this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Is medical malpractice censorship? Legal malpractice? Financial malpractice? Engineering malpractice? Academic malpractice?
I don't want to use government sanctions explicitly because government decisions tend toward political or popular outcomes, not reasonable outcomes. When a doctor SAs their patients, we don't saction them; we revoke their medical license. Fiduciary negligence calls for a lawsuit, not direct government action (although lawsuits have issues as well).
I'm not advocating for community action either (I would hope individuals would check for integrity, but that obviously doesn't happen enough ATM), shunning or excuding people from certain communities is something I want to avoid. This is definitely not excommunication (even if we broaden the term beyond it's explicitly catholic meaning), I very much do not want to banish or otherwise impact affected persons' quality of life. It's simply about practising a privileged profession.
You should be able to say whatever you want without government censorship, but we shouldn't be giving all ideas privileged platforms. Libel is a very difficult thing to prosecute for, but I think we need to challenge more publically broadcast statements. To broadcast as "News" or something authoritative would be a privilege, like practing medicine or law.
Even in this hypothetical situation, the definition of reasonable accuracy would have to be determined methodologically, as political entities and the public cannot be trusted to decide in good faith. That's the crux of trying to implement public deplatforming; objective value judgments. We can get useably close with peer-reviewed papers, but it's still vulnerable to political and monetary influence.
To summarize: I do not want to silence anyone, just restrict access to the official-looking megaphone and clipboard. Even then, how that access is restricted is a difficult problem considering the conflicting interests around it.
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it's his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word "news". Which... I don't think is going to be very effective. They'll just do this whole "we can't call ourselves news because the government doesn't want you to know what we are going to tell you" shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.
Not every private company can just do anything. ITAR still applies to SpaceX, the military industrial complex still wants political control over it's suppliers, telecom corps still need to adhere to network standards, and COPPA was applied to YouTube (and they dealt with that terribly).
As much as capitalism wants to push everything as far as the system will bear, we can change that. We can say that social platforms need special care, or government officials need to be held to a higher standard. The issue at this point is political will, wich is growing in many directions at the moment.
The problem with specifically controlling speech is that we don't have any system unbiased enough to be responsible for such a broad aspect of society. Some specific cases with some general rules might be useful though, but again I don't trust our current systems to make good rules. This is all speculation on how to prevent public manipulation, and it probably won't work well when used to root it out once established.