Robbery is a crime, so why should people take any measures to protect their things from being stolen? Murder is a crime, so why care about death threats?
New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.
It's a tough problem, everyone believes themselves an expert on everything, plus trolls and disinformation campaigns. There's also a significant information asymmetry.
It's funny you mention opioids as I just recently came across a tweet claiming that Indians were responsible for getting Americans addicted to them via prescription. In one of the buried reply chains, the poster admits they have no evidence and are just repeating a claim someone made to them sometime. But how many people will read that initial post and reinforce their racist beliefs vs see that the claim was unsubstantiated? And when that leads to drastic action by a madman, who's going to be the target of the blame? The responsibility is too diffused to target any specific person, the government obviously won't, madmen don't act in a vacuum and so the blame falls on the platform.
Yes, no one should have the power to determine what ideas are and are not allowed to propagate, but on the other hand, you could still go to other platforms and are not entitled to the reach of the major platforms, but then again, these platforms are extremely influential. At the same time there's also the problem that people in part view the platforms as responsible when they spread bad ideas, the platform operators also feel some level of social responsibility, while the platform owners don't want legal responsibility.
> Robbery is a crime, so why should people take any measures to protect their things from being stolen? Murder is a crime, so why care about death threats?
I don't understand how your question relates to the discussion. Perhaps you could answer my earlier questions first and it might clear things up for me.
Being censored by the robber from discussing the burglary is not a measure to protect your belongings any more than giving the government the power to prevent freely speaking about their carrying out the democratic processes is a measure to protect democracy from abuse by government officials.
Should Trump have had the power to censor news and discussion of the 2016 election when there were a lot of election deniers and conspiracy theorists concerned about the legitimacy of the election and conspiracies with Russia? Absolutely not.
> New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.
There are unfounded claims about how much damage was caused by people exercising their right to speak about covid, and they all come from authoritarians who sound like they have ravenous thirst to gain the power to silence their critics and the population at large. So I consider them totally unreliable handwaving at best, and more likely fraudulent fabrications. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with letting them use social media platforms like anybody else. It's fine if those companies decided to decide whose message to amplify or create their own terms of use, but having governments pressure corporations to carry out this censorship is a crazy overreach and violation of human rights by the government.
The response, policies and messaging and communication by governments and bureaucrats has caused far more damage to society, to public health, to trust in institutions and trust in vaccines and medical science than common people talking about it.
New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.
It's a tough problem, everyone believes themselves an expert on everything, plus trolls and disinformation campaigns. There's also a significant information asymmetry.
It's funny you mention opioids as I just recently came across a tweet claiming that Indians were responsible for getting Americans addicted to them via prescription. In one of the buried reply chains, the poster admits they have no evidence and are just repeating a claim someone made to them sometime. But how many people will read that initial post and reinforce their racist beliefs vs see that the claim was unsubstantiated? And when that leads to drastic action by a madman, who's going to be the target of the blame? The responsibility is too diffused to target any specific person, the government obviously won't, madmen don't act in a vacuum and so the blame falls on the platform.
Yes, no one should have the power to determine what ideas are and are not allowed to propagate, but on the other hand, you could still go to other platforms and are not entitled to the reach of the major platforms, but then again, these platforms are extremely influential. At the same time there's also the problem that people in part view the platforms as responsible when they spread bad ideas, the platform operators also feel some level of social responsibility, while the platform owners don't want legal responsibility.