Speaking as somebody who goes with mainstream expert opinion by default, I nevertheless think there's enough censorship from the big tech providers, at the very least let's have such "filter out stuff that annoys us" initiatives as optional.
I can’t believe anyone is in favor of censorship in the first place. Maybe they just need to experience the harsh reality of rule by majority opinion or mob rule. Reddit is the perfect example. I can’t tell you how many times a top up voted thread or comment is 100% false. The experts aren’t the ones voting is the problem so who gets to the top is only the one most persuasive or with a comment that already agrees with expectations. This is exactly how things work with politics or news as well. I can’t tell you how many news articles I’ve read that make extremely basic mistakes and assumptions because the person writing the article has no experience in that field.
But there is space between outright censorship and deliberately building a system that promotes the ideas of those who are the best at information warfare.
If you repeat your idea often and loud enough, you can make a large number of people believe anything.
Internet curated by algorithms is a perfect tool for spreading misinformation:
- You need not to carry the weight of any of the legal structures or responsibilities of a journalist.
- You can produce misinformation faster than the news cycle is able to react, meaning your misinformation will be able to poison the well before any conversation is able to take place.
- You can segment your audience so that dissenting opinion is nowhere to be seen.
- By the time any debunking by actual journalists can be done, your target audience is already exposed to the next cycle and can barely remember anything about the previous one.
This is extremely dangerous.
I am sure that the people who came up with automobiles weren't trying to create a vehicle of death, but there needs to be some kind of safety check akin to seat belts for the information propagation that takes place online. I am not sure what the answer is, but acknowledging the problem and trying to do something shouldn't be dismissed with a mere cry of "censorship" when information can and is being weaponized in a way and at a scale that has been impossible so far.
And who is fit to play the censor? And who shall determine if a group is full of bad conspiracy theories or ok ones? And how shall we address it when the censor is wrong?
It was not long ago that trans and gay people were censored "for the common good".
Those are excellent questions. But if your freedom of expression collapses itself, it won't survive anyway.
The Nazi party got into power in Germany democratically. They used the privileges given to them to take those privileges from others. Give people the freedom to elect their representatives with no checks and balances, and the results can be ugly.
The polarization and brainwashing happening through social media today makes me think it is completely feasible, if not inevitable, that a group will form that will enact actual censorship to the internet.
In the settings on search they currently only have the option "hide explicit results"; that could be expanded to give users control over the filters used.
Google has to choose something to prioritize. It's good that in this case it chose the authoritative site over the conspiracy theory one. Even better if they chose it because it was more authoritative rather than because they calculated they could show you more ads that way, but I won't give them credit for that just yet.
They didn't censor the other site completely. If I search with site:dangersofvaccines.com I get results from it. I can't get results from it any other way though, including searching text that only appears on that site - they'd rather tell me there are no results - so I agree that's an unpleasant level of censorship/nannying.
