We truly live in the dumbest timeline where the gov asking companies not to support dangerous misinformation is considered an attack on “free speech”
It’s a completely valid question when the label “dangerous misinformation” is open to interpretation of whichever way political winds are blowing. There is no supreme arbiter of truth, and not every issue is black and white. I certainly would not enjoy a Donald Trump administration deciphering or filtering “truth” from “misinformation” for me.
This statement is great in a vacuum. But a lower court put up an injunction to prevent the white house from taking to any tech companies. Lol what?
We don’t want any social media company becoming a mouthpiece of the the state (under any administration) but pretty much all media is in communication with government officials and yes to a degree those government officials can somewhat influence what those businesses CHOOSE to say and do.
We didnt have to live in the world where SCOTUS had to spell that out
If only we could enact some sort of practice - a doctrine really - where those who choose to engage in the disseminating of information of any sort are duty bound to be impartial and allow for good faith counter arguments. Doesn’t that sound fair?
There really is actual truth in the world, and opinions are fine too, so long as they’re presented as such. “The ocean has had record high temperatures every day for the past year” is an objective fact. “The oil companies have intentionally hidden the extent of their impact on climate change” is (currently) an opinion that can be debated by people from both sides of the issue if they do so in good faith. As one example.
Who determines what is considered good faith, though? Who sets the line between fact and fiction?
One of the issues we encounter in this sort of scenario is that the media has a habit of forcing “two sides” perspectives of issues that have one objectively correct answer because the topic is needlessly politicized. News stories about the effects of climate change should not be held up next to counterarguments that question the validity/motivations of the scientific community, but they are anyways because one party believes that they can legislate truth.
Whichever party is in power at the time is the one that gets to control how this nebulous standard would be applied, and so you’re only one Christofascist movement away from climate change being a debatable subject and religious doctrine being indisputable fact.
See most civilized countries get around this by just banning the christofascist parties from even trying to build a movement.
There’s two prongs you can hit this from, first, holocaust denialism/minimization, second, supremacism/nationalism, voila, you’ve banned fascist movements without beginning to play whackamole with new right wing parties that just redress the same old bullshit in new lines and rhetoric.
There’s also implementing the BITE model as legal grounds to forcibly disband an organization, that is if an organization is attempting to take control over its members’ Behavior, Information, Thoughts, and Emotions, hunting orgs that tick that list will nip proto-fascist-movements in the bud before they can even rise to being an organized christofascist party that has to have the ban hammer brought down on them for thinking the Jews start wild fires with space lasers.
