In my view Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are on the wrong side of history in their decisions to censor content they disagree with. Authors must be free to express their ideas. They platform is free to repudiate its support or endorsement of their ideas.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic @UnrealAlexander
If Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, or Google leadership want to influence politics, they should do as respectable publishers and editors have done for centuries, and write editorials persuading readers of their views.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic @UnrealAlexander
I feel their policy of censoring ideas they disagree with is fundamentally cowardly, revealing their belief that their readers are incompetent to evaluate the merit of ideas freely presented to them. This belief is incompatible with democracy itself.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic
That assumes the users of social media are competent in fact checking and also that information/debates are being put out in good faith. Banning people for disagreeing with you is a bit different then trying to reign in floods of abuse and deliberate misinformation. 1/2
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Replying to @UnrealAlexander
Political discourse has never been built on a foundation of assumed good faith. Democracies, free societies, and juries have always relied fundamentally on individual judgment about the truth of unproven statements and allegations.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic
I mean, ideally, a jury of peers would be the best method of determining disputes and if someone is acting in bad faith. No one seems to have an answer for that on social media dispite the access to so many people.
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Replying to @UnrealAlexander
Bad faith is a normal part of life though. We sort through hundreds of instances of bad faith every day, from clickbait, to shady ads, to news stories that misconstrue or selectively choose facts in once highly reputable publications.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic
This is the crux of my arguement: Assuming the user is fact checking at all incorrect, people in fact do not sort truth from fiction and just pick things they like. Study published in Science magazine agrees with this:http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 …
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Replying to @UnrealAlexander
If we take the existence of cognitive biases as an argument against liberty, the inevitable conclusion is that unelected elites should dictate the terms of our lives. But they’re people with cognitive biases and self-interested motives too.
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Thus we must rely on a system in which every person’s freedom of expression contributes to the checks and balances on everyone else’s power and influence.
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