
How alarmist rhetoric is informing draconian speech laws in the Global South - DyslexicAtheist
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/repress-redress-what-the-war-on-terror-can-teach-us-about-fighting-misinformation/
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pjc50
Oh this is good. And it extends beyond the global south:

> Instead of exhausting all redressive options before turning to repression,
> policymakers operated in reverse, treating politics as something one resorts
> to only after violence fails. Instead of redressing the root causes of
> political discontent, they mandated the military to prosecute an unwinnable
> global war on its symptoms — with devastating consequences for life and
> liberty both abroad and at home.

Substitute "police" in there and you have the BLM situation. A hundred days
and nights of teargassing the public rather than addressing their political
demands, i.e. that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in
the streets on mere suspicion of a crime, and that such crimes should be
effectively prosecuted resulting in conviction and imprisonment of the
individuals responsible and any co-conspirators.

> Political grievances, by contrast, run deep and are easier to build a
> sustained strategy around. If, for example, Russia ends up exploiting the
> marginalization of African Americans in order to sow domestic discord, as
> suggested in Thomas Rid’s New York Times op-ed (Rid, 2020), then the policy
> response should be twofold. Yes, we should detect and uproot Russian
> propaganda infrastructure where practicable. But, policymakers should also
> seek to redress the mistreatment and social injustice that made audiences
> receptive to such propaganda in the first place.

Well, that's not going to happen, is it?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Well, that's not going to happen, is it?

I think that the working-class prosperity the US enjoyed from the 1950s
through the 1970s was not just because the US was the only major economy not
devastated by war. I think it was also because business owners were afraid of
communism, and were therefore treating their employees somewhat better, to
head off any ideas they might have of getting a better deal by revolution.
Something like that could happen again... if business owners become concerned
enough about the possibility of the workers revolting.

~~~
Nasrudith
The "working class" in that context doesn't mean the whole working class
including those discriminated against. They tend to get ignored when talking
about the good old days of the "in group" as usual. They had an artifically
deflated labor pool that kept out competitors driving up their wages,
effectively a cartel. This bigotry in labor was also the seed of their
downfall as those excluded started their own and undid the monopoly on labor
bargining. Cartels either hold the world back or are passed by it. The
gatekeeping approach has failed recursively with non-union shop prevalence,
increased automation paired with professionalization as opposed to trade
shifts, and outsourcing.

From what little I can tell about many European labor union styles they
avoided this shortsighted xenophobic fracturing of their bargining power.

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mola
This is so important. It's been the zeitgeist for a while now to avoid trust
at all cost. symptoms of the zeitgeist in censoring solutions like the article
shows; Technologists obsession with decentralization and a zero trust monetary
system; economist obsession with game theory and rational quantity optimizing
individual agents models.

Don't get me wrong, these models are useful, but they are perceived like laws
of nature, or even religion where any other, especially, qualitative
description of reality is _automatically_ considered wrong and against dogma.

These things got accepted is truth because these ideas were developed while
the US went in to a huge economical boom post WW2, and by association are
perceived to be the causes of this boom. At the same time, Soviet Russia
failed model for society and the atrocities committed against its citizens are
perceived as proof of the danger in any departure from this dogma. The
naturalization of these values; the rise of social media; and information
technology. created the perfect storm for a complete erosion of trust in
authority. Attention economy ran by people that believe business endavours can
only be rational and purely profit driven, made disinformation a standard in
media through click optimizing sensationalized content. Even science succumbed
to this: when universities started seeing themselves as businesses that need
PR to optimize some metric. These PR departments sensationalized science
communication, pumping out exaggerated reports about early stage science.
Leaving the public confused and distrustful.

Science is the core of truth In western secular culture. Now that science got
commoditized for PR purposes, we lost this last grasp at truth.

This, At the macro level, We lost trust, and we lost truth. The only
psychological/societal cohesion inducing element left is power and domination.

Distributed media is not necessarily a good thing. I think a local,
transparent distributed and heirachial forms of media might be better for
humanity.

~~~
Nasrudith
That gets it backwards - the reason for no trust is because they aren't
trustworthy. Rather than try to ensure that they are under the transparency
they clammor and cry for gatekeepers and "good old days".

It brings to mind the USSR and glasnost - once they are shown to fundamentally
be a lie "going back" is delusional and doomed to failure. It is like the joke
about the despairing old man who is now forever known as "the guy who shagged
a goat" despite decades farming, building docks, and fishing.

~~~
mola
Not looking to go back. Just forward in a different direction.

Some institutions were never trust worthy, others were for a while. But the
assumption of no institution is trustworthy is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Why would an institution want to be trust worthy if no one would believe it?
And if it actually hurts it?

We need to demand our institutions to be trustworthy, and make those that
aren't pay for it.

We shouldn't just say "fuck it, everybody lies, I guess I'll lie a bit too".
Or say "of course they lied, it's the rational thing to do"

That's what we do when we opposed the very idea of being honest for honesty's
sake.

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text70
"Where the rewards for merit are the greatest, that is where you will find the
best citizens." \--excerpt from The History of the Peloponnesian War

I think it boils down to what society rewards as merit. Reward a kid with
millions from minecraft videos on youtube, while the Phd in Humanities,
struggles to pay the bills is ripe for a culture of mistrust. While this is
just a simple example, I think it illustrates how prioritizing and rewarding
knowledge and talent, and the good aspects of a person, and a citizen, can
lead to more cohesive, and better societies.

~~~
Nasrudith
That doesn't seem to be an issue of trust so much as demonstrating that
uncomfortably assumptions they "think are fair" should don't hold true at all.
Skilled weavers may have thought their craft virtuous but they were throughly
bested by cloth mills and vast automated of early industrialization.

Sure those involved may feel screwed over but they never were betrayed - they
just had wrong expectations that the world did not vindicate. It brings to
mind a joke about the last Phrenology graduates before the field was disproven
having the king of worthless degrees.

Fundamentally the question in both cases is "Why should everyone else support
them in their endeavors?" The kid has "because ads and views" financially and
because people want to watch it. The PhD in Humanities implicitly lacks an
audience, let alone a way to monetize it.

What is knowledge? What is talent? If they aren't defined they could be
trivially gamed. Epistemology ironically plays into it as well - how is the
knowledge validated in any way? What separates a schizophrenic crackpot who
believes that our brains are being kept in jars on the dark side of the moon
from Aristotle's lauguably bad impetus physics of projectiles except history
and how persuasive an essay is about them? Both are objextively wrong and
don't contribute anything in themselves.

If any configuration may be studied or composed regardless of validity and
rewarded it encourages a "parasitism" of making up bullshit as the path of
least resistance instead of anything remotely productive which is no good for
a system which wants to sustain itself.

Of course there are also many layered ironies in practical producitivty as a
framework as opposed to abstract intellectual theory. Theory which "escapes"
and proves useful tends to disrupt and utterly outdo the "productive" of old
rendering the former practicioners living historic artifacts.

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anm89
With him until his first major prescription was forced heavy censoring of
online platforms.

~~~
koheripbal
His article is more about the problem than the solution, which he says himself
he's unsure of.

I think we can all agree that we have a social media problem.

~~~
anm89
People communicating openly and freely over the internet doesn't seem like
much of a problem to me. The one thing he does get right IMO is that if you
want to make real progress on this stuff you have to dig into root causes. The
fact that people are rightfully distrustful of institutions isn't Facebook's
fault and. It can't be solved by censoring Facebook.

~~~
happytoexplain
>communicating openly and freely over the internet doesn't seem like much of a
problem

This is an oversimplification. Communication is the foundation for nearly 100%
of all events - good, evil, and neutral. It doesn't make sense to just call it
good or bad as part of an argument.

~~~
anm89
Right, the communication is the problem, not the medium. We don't yell at at
phone line operators because nazis have cell phones and we shouldn't.

~~~
koheripbal
Social Media has a specific format that encourages bubbles, extremism, and
mob-type behaviors.

We need to design social media better to eliminate these tendencies.

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flower1143
True. The NetzDG law has inspired censorious laws around the world.

