
Covid Is Accelerating a Global Censorship Crisis - Malifalitiko
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-covid-is-accelerating-a-global-censorship-crisis/
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Barrin92
To play devil's advocate, isn't it a little bit generic to just name a few
instances of abuse of censorship, rather than working with data to determine
to what degree misinformation rather than truthful information was targeted?
Because just from a bird's eye view, if one plots the press freedom index
against the covid-19 death rate, I don't think you'd get a plot that the
author would expect based on this article.

I don't think the article tackles hard and serious questions around speech.
Banning the doctor in China from speaking out was extremely bad, but say, what
about a potential effect of stopping a panic in Wuhan and people from fleeing
the region and taking the virus everywhere?

I don't necessarily mean this as a defense of censorship but rather as taking
a genuinely critical view of failures in our systems.

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ibeckermayer
The problem with your proposal is that your methodology is a false approach.
Freedom of thought (and it’s close corollary, freedom of speech) is
foundational to all inquiry — if I must adhere to some idea, I’m not free to
think, and if I’m not free to think, then philosophy (inquiry) can’t exist. So
we know that censorship is wrong as a matter of principle, and we don’t need
any extra data beyond the a priori arguments of the type above.

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zaarn
There is degrees to freedom of speech and until the chinese invent telepathy,
freedom of thought is preserved, always.

But to the first point I just made; you can have freedom of opinions and
freedom of facts. The former means you are free to state your opinion on
things and it's something you get for example in germany. The later means you
can state anything you want as a fact, regardless of if it's true and if you
know it's true. That part is something most countries, even the US, regulate
to some extend (false advertising in medical supplies for example).

Spreading false facts about a pandemic ought to be regulated by law, you do
not have freedom of fact and never had it. You continue to have freedom of
opinion in a lot of countries and IMO the number of countries that have it
hasn't change since the pandemic started.

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raxxorrax
I think censorship doesn't really work anymore. It is maybe restricted to
certain demographics, but we have pluralistic sources of information that
cannot be undone completely. So we are lucky, but censorship can still do a
lot of damage.

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KiranRao0
While I certainly hope you're right, I'm always hesitant to become complacent
in areas related to censorship.

