
Elizabeth Warren proposes criminal penalties for spreading voting disinfo online - AndrewBissell
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/29/warren-proposes-criminal-penalties-for-spreading-disinformation-online.html
======
maxharris
Just last night I listened to this podcast which Steven Pinker recommended on
Twitter:

"Episode 39 of Jacob Mchangama's podcast history of free speech. How Weimar
Germany, ambivalent about free speech and vulnerable to censorship, quickly
gave way to Nazi tyranny."

I can't recommend this highly enough, because Warren's proposal seems to be
making the exact same mistake as the one made by the social democrats of
Weimar Germany.

[http://traffic.libsyn.com/freespeechhistory/Episode_39_-_The...](http://traffic.libsyn.com/freespeechhistory/Episode_39_-_The_Totalitarian_Temptation_Part_2_Der_Untergang_27012020.mp3)

EDIT: Warren constraining it to just voting doesn't do much to address the
lesson here: if the _government_ is put in charge of determining what is true
and false, that makes it easier for a fascist government to consolidate its
power. This is exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s. This is all
covered in the podcast linked immediately above.

Downvoting me won't stop history from repeating itself. Please listen!

~~~
AndrewBissell
There are huge Twitter meltdowns happening over this right now because CNBC
put out a tweet without the "voting" disqualifier in the headline -- i.e.
making it seem like Warren wants to criminalize _all_ posting of info which is
deemed "disinformation."

I agree that would be Orwellian, but what Warren has proposed is much more
narrow: she wants to make it illegal specifically to post disinformation about
_voting_. So, for instance, it would be illegal to tweet "Go vote in Iowa on
February 4!" when the vote is actually scheduled for February 3.

~~~
datashow
No. Warren did not narrow it to only about voting.

Here is her own website: [https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/fighting-digital-
disinform...](https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/fighting-digital-
disinformation)

Edit: after read through the webpage, I realized that although the webpage
talks about lots of things, but she did only propose to criminalize
disinformation about voting. But this still feels dangerous. It's really like
a tactic from authoritarian governments. They would talk about
"disinformation" as a broad concept, and propose to criminalize the worst
ones, and then expand the scope of regulation under the same concept.

