Say what you will about the CCP, it's naive to let a foreign nation have this much impact on your subjects. The amount of poison and political manipulation that are imported from these platform is astronomical.
Well when the local media bends a knee and outright bribes the President (Paramount, Disney, Twitter, Facebook), why should we trust the domestic media?
Wait, are you saying that the person you are replying to is a hypocrite, or are you saying that the Biden admin set the standard for responsible government handling of media relations, or are you saying that if one administration does something bad it is ok for any other administration to do something bad, like a tit-for-tat tally system of bad things you get for free after the inauguration?
Instead of implementing government information control, why not invest those resources in educating and empowering ones citizenry to recognize disinformation?
To me this is sort of like saying why do we need seat belts when we could just have people go to the gym so they're strong off to push back an oncoming car. Well, you can't get that strong, and also you can't really educate people well enough to reliably deal with the full force of the information firehose. Even people who are good at doing it do so largely by relying on sources they've identified as trustworthy and thus offloading some of the work to those. I don't think there's anyone alive who could actually distinguish fact from fiction if they had to, say, view every Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/everything post separately in isolation (i.e., without relying on pre-screening of some sort).
And once you know you need pre-screening, the question becomes why not just provide it instead of making people hunt it down?
With modern safety design and human factors, we do both and more. A car can have an automated breaking system, and a manual break, and an information system that informs the driver of the surroundings in order for better informed driver. We don't remove any of those in the false belief that one of them should be enough.
Applying that to information and propaganda, users should have some automated defenses (like ad blockers), but also manual control of what should or should not be blocked, and also education and tools to be better informed when taking manual control.
In neither system should we remove manual control, education or automated help. They all act in union to make people safer.
Perhaps a better analogy from recent HN discussion would be auto-lock-on-drive doors.
Some people die (often children) by opening doors while a vehicle is moving or before it is safe to do so.
However, this also impedes the ability of rescuers to extract people from crashed vehicles (especially with fail-dangerous electric car locks).
Is it safer to protect citizens from themselves or empower them to protect themselves?
In my perfect US, both would be done:
"Dealing with disinformation" as a semester-long required high-school level course and federally mandating the types of tools that citizens could use to better (read: requiring all the transparency data X and Meta stopped reporting, from any democracy-critical large platform).
While also mandating measures to limit disinformation where technically possible and ethically appropriate (read: not making hamfisted government regulations, when mandating data + allowing journalists / citizens to act is a better solution).
Children often lack experience and education to prevent harm, as that is one of the distinguishing aspect between adults and children. We also know from biology that children are more prone to poor impulse control. Children in general are dependent on an adult for safety, and children agency is occasionally removed in favor of security. Auto-lock-on-drive doors is a prime example of this. The adult driver is also liable for their passenger, especially children, so they have multiple incentives to ensure good security.
Treating children as children is fine and expected. Treating adults as children is not. Protecting children from disinformation, under the assumption that they lack the experience, education, impulse control, and expectation to handle information security themselves is fine. The government can also be an acceptable party to define this for children, even if some parents will object to not carry that role. An alternative could also be to make the parent liable if they fail in their role to protect their children from information harm.
Going back to auto-lock-on-drive doors, giving the government remote control of the car doors with no override, including the driver door, is unlikely to be acceptable to the adult driver who own the car.
Because you want to use it yourself. You can't vaccinate if you rely on the disease to maintain power. You can't tell people not to be afraid of people different than themselves if your whole party platform is being afraid of people different than yourself.
That’s hundreds of millions of people in the US, of varying ages and mostly out of school already. Seems like a good thing to try but I’d imagine it doesn’t make a tangible impact for decades.
'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure.'
It's so much easier to stop one source than it is to (checks notes) educate the entire populace?!? Gosh, did you really say that with a straight face? As if education isn't also under attack?
I never defended the authoritarianism of the CCP. I only said it makes sense to block foreign platforms, regardless if the state is a tyranny or not. Framing it as if it's some kind of tactic to help keep the populous indoctrinated is a very simplistic take.
Take Reddit, for example. It's filled with blatant propaganda, from corporations and politicians. It's a disgustingly astroturfed platform ran by people of questionable moral character. What's more, it also has porn. All you need is an account to access 18+ "communities". Not exactly "enlightening material" that frees the mind from tyranny.
If we could just educate people and make sure they don't fall for scams, we'd do it. Same for disinformation.
But you just can't give that sort of broad education. If you aren't educated in medicine and can't personally verify qualifications of someone, you are going to be at a disadvantage when you are trying to tell if that health information is sound. And if you are a doctor, it doesn't mean you know about infrastructure or have contacts to know what is actually happening in the next state or country over.
It's the same with products, actually. I can't tell if an extension cord is up to code. The best that I can realistically do is hope the one I buy isn't a fake and meets all of the necessary safety requirements. A lot of things are like this.
Education isn't enough. You can't escape misinformation and none of us have the mental energy to always know these things. We really do have to work the other way as well.
Sorry, 'recognizing disinformation'? You must have meant 'indoctrination'.
(They don't necessarily exclude each other. You need both positive preemptive and negative repressive actions to keep things working. Liberty is cheap talk when you've got a war on your hands.)
