Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
As a libertarian who spent many years as a sex worker, with many direct encounters with frustrating censorship myself, I'm both personally and in principle super sympathetic to the calls for no censorship. It's a type of force that pple use to silence others they dont like. But:
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Like, let's imagine a world where AI has designed the heroin of memes - hyper spreadable and deeply damaging to anybody it catches onto. Imagine early-stage religion, or a more contagious Qanon. Would you support banning discussion of that meme from social media?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I... don't know what I would do. It feels *super dangerous* to allow anything even begin as a justification for limiting free expression, even - or especially - when it's the 'greater good'. We've seen "for the greater good" named in basically every atrocity known to man.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
But given a clearly hyper-dangerous meme that's destroying everything it touches, I feel like maybe banning it would be reasonable? You could argue "it's better for the ecosystem to develop natural immunity/burn itself out" but diseases don't always work like that.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
So given we have an extreme in which censorship is reasonable, then the issue becomes "what is the degree of horror it will take for us to resort to it," not whether censorship should ever exist.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And we get questions like, is a lil bit of censorship justified for weak, early-stage memes with high potential for damage as a preventative measure? Should tiny bits of censorship be done sometimes as maintenance? Can we stay aware of all side effects of both censoring and not?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
My point is this issue doesn't feel black and white to me. I do feel that as a whole we have *way more* censorship than is necessary, and "freedom" might be my core #1 value, but if you can think of even a single exception for your value, then it's not a law but a guideline.
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Aron, PhD
@Leapdragon
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I actually don't think censorship but rather a new thing, a kind of geographical limit, and not just for speech. We need to design controls so that effects fall off rapidly as distance increases, so that you have to be MUCH more important to reach out nationally/globally.
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Julian Chastain
@Juliangchastain
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
The hypothetical world in which censorship are good are when a small number of people (who are in power) have better meme judgement than everyone else. This could in theory happen, but doesn't seem to be likely
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