Topic: Where do you draw the line, Freedom of Speech/Misinformation (Read 475 times)

As a journalism student, I value freedom of speech more than other of the many rights we have as humans. However, freedom of speech has always has been a doubled-edged sword.

If there's no freedom of speech, then only those with power will get to choose whether an idea should be listened to or not--and that it extremely dangerous as there are a lot of selfish power-mongers out there. However, as you said, some people abuse that freedom and use it to pass their often misinformed and false opinions as hard facts, and that is one of the main problems of journalism.

There are a lot of people that are either intentionally trying to spread fake news, or just plain stupid as to why they can't tell if they should present their opinions as truth or not.

Moreover, I extremely agree when you said that the people's voices should not be muted but those spreading lies should get punished. Legally speaking, these are criminal acts as they can either be libelous or just plain misinformation-spreading. However, the sad truth is that only a few really get to pay for it. I hope our justice system gets to take these more seriously and add measures on how to prevent them.

P.S. Just to add to your list of examples, I believe the Flat Earth Society should be one too 

Hahaha.

Well, it's where all my credible news sources come from lol

That actually makes me want to post on facebook lol.

Definitely going to get all my news from the daily testicle from now on.

I am a snake?

I have legs and snakes have legs so I guess I am a snake .

Or am I just a dummy?

This entire idea grinds my gears. I'm with you on this 100% of the way.

I began my internet working journey in 2015, and the very first idea I had was that I would build a blog representing my thoughts, feelings and experiences put forth into the world for anyone that could use whatever it was that I was talking about to their advantage. This blog slowly grew into a magazine and recently I've had some lovely diverse and open-minded perspectives towards the world. The only real mission that I have for my magazine is that I may not necessarily agree with the message of the author but because of freedom of speech and expression, and my thirst for devouring different viewpoints, I let everyone have their say providing it's not damaging or hateful.

This entire perspective I have on the world has thrust me into a very libertarian network of people, and although I consider myself libertarian I do love the idea of free speech. Free speech allows us to exist in a realist world where everyone voices their opinions freely. I've met some strange people though; one lady that was enthusiastic about writing for me insisted that you couldn't be racist to a white person and would accommodate no other viewpoints to that; her own perspective on the world being the gold standard and anything that differs from such would require her and her buddies to go into their safe space.

In my mind the term safe space has been hijacked. As a manager, and a man that would go into difficult communities and get people talking, a safe space for me would be to sit two people down and have them both listen to each others viewpoints without interruption or judgement -- that way you could force and medium ground; it's a thing counsellors do in couples therapy, and it's also a way to get people to realise they aren't listening to each other. So this new term safe space has been completely hijacked and used as a term for people to sit in without fear of anything different. In my mind that's dangerous to a person and society.

If I hadn't been called weird and different as a kid, I would have never have strived to make anything of myself; to be better than those that enjoyed name calling me, to sit on my high chair in adulthood and look down on them as they struggled to make ends meet. It didn't pan out that way, but in my opinion the differing of opinions and the competition in society is fierce. If there was no reason to be better, to create more, to be better than you were last year then we would all just stagnate. We would exist in our own bubble of safety and no-one would ever intend to get better at anything. Life is grand, so we'll just sit in the sun and get a tan.

Ben Shapiro famously said -- facts don't care about your feelings. Now I'm generally not a big fan of that man but everything he's said on freedom of speech is down to the nail. If we all wanted to be sheltered away from the nasty things in the world we'd end up as big fragile snowflakes scared that our feelings get hurt.

I blame Facebook though, and other algorithm formats. They've created a world where people live in echo chambers of their own opinions and it's become so increasingly harder for people to hear opinions from other people that differ from theirs; right down to the point of utter disgust, and bodily harm. "Punch a racist" is a commonly used term in my world, yet I worry that racist is used too loosely these days. Someone identifying with right wing ideology is brandished as a racist; when without deeper analysis you have no way to tell this.

And have you noticed that everyone believes they are right these days? Everyone? There is absolutely no gathering of facts and proper critical analysis; it's just, you're wrong because I don't like to feel that I'm wrong.

I'll leave you with this piece:

https://youtu.be/0HXMYm4k6w0

Right.

I heard about Bitcoin in 2010, but dismissed it because Keynsian economics (which I'd learned as simply being the only economics) dismissed it. It was only because the tech sounded interesting that I checked it out again in 2011, and found threads here on Bitcointalk.org talking about Austrian economics and central banks being scammy etc. The latter completely changed my mind about the "conspiracy theory" topics, it's pretty obvious that the whole financial system (fiat banking inclusive) is just a massive scam. Seeing as the "free market" financial system is the basis of the entire Western world narrative, it changed my view of the world alot.

7 years later, this is my conclusion: alot of what gets labelled conspiracy theory is actively encouraged by the corporate/bank/intelligence uberclass as a kind of smokescreen. This is their weapon to make it very difficult to make an informed choice about what's true and what's false. They are likely manufacturing a whole range of fake and true stories using agents controlled by them, so that given a little passage of time, they can manipulate perception about anything (most Americans believe the Oliver Stone version of what happened in the JFK assassination, but one of the source materials for the screenplay of that movie went on to become a UFO person, despite the earlier JFK stuff being far more credible. Maybe this guy was a government agent paid to say something convincing about JFK in the 1980s, then screw his reputation in the 1990s by deliberately by switching to UFO craziness? Stranger things have happened in cases involving government agents)


Plato wrote about this in the year 2200 BC in The Allegory of the Cave, and Aristotle in his appraisal of the abuse of political power. If anyone really believes that Aristotle & Plato were nothing more than ancient Greek conspiracy nuts, maybe you'd believe anything if someone on TV wearing a suit and tie told you (i.e. the Stanley Milgram compliance experiments).

Freedom of speech is in some western country's just a joke and a empty facade. We are controlled by powers higher than us that expressing this freedom of speech is inflicting personal problems in life. For example Facebook -> It's a very totalitarian system, where only speech which fits theirs agenda is tolerated. If you say something opposite to theirs agenda you get blocked. How is this about democracy or freedom of speech ?
Everybody has the freedom to say whatever he thinks, but this needs to be done in a respectful manner.

Nowadays i feel that, mostly in Western European country's, freedom of speech is just a show. It doesn't exist at all. We are ruled by our politicians and everything against theirs agenda will not be tolerated. What's the difference between them and authoritarian country's like Saudi-Arabia for instance ? Just in Europe they hide it very good.


Misinformation will always exist. An example an messenger sent a message to person B, the messenger is person A. On his turn person B tells the story to person C but adds some extra to the story, to make it short person Z will have a totally other story than person B. This can lead to misinformation.
But everybody has his own perception of the truth. This doesn't mean it is fake news, just the perception of the people differs.


 

I think the worst part about how those stories are presented is the use of their quotes once you start reading the stories.


This quote pulled from the story that failed at math in the headline.

Not being medically trained myself, I would be inclined to dig deeper, but would start on google if I was unlucky enough to read the story that didn't link to the original article in the story as only 1 did.

If I had been lucky here's what I would have found... a basic conclusion written up based on the results (IMO showing the need for further testing for possible indicators for favorable/unfavorable outcomes). If I remember correctly that's how I was taught to do experiments/research in grade 4 or something for the good old science fair.

Just for kicks I did take a chance on google, like I would without a link to the source, and didn't get inundated by garbage yet this article was actually a well balanced interpretation IMO. It may be to recent but as soon as someone with an opinion will begin the spread, and there will be a rabbit hole of misinformaion to fall into.

Oh my god, yes. This annoys me so much.

My field is medicine. An important study came out a few days ago that shows that adrenaline, which is used as part of advanced life support algorithms, resulted in a significantly higher survival rate but no significant difference in the rate of favourable neurological outcome. This has been reported with the following headlines, neither of which are true:

Cardiac arrest resuscitation drug has needlessly brain-damaged thousands

Routine treatment for cardiac arrest doubles risk of brain damage – study

These headlines are completely designed to bring in clicks and views at the expense of accuracy. It happens all the time - journalists don't care about the truth, they care about how many viewers/readers they can get.

Every system needs adopters, and if the system is presented openly and honestly(the system, not it's users) it is for society as a whole to decide it's place.  

I wish that still had some effect on people and the stranglehold their "feeling facts" had on them. People like the easy way out and that doesn't often include challenging long held beliefs. This does have effect on a small scale but seems ineffective at this point for large scale distributorsof half truths, and full lies.

How does 2009 BTC fit into the freedom.  The libertarian community along with silk road and satoshi dice were the only reason IMO bitcoin made it out of the basement dwelleing nerd domain!

Imagine if groups of bankers, politicians and anti-gamblers etc had been able to stifle the free speech of those users, we may never have heard of BTC.  The model of free expression of value was completely against the "norm" of the time!  I personally found BTC from a fiat online poker forum I was into at the time, and after I figured out it wasn't the next internet scam (which was my first impression LOL) I was hooked.  If they had censored in anyway that information I would not have been here 5 years ago, who know's if or when I would have ended up here!

I admit that anti-vaccine, flat earth, chemtrail etc etc are vastly different that disruptive tech like BTC however the line must be such that legitimate innovation MUST NOT be stifled because illegitimate/agenda driven/trollingmotherfucking users are taking advantage of the situation.

A problem I often encounter is that people do not understand what even constitutes evidence. Peer reviewed journals, randomised control trials and mountains of data do not and should not have to justify themselves against anecdotes and YouTube videos. Your belief that vaccines are poisonous (for example) because some random conspiracy nut wrote it on their blog is not equivalent to literally billions of data points that say the opposite. "Do your own research" often doesn't work for this reason - because people don't understand what constitutes good research.

Now, I understand the scientific process, peer reviewing and scientific literature because I was educated in and work in a scientific field. Many people are not, and no disrespect to them - there are many paths to walk in life. But if you do not have the knowledge or skills to interpret scientific data, then "Do your own research" is bad advice. Your opinion which you reached through an evening of Googling does not hold the same value as the opinion of an expert working 20 years in the field with an abundance of data behind them.

I completely agree with you, however, that you should be allowed to hold and voice whatever opinions you like, just don't expect anyone to take you seriously or even listen to you if your opinions are stupid.

I definitely agree that any space restricting or censoring any legal exchange of ideas, is problematic; if for no other reason than it creates the same type of environment stifling growth. It just seems the ridiculing has ceased, or doesn't have the same effect.

I don't think there needs to be consequences for solely spreading misinformation. It's more when this is done with a malicious intent to deceive. Also if a professional is speaking to something in that capacity, or in giving the impression of such, they should be held liable if proven they were negligent in any way.

Any punitive measures would have to be proportionate to the offence. I can't imagine a lot of verbal warnings having any effect on someone who lets facts escape them.


I get the feeling you're not anti-vax, 

That's just good practice to question things and do your research. There's nothing wrong with being overly critical if in the end you can still look at and react to the information objectively.

Again I disagree with silencing any doubters especially in scientific/research communities. I just expect standards; and I don't think that's to much to ask for. I can't stand when someone wants to present evidence, and it's a 1 off result out of 1000, so obviously it's the only result that matters because it fits the narrative. Another beauty is looking at the most basic data and ignoring key parts of the data to again fit the narrative.

There's nothing you can do, it's the way humans are and the way they will always be. They will defend their point till the end. Their team has to win. If you had magical powers and could snap your fingers to make every human currently on Earth be open to all opinions, and not be so emotionally invested in their side, then what about their kids? It will continue in future generations because it's just human genetics.

The problem you have is that you're getting stressed out by it rather than accept it for what it is.

Free speech is a tricky thing. I believe in it, and I'm not one of those hypocrites who believe in free speech right up until someone says something they don't like and then they want that person to be silenced or imprisoned, but I guess a line has to be drawn some place, but where do you draw it? Can you slander someone? Accuse them of being a pedophile or criminal based on absolutely no evidence at all? Can you incite someone to commit violence or terrorism? Do or don't those people have a right to make those claims? Do they have a right not to be punished for factually inaccurate or dangerous claims or should people be imprisoned for spreading very damaging or hurtful claims?


I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I don't think people should just blindly accept whatever their government tells them is ok either and vaccinations or any sort of medications usually come with side effects. I'm sure the people who first called out thalidomide were debunked as crazy conspiracy theorists, but that was a immunotherapy drug that went bad and with disastrous consequences. Some of the current vaccinations do have harmful elements in them (even if they're just trace amounts) and we might not ever know what sort of damage they may or may not do or may find out about them at some point (remember, we were told cigarettes didn't cause cancer), but on the flip side the benefits may outweigh any potential negatives, but again, I wouldn't just debunk or try silence anyone who is against or critical of vaccines or points out the potential harmful effects of some of them (though the people who think the gov are actively trying to poison you are probably going too far into chemtrail craziness). Again, I'm, not anti-vax, but I am overly critical of any medications and their potential side effects or possible long-term damage of their use that may or may not be known yet.

As for crisis actors, now that is a crazy conspiracy theory  .

Actually is there any "Absolute Truth". I don't think so. Truth is also subjective and it is defined according to the standards that we prepared. It can be True for some valid standards and it can be False to another equally valid reference standard while both standards are prepared by us. I think if we can practice the habit of listening to what other peoples have to say regarding any issue which will reduce the day to day problems by big percentage. People can spread the misinformation( If we classified true information as information that are scientifically proved) but at the end of the day we are the people who decide whether it is true or false from a valid reference standards which we knew( That standard also can be amendment or revised in future). I think we should not control the "Freedom of speech" of anyone as a people who still believes in democracy. If we control the Freedom of speech then the society can be goes again to the dictatorship which we actually don't want.

So always listen what others have to say and they can be looking from a different angle where we wouldn't see. I can give you a simple example of what we have taught in our schools. They always taught us 1+1 always equal to 2 and we all are taken it is the absolute truth. But think about one drip of water sums up to a another one drip of water, the answer is not 2 drips of water but 1 drip of water.

Well, taking a look at the history, it has happened since "forever" (?). Maybe the mean issue is the mere concept of "The Truth" (notice I'm using capital letters), for, what is "The Truth"? Even it exists?
We live in a huge world with too many humans there. Since the very beginning, there have been speeches regarding almost everything. I don't think the number of people with the ability to think for themselves is dropping, on the contrary, the amount of information you have at hand is creating some people with the capacity of building their very own ideas. Perhaps the problem we have now is that the charlatans have their own space. When before, they were kind of "local", meaning that they can spread their bullshit in a confined space, maybe a town or a city or some books, now they can be seen and listening by some many people, due to the internet. But the people willing to believe in them, as well as the activity itself, has existed since "forever".



I think this is impossible to create a consequence just to an opinion. If the people want to believe in the chem-trails, for instance, we can't do anything.
But I do agree on one thing: when it has consequences. For instance, all those "medical gurus" speaking about how the doctors are confabulated with the pharmacy industries and encourage the people to avoid vaccines, and such kind of stuff; or all those who are selling to the people with cancer miraculous products at a high price and making the people feel worst. Well, I think that they need to suffer some consequence for that, but, again, this is just another opinion.

The matter, from my perspective, is that misinformation has always existed. People are willing to believe in miracles, and now, in order for something to become a miracle, it needs to be supported by the phrase "The scientist said...".

Now, if you invent a situation, or make false accusations online and destroy somebody's life, well, it needs to have some consequences. But, for charlatans... well, they have always existed, and it is on the people the responsibility of informing themselves and to build their own identity.
This is difficult to many, thought. We live in a society with access to the internet and to a lot of information (false or not), but many live in a closed world, with the word of a priest as the only window to the "reality". Or even those living in a society with all the information at hand, prefer to spend their time on Facebook and to believe every fake in the platform, but it is their choice, too.

So, in short, I think this is the responsibility of each person to build a personal insight based on the data at hand, and that the freedom of speech should be allowed 'till the last consequences, as far as it doesn't directly damage someone.
If the people choose to believe in aliens, conspiracies, chem-trails, flat earth, illuminatis or miracle products... well, this is on them.
The industry of the lie is one of the most profitable, as always has been.

I don't think there should be legal consequences to spreading misinformation.
No authority should exist that claims to know and decide what is truth and what is not.

If there are any consequences to spreading misinformation should exist, they should be verbal, not physical, not material.
You can tell them they are wrong, you can walk away from them, you can deny to associate with them.
Doing anything that physically or materially harms them would be unethical and unwise.

The banning of public speakers and creation of "safe-spaces" is the next step to society wide censorship. Why should someone else get to decide what ideas I can and cannot hear? Freedom of speech is vital as there was a time when it was illegal to say the Earth orbits the sun. Having said that, freedom of speech does not include the right to be heard. You should be allowed to say what you like (provided it is not illegal) and you will be ridiculed if what you say is stupid.

Indeed, the rights that give you the freedom to talk nonsense (such as anti-vaxxers) are the same rights that give others the freedom to criticise, ridicule or completely ignore you. Just as freedom of religion includes freedom from religion, freedom of speech includes freedom from speech.

I think the issue that you refer to is actually due to the internet. Quacks have always existed, and they have always been rightly ridiculed. Before the internet, that was the end of it. Now they can find each other too easily, organise in to groups, and spew their nonsense to a wider audience.

Ironic that the internet gives them more access to information and evidence than ever before in human history, and instead they use it to spread their ignorance.

There are days I have a hard time talking to people about anything of substance. It goes beyond the general differing opinions or being proven wrong; I'm entirely fine with that. I actually enjoy discussions with a differing opinion, don't mind being wrong but enjoy the chance to learn.

What gets me these days is the fact that anyone and everyone's information is given the same weight. This has been going on so long that people are losing the ability to think for themselves and be objective. I know there have always been sheeple that can't and won't think for themselves. Unfortunately there is a growing number of our population locking themselves into an echo type environment that doesn't introduce contradictory ideas.

This is particularly dangerous when said people begin to promote "gut feelings" or opinions as facts or proof. In turn they are more vocal in their arguments and if confronted with a debate tend to get whipped up into a frenzy. Once again to the point where they are only surrounded by the ideas that comfort them.

I've always been very much in agreement with free speech and that everyone is entitled to their opinion. I just can't stand the fact that people have the opportunity to present their opinions as fact based; and are continuously given a megaphone and a soapbox directly to the world with little or no consequence. To me this leads society down a dangerous/deadly path depending on the information, and unfortunately stifles real science in the wake of more profitable opinions.

I'm not saying that these peoples voices need to be muted but that there needs to be consequences to promoting misinformation.

Examples:
Crisis Actors in the US, a convenient way to dismiss people after a  mass shooting

The Anti-vaxxer

The ever so controversial "Hoax" of climate change