I saw an article on Techdirt about this, which presented a dissenting view. <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha-baron-cohen-is-wrong-about-social-media-wrong-about-section-230-even-wrong-about-his-own-comedy.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha...</a>
I can't help but think "holy projection Batman" when I see that term. They may be shady but I trust vested interests and scapegoaters even less.<p>They do damage to their own credibility with their incessant pushing on a flimsy and selective basis.
It's interesting how social convention itself causes some social media problems to not arise. Despite its infamy for being a spammy place of careerist self-promotion, LinkedIn doesn't suffer from any of the problems of these other social networks, simply because it isn't designed for that context. I've seen some terrible low quality content posts on LI, but even at its worst, they are simply asinine life/career inspirational thinkpieces intended for a professional audiene. Not dissimilar to low quality on Quora. Yet both places host material that have a general higher standard than on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.
Conflating conspiracy theories, propaganda, and racism is very problematic.<p>Propaganda is most often used to motivate state goals, such as war, with falsehoods.
Government and government/industrial partnership is the main source of propaganda. Conspiracy theories are generally anti-propaganda in the sense that they contradict the official story.<p>Its true that there are many conspiracy theorists who are racist. However, its certainly not all of them. I would be considered a hardcore 'conspiracy theorist' by most but I'm not the least bit racist. I am a white man who dated asian women and lives in Mexico. I don't pretend to know anything about people who I don't know. Conspiracy theories are also extremely popular with black Americans.<p>The problem with large companies or the government "regulating propaganda" is that, as I mentioned, they are the biggest sources of propaganda. What you will end up with is something along the lines of Chinese government information control.<p>I do, however, believe that we should make an effort to reduce the propagation of racism, and extreme views that are deliberately false. But whatever form this takes, it must not be monopolized by one organization or establishment, and must be structured in the context that I described, rather than a false context where anti-establishment views are automatically censored. One possibility might be to use the legal system. For example, some legal action could disqualify political candidates who blatantly lie about their opponents. Of course, this is extremely challenging, since that would disqualify all candidates in the current system.
I agree with (most of) the description of the problem - the rise of conspiracy theories online - and agree it's a serious issue. I think the proposed solution would make the problem much, much worse, though.<p>"What are <i>they</i> trying to hide by controlling what we say and censoring our attempts to expose the truth?"
There's a huge difference between regulating what is not ok and "telling everyone what to think". Americans seem to jump on any kind of regulation as equivalent to Big Brother thought control which is just a bizarre overreaction. Any kind of international agreement over regulating speech is going to be very mild by the nature of consensus - you won't get all the governments in the world agreeing to something extreme. You might get agreement around "don't publish lies" and "don't publish racist stuff"