Obvious as it may sound, people with authoritarian beliefs hiding behind free speech actually consider it as a weakness akin empathy. It allows losers like them to amplify their reach despite not being in power. They abandon their “free speech absolutist” postures the moment they think they are in power.
That’s just technology & fearmongering. Socrates was critical of writing out of concerns it would deteriorate minds & make superficial thinkers. Critics were concerned the printing press would lead to widespread moral degradation with the abundance of low-quality literature. People criticized television & media for brain rot.
Guess what you’re the next iteration of?
Technologies change, yet good principles hold regardless.
You know what you can do with free speech? More free speech. No one has a monopoly on LLM, bots, or algorithms. If people were inclined, they could launch these technologies to counter messages they oppose. People can choose to tune out & disregard expressions. Much more can be done with free speech.
Technologies and ethics continuously change and adapt to new technologies, and I’m not interested in discussing the analogies of going from codexes to printed books vs. going from printed hard copies to human-human interactions being hijacked by human-passing bots, because to me these are evidently not comparable.
The fact that this discussion is taking place on Lemmy and not Xitter tells plenty about the actual complexities of this story.
yes
no
Yes. Technology may change, people’s awareness & recognition of the application of ethical principles may change, however that doesn’t mean the principles themselves change.
In terms of ethical reasoning, the essence of a matter may remain the same regardless of superficial guises (like technology). Adapting to a technology means applying the same general principles to novel, special cases. The principles concern rights & moral obligations people have to each other. Technology isn’t essential or relevant: the use of technology to perform an action is irrelevant to whether that action is right or wrong. The principles themselves can be timeless, immutable, and concerned only essentials necessary to evaluate actions. Thinking otherwise indicates confusion & someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Well, you’re wrong. They’re ultimately ways of disseminating expression. Just because you think some shiny, new, whizzy bang doodad fundamentally changes everything doesn’t mean it does.
It probably indicates lack of historical perspective. These problems you think are new aren’t. People have long been complaining about lies spreading faster than truth, the public being disinformed & easily manipulated. In the previous century, the US has been through worse with disfranchisement, Jim Crow, internment camps, violent white supremacy, the red scare, McCarthyism. Yet now contagious stupidity spread through automations is an unprecedented threat unlike the contagious stupidity of the past? Large scale stupidity isn’t new. Freedom of speech was essential to anti-authoritarian, civil rights, and counterculture movements.
There’s something contradictory trying to defend liberal society by surrendering a critical part of it.
Not really. Decentralization is part of the solution.
Some people never liked Twitter.
This reads like arguing for sake of arguing because calling out nazis as liars about their interest in free speech has got to mean abandoning freedom of speech.
We could go on and on, but this is a nice summary statement here. Thank you.