I disagree. The market and political forces are too strong, the "misinformation" umbrella will always expand to fit the needs of the wealthy and powerful.
When the stakes are high, exactly the time when you need radical honesty, the benefits of censoring information are also high.
Some might say, "hasn't this always been the case?" And you'd be correct. The difference today is that it is now a fashionable political position to cheer for censorship of any controversial ideas. This prevailing attitude combined with centralization of the public square (social media) is a dangerous combination, and we will continue to pay the price of this well into the future.
The trust in traditional institutions is plummeting, as it should for anyone who has witnessed their actions the past year.
I still remember the "hug a Chinese person" campaign in Italy.
It's really hard to view this as suppressing scientific inquiry. Scientists don't use public Facebook posts to collaborate on their research, nor to share their final results with the rest of the scientific community. It's also very hard to picture social media giants ever blocking users from posting anything that comes from peer-reviewed published science.
I find his arguments very difficult to square with this article from 2015[1].
The prologue of [2] also paints a pretty compelling picture of how this might happen.
Also
> We don’t live in the world of Neuromancer and we never will. 99.9% of everything is mathematically invulnerable to hacking.
Yea, assuming someone had enough resources to create a powerful AI, they would also have enough resources for a hefty collection of unreleased 0days...
As anyone who was around to see the advent of “crypto TA” c. 2012 can attest, TA in the Bitcoin space started out as quantitative-themed narrative pumping, and it remains so to this very day. Crypto TA chartists self-promote and advertise coins in a furtive attempt to bolster speculation. They can then point to “trading volume” and speculation-fueled transactions to further boost perceptions of credibility — “$X zillion dollars were settled on this blockchain I’m invested in”.
Drug cartels are on the decline. Rise of the Warrior Cop is directly correlated with centralization of power and the influence of police unions over politics and public spending.
It's also correlated with the change from the US military Soldier's creed, to the "Warrior ethos" [0].
The differences are quite interesting: The soldier swears to always act in ways creditable to the service and the nation, recognizing it as a honored profession not to be disgraced.
While for the warrior the mission always comes first. Honor, credibility, disgrace? Not even in the vocabulary, replaced with "deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the US, in close combat".
Are you just saying that because weed is being legalized?
Economic inequality sure isn't in decline, and there are a lot of 18-24 year old uneducated men out there with nothing to lose. The turmoil in places like Venezuela and Colombia leaves power voids that cartels step in to fill.
The person you replied to did make a claim with no evidence, but so did you. What about the southern border, do you have a reliable citation for something bad happening there compared to 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago?
See! Irony at work: it wasn't good enough for you so you wanted a feature. That's where it all starts. I'm not dissing you, I'm pointing out how innocuous feature creep can be.
When the stakes are high, exactly the time when you need radical honesty, the benefits of censoring information are also high.
Some might say, "hasn't this always been the case?" And you'd be correct. The difference today is that it is now a fashionable political position to cheer for censorship of any controversial ideas. This prevailing attitude combined with centralization of the public square (social media) is a dangerous combination, and we will continue to pay the price of this well into the future.
The trust in traditional institutions is plummeting, as it should for anyone who has witnessed their actions the past year.
I still remember the "hug a Chinese person" campaign in Italy.