming came from a Russian-bot or a real person. But now, in the age of deepfakes and bot farms and algorithmic social media bubbles, I don't understand how anybody doesn't see it.
Of course I agree with your observation that many people make horrible decisions based on untrustworthy information they gleaned from some sort of media, or elsewhere.
My objection to what you wrote was in your ending line where you rhetorically asked something to the effect of “shouldn’t they face consequences “, referring to the purveyors of (what you seem to be categorizing as dangerous) disinformation.
No, hell no, “they” (from whatever camp) should NOT face consequences for telling lies. Fox, WaPo, and every other legacy news outlet makes it a habit to lie about just about everything. And guess what? Without censorship, their influence is fading…..that’s why everyone is on Substack or Rumble or Medium, because, believe it or not, we are smart enough to know that neither Don Lemon nor Sean Hannity has any interest beyond peddling whatever crap gets them clicks.
Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history? When the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and said “Thank God we had censors or we wouldn’t have survived.” I’m serious, not trolling here.
Censors are always protecting something other than the truth….always…..
The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less. If people do bad things based on what they hear, that’s on them. To take one of your examples, many people, black and otherwise, did not riot and burn down stuff when they heard warped, false statistics about police killings. They did other, more rational, legal things, and probably are thankful they didn’t get caught up in the insanity of the moment.
Why do you need consequences? Who decides? What are the penalties for pushing lies in the name of truth when you get caught later on (e.g.weapons of mass destruction)? How many people died for that official lie, which was pedaled as Gospel truth by the guardians of probity and righteousness (like Ari Fleischer, Dubya, John Bolton, etc)? How many lives destroyed by a total lie, which was pushed and ratified and certified by every single organ of our government, media, military for YEARS? Do they get to determine the consequences for us who promote or consume what the pro-censorship crowd is today calling lies? Look at the pro-“consequences ”coalition coalescing around Harris……if Bolton, Cheney, Brennan + Harris, Clinton and Kerry doesn’t frighten your pants off….what will?
"The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less"
Just noticed that I missed this point. No, this is absolutely catastrophically untrue.
The antidote to bad speech is not simply *more* speech, it's *better* speech. Which is what I'm advocating for. Partly because nobody has time to consume an infinite amount of bad information in the hopes of getting to the good stuff, and also because we are not perfect information processing machines that aren't influenced by the repetition of nonsense and lies. Even obvious nonsense and lies.
This is actually a great idea of what I'm talking about. We all know that words doesn't become true just because they've been repeated often. But it sometimes feels like they are.
If you are trying to find a signal in amongst the noise, the solution is not to add more noise. You have two options. Reduce the noise, or strengthen the signal. Most speech, and this has always been the case, is noise. But in the social media age, there is an exponential increase in noise, and especially in the reach of noise, and still roughly the same amount of signal. The reach signal has increased a bit, but depressingly enough, not as much as the reach of noise has.
I'm advocating for efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio. And before you "who gets to decide" me, there are lots of things we have managed to figure out the truth of throughout history. The fact that some things are ambiguous doesn't mean we have to pretend that everything is. I'm not talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or how many prostitutes Donald Trump had sex with. This is just reality-TV crap that "responsible adults" should be smarter than.
I'm talking about things that affect decision we make about our health, or about whether we can have faith in the democratic process, or whether its okay for a former president to undermine millions of people's faith in democracy because his ego couldn't handle his very obvious loss. Information like this is incredibly consequential. And we need to be more careful about it than we are currently being.
"Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history?"
Why are you so focused on censorship?? I haven't at any point, mentioned or condoned censorship. This is just a very common knee-jerk reaction to ANY suggestion that we need to do something about the information crisis that we're facing. The line where I talk about consequences, if you'll notice, is accompanied by several very clear, specific examples of material harm.
And the problem is, I *can't* give you any examples from history, because we are in a completely unprecedented situation. It is already well established that there should be consequences if you shout "fire" in a crowed theatre with, say, 200 people inside, cause a panic, and someone dies in the resulting stampede, right? This is uncontroversial. We can all see the connection between cause and effect.
But if you shout "election interference!!" into a megaphone that instantly reaches hundreds of millions of people, and you keep doing it over and over again for six months, and in the resulting panic, a bunch of people try to hang the vice president and storm the Capitol and 4 (?) people die, that's just free speech, right? We just shrug our shoulders and pretend that there's no connection between these events whatsoever. It's just insane.
And this is before we address the question of deep-fakes and foreign interference and AI.
The world has changed. In terms of information, it has changed more in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 200. And if you think we can deal with the challenges ahead by just being "responsible adults," you are simply not paying attention. Which is especially strange given that, as I said earlier, you can already see preliminary versions of the harm they can cause around you right now.
Consequences, in the case where you cause some clear, material harm, say, should be the same as the consequences that currently exist. Again, I don't know what you're so afraid of. If you tell somebody to kill someone, and they do it, you can't just cry "free speech." You're liable. As you should be.
That's not to say that you can't express a controversial opinion. You're allowed to say, for instance, that vaccines are dangerous. But if you do so repeatedly, with zero evidence, and have no specialist knowledge, maybe we should at least put a disclaimer stating this on your claims *before* they're released to millions of frightened, occasionally irrational people during a pandemic who are absolutely not qualified or responsible enough to appraise those claims accurately.
And to be clear, I include myself in those people. I consider myself to be pretty smart, I have a solid scientific background, but I'm not a doctor. 'm humble enough to understand that I can't appraise information about cutting edge vaccine technology reliably. I don't have a strong enough background to compare different testing protocols. So what I need, what almost everybody needs, is some indicator of how trustworthy the person I'm listening to is and how well verified their claims are. Again, the online world COMPLETELY LACKS these measures. This is the problem I'm pointing to.
I think that people who take advantage of this problem and cause harm by doing so should face consequences for the harm they cause. Again, this is THE SAME SITUATION WE HAVE NOW for offline speech.
I hope that you have time to watch this.
https://youtu.be/kuQ8Bv330C0?si=BpWjgatjWUMnH9wh
The ratio of misinformation due to ignorance and agenda driven disinformation has reached a level that we all should be aware of it, the difficulty is in determining truth since sometimes the way to sell a lie is to make it an outrageously big lie.
I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse.
As an afterthought, when I was in Vietnam I saw and heard communist propaganda purposed to create racial disharmony in American troops. Sadly, some of it was true. It is always most effective to mix truth and lies.
"I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse."
Yep, it's very hard to know who to trust nowadays. But I do think there are some incredibly obvious examples of untrustworthy people in the public sphere, people who we know, for an indisputable fact, have spent years telling the exact opposite of their true views to millions of people. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz spring to mind.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have people like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Judith Butler, Hillary Clinton, I don't think these people, with the exception of Clinton, are as flagrantly dishonest, but they make yp for it by being spectacularly intellectually dishonest which makes their arguments completely moronic.
This is the thing about speech. I'm not at all arguing to limit the kind of speech that ordinary people enjoy. I'm arguing for some checks and balances on people like these, who are enormously influential and simultaneously incredibly damaging to society. It's like the checks and balances that govern trillion dollar financial transaction vs those that affect your purchases.
And I'm not even arguing these people shouldn't be able to say what they want, I'm arguing that their audiences should be reminded that these people have said the exact opposite, or that their arguments have no basis in facts or evidence, or that sweeping generalisations about any group of people are intellectually bankrupt.
We should remind their audiences of these facts on a regular basis. And if they're still dumb enough to follow them, well, at least it's something.
"What is it that is so frightening about other people getting to decide for themselves what is truth, good or bad advice, misinformation, and so on?"
The immaturity of this question takes my breath away. Truly, you are adrift in the philosophical doldrums.
As if there is anything "subjective" (spits) about truth. As if whether or not Haitians are grilling pets or Democrats are committing infanticide are matters of opinion.
Why do people need protection from "harmful opinions?" Because they aren't intelligent or educated enough to live safely without such protections. Because they are so easily manipulated by unscrupulous applicants of the new science of persuasion that they are incapable of staying atop even the most essential information they need to make rational decisions. Because they can be talked into voting themselves into slavery and into placing entertainment at the center of their monstrously empty lives. Because they would rather fill trash cans with single-use plastic bags than spend 20¢ on a cloth bag they can use hundreds of times.
"Responsible adults" are as rare as turtles with feathers, almost as rare as that fictional bullshit called "common sense." You aren't promoting intellectual independence, you're promoting conceit. For you, I have four words of advice: go to a mall. Look at the vacancy in so many eyes, pushing the next generation of pollutants in strollers and no idea what they came there for.
Substack doesn’t end notifications to me anymore…censorship.😊….so I’m late to reply….
The best I can make out from your screed is that you, the enlightened savior hero, and your ideological friends, will race to the rescue of us ignorant peoples, to save us from disinformation and lies and untruths and unpopular opinions…..a sort of modern, updated, “white man’s burden”. We only get freedom when our positions align with yours. We don’t quite deserve it yet. Out of the goodness of your heart, you are going to spend some of that precious “me” time to censor out inconvenient truths, unpopular options, outright lies, just because you care. For many years, I have harbored the opinion that the lowest form of life is a white liberal, and your commentary hardened that belief of mine into ancient concrete.
The insanity of what you seem to be proposing, though you don’t quite spit it out, is mind boggling. The censors have NEVER been on the right side of history. The purported motivation of censorship doesn’t matter…..whether it is Woodrow Wilson or Joe McCarthy or George Bush or Hillary…..every one of those, and legions of others used their power and influence to crush the unpopular ideas and positions of others.
Where have you been these last 50 years? Did you ever hear of the Gulf of Tonkin? Do you remember the “truth” of the VietNamese attack on the US naval ships? Do you remember the “truth” of the Kuwaiti babies being slaughtered by invading Iraqi soldiers? More recently, do you remember the “truth” about the efficacy of paper masks from Dr Fauci? First they were no good, then good, then very good, then not good enough (you need two or three to be up,to date on your virtue signaling), then finally, well they don’t really work very well? All of these mutually exclusive pronouncements were considered “truth” for a couple of news cycles, and people were yanked off of YouTube and FB and Twitter and many other platforms for opining on the insanity of government pronouncements.
Just a few days ago, we see, in close to real time, outright fabrication of a response in the Harris 60 minute interview to cover up for the fact that Harris is yet more vapid, stupid, and incoherent than Trump. This is your “truth”??? We are going to trust those guys to filter truth from lie? Really? Or the 50 “national security experts” who weighed in on the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation only to find out, long after it mattered, that the contents as reported by the NY Post and others were 100% true?
Without the 1st Amendment, we have no country. Without robust debate, more speech, not less speech, we will never be able to make rational, informed decisions. Each one of us is responsible for what we do with the information we consume. It is not now, nor never has been the responsibility of you, your friends, or the authoritarians in government to sift through all the conversations, media articles, posts on the internet to save us. We don’t want you. Go home and shout out your TV. We are big boys and girls here…
I don’t need to go to a mall to see vacuous faces and empty lives. I live in Detroit. I am surrounded by the legacy of “trust me, we care for you” every single day. Broken promises are inextricably entangled with broken dreams…..We are ground zero in America for “look what happens when you trust the experts”. I do my best to lead by example, to help those who both need and appreciate, and to gently suggest that maybe, next time, don’t swallow as much of the Kool-Aid, whether it is coming from the preacher man, the Mayor, or the medical professionals who have made career customers out of most of us…..
I don’t try to shut down the speech of those whose positions I abhor; I try to present a coherent alternative. That position didn’t use to be controversial in America. Commitment to freedom, tolerance, diversity of opinions, a healthy skepticism of Big Everything, and a fierce opposition to censorship used to be bedrock principles of the Democratic Party in America. Now the party, along with the neocon Republicans have turned into the mouthpiece for the worst elements of society, clamoring for a level of censorship and control that was unthinkable even 10 years ago…
I'm not sure what it happening in this 'Stack but participation has dropped off a lot. This was at one time the most active Substack I was on.
Maybe it's the number of alternatives, as anyone who enrolls as a reader now has his own forum, though most are empty. Maybe Steve has said all he has to say about race. Maybe the overwhelming unwholesomeness of online discourse has become too offputting. Certainly there is more protection for trolls now than for plain speech.
My own online writing is near zero now, I had a heart attack six weeks ago and the hospitalization that followed gave me a very grave nosocomial Staph infection leaving me almost too weak to walk. But that's just me.
I don't know anyone in the USA who is doing well.
"I'm not sure what it happening in this 'Stack but participation has dropped off a lot. This was at one time the most active Substack I was on"
that's my fault. I was dealing with some personal issues that tanked my online activity. Most people are still around, but a little less engaged. I'm mostly back on track now.
Very sorry to hear about your health issues. Are you mending?
Chris, I am very sorry to hear about your heart attack and Staph infection. I sincerely you are able to fully recover, and feel better soon.
I rarely post comments, but have always found your input to be very constructive and enlightening. Unfortunately, I think that the drop-off in participation is likely due to so many other distractions and very heavy news cycle due to world and national events.
For me, even with very limited time due to so many other news/reading related distractions trying to keep up with current major geopolitical, national, techno, and societal events, I find time to read Steve's articles for his excellent writing and perspective. I have also appreciated the folks, like you, who contribute very thoughtful comments to the Stack.
For me -- in my off-work hours, I have been spending time on tech/security/Gen AI related topics, as the direction we are headed is a very big concern to me -- right up there, and related to, the ease of creating deep fakes and disinformation at scale. It infuriates me how disinformation and outrageous lies being allowed/accepted as 'normal' in current public discourse. I fear for our mental and physical health as individuals and as a society. We were not designed mentally for the current environment in which we find ourselves.
I think we are going to come to profoundly regret AI. Already it’s become routine to distrust what we see.
The reaction we need are that we are not getting nor likely to get is a revulsion against lies, misinformation, disinformation, in all their forms. It’s simply astonishing how Trump can say the things he does and suffer no consequences. He gets people killed.
AI replaces discernment with an algorithm that has little if any bias negation. Thus far I have resisted purposefully using it, but we are getting it good and hard anyway.
Well, sure. And in that case it's a million and three ways.
Could you flesh this out please? What is your specific concern?
My apologies, as I'm just seeing this. I don't recall any concern. I think I was just happy to be able to comment since there is no paywall here. I want to read and comment more often! But as it is, I guess mine was just a joke that fell flat. I hurl those from time to time.