US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9917

On February 16 2018 06:30 OuchyDathurts wrote:
So infowars of course spread a bunch of false information about the shooter. He's a democrat, antifa, etc, etc, all the usual stuff. Along with a supposed photo of him wearing a communist shirt....except that's not him it's just some random guy. People are reaching out to that kid who's photo they falsely spread and gathering evidence in an effort to bring a lawsuit against infowars. Hopefully they get turned into gawker.

On February 16 2018 06:35 IyMoon wrote:


Someone said the shooter has a pic with a MAGA hat on?

Got to love how Infowars just can lie to everyone and people believe it

On February 16 2018 06:50 Plansix wrote:
Slippery slope, free speech and all that. The terrifying possibility that Google care about something else besides profit long enough to make a decision. Likely the same with Twitter and Facebook too. Look forward to the conspiracy theories that this is all a hoax and years of the parents being harassed, because it never stopped for Sandy Hook.

On February 16 2018 06:55 Jockmcplop wrote:
There's a 'second shooter' rumour going around on infowars too. If ever I wanted Anonymous to hit a website it would be now.

On February 16 2018 06:55 Tachion wrote:

I had to indulge myself a little. On the front page of Alex Jones's YT channel there was a video titled "Probability Florida Attack False Flag For Civil War - 90%".
Half of the comments it seemed were calling him out for being an idiot. Or maybe they just pulled in some unusual outside traffic for their shit reporting like I was.It was still a bit nice to see regardless.

On February 16 2018 06:57 PhoenixVoid wrote:
Would be a little cosmic justice if a billionaire (how fun it would be if it were Soros) funded a legal war against InfoWars to bring it down, a la Peter Thiel style. Not that I necessarily want billionaires shutting down opposing media outlets as a personal hobby, but InfoWars is so beyond journalism or truth-telling it would be a favour to the world to accomplish such a thing.

On February 16 2018 06:56 OuchyDathurts wrote:


Anonymous said they have info on the author of the infowars article. Hopefully sparks start flying.

It should be no surprise that I'm an unabashed supporter of free speech. Usually essays that start that way are then followed with a "but..." and that "but..." undermines everything in that opening sentence. This is not such an essay. However, I am going to talk about some interesting challenges that have been facing our concepts of free speech over the past few years -- often in regards to how free speech and the internet interact. Back in 2015, at our Copia Summit we had a panel that tried to lay out some of these challenges, which acknowledged that our traditional concepts of free speech don't fully work in the internet age.

[...]

In the past couple of months, two very interesting pieces have been written on this that are pushing my thinking much further as well. The first is a Yale Law Journal piece by Nabiha Syed entitled Real Talk About Fake News: Towards a Better Theory for Platform Governance. Next week, we'll have Syed on our podcast to talk about this paper, but in it she points out that there are limitations and problems with the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" working the way many of us have assumed it should work. She also notes that other frameworks for thinking about free speech appear to have similar deficiencies when we are in an online world. In particular, the nature of the internet -- in which the scale and speed and ability to amplify a message are so incredibly different than basically at any other time in history -- is that it enables a sort of "weaponizing" of these concepts.

That is, those who wish to abuse the concept of the marketplace of ideas by aggressively pushing misleading or deliberately misguided concepts are able to do so in a manner that short-circuits our concept of the marketplace of ideas -- all while claiming to support it.

The second piece, which is absolutely worth reading and thinking about carefully, is Zeynep Tufekci's Wired piece entitled It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech. I was worried -- from the title -- that this might be the standard rant I've been reading about free speech somehow being "dangerous" that has become tragically popular over the past few years. But (and this is not surprising, given Tufekci's previous careful consideration of these issues for years) it's a truly thought provoking piece, in some ways building upon the framework that Syed laid out in her piece, noting how some factions are, in effect, weaponizing the very concept of the "marketplace of ideas" to insist they support it, while undermining the very premise behind it (that "good" speech outweighs the bad).

In particular, she notes that while the previous scarcity was the ability to amplify speech, the current scarcity is attention -- and thus, the ability to flood the zone with bad/wrong/dangerous speech can literally act as a denial of service on the supposedly corrective "good speech." She notes that the way censorship used to work was by stifling the message. Traditional censorship is blocking the ability to get the message out. But modern censorship actually leverages the platforms of free speech to drown out other messages.