65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
i mean yeah i very much am fine with the government saying “you can’t say this” because i’m not a free speech absolutist and there are inarguable harms caused by certain forms of content being allowed to fester online. i’d personally quite like it if my country didn’t make it legal to explicitly call for, plan for, and encourage people to exterminate all queer people—and i’d quite like it if corporations took that line as well. many countries have a line of this sort with no such problems, even though it is explicitly more punitive than the US model of “say whatever you want”.
I’m honestly shocked at the pushback for “Maybe we shouldn’t let people preach things like ‘X group of people needs to die because my God said so!’ because it leads to unmitigated violence against the X group 99% of the time.”
All of these well intentioned ideas put in place the infrastructure for abuse when a not so well intentioned person comes to control it.
That literally goes for anything. All systems are subject to risk of abuse. No system is perfect. It’s not as nihilistic as saying “why even have society at all if it’s not perfect?” but it’s approaching that.
Here’s a film that might benefit you. This is an Encyclopedia Britannica film short from 1946 about despotism.
The thrust of the film is, obviously, that despotism can happen anywhere, to any kind of government system or any kind of economic system. You’re no safer by saying “restrictions mean we can be restricted!”
That’s why we have three branches of government, a constitution, and state rights. Literally any government in bad hands can be abused. It’s a senseless argument