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
My question is, are there any hypothetical worlds in which censorship would be good? As a culture we think heroin is bad despite being a personal expression, because it sort of 'hijacks' the brain and results in damage to self and other. 1/
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Aella
@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
Replying to
@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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Viktor
@viktor_roamin
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
The problem with this is how do you reconcile this in the present? Most would only be able to see it as problematic in hindsight. What would be the benchmarks to make that decision and who would ultimately be in charge?
David de Kloet
@dskloet
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
How do you imagine banning a meme? Creating a full authoritarian surveillance state with zero tolerance and people reporting their neighbors and family like the Stasi in east Germany?
David Vorick
@DavidVorick
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
What you want is to build tooling that allows people to fight memes that hijack their brains and control their decisions. What you don't want is to require people to use a specific set of tooling or set top-down controls from the government about what types of memes are allowed.