All nations are under pressure to hide information from their citizens, whether it’s for covering up political scandals or suppressing political opposition. If you give them the tools, they will eventually use them. So you can’t give them the tools.
The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.
Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors.
I agree on the philosophical part, letting our governments act opaquely under the veil of national security, inevitably leads them to turn on their citizens. But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.
> Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors.
> But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.
You know, democracy obviously has its downsides. Should we abolish democracy because of that?
But in case of the democracy there is no paradox. Democracy is about will of people defining the government. When it is the other way around (the government defines the will of people), it is called authoritarianism.
So basically you are arguing for the authoritarianism against the democracy. It is just so you seemingly does not like the word authoritarianism and like the word democracy, and are trying to justify the discrepancy by some kind of paradox (which there is none).
Even IF you are right about people will destroy the democracy by their will if that will does not formed by the government, there is still no paradox and that is still called the authoritarianism. By that, you simply point out one of the weakness of the democracy, and suggest the authoritarianism as a better alternative (even if you are refusing to use the correct definitions).
You should really read those Wikipedia articles. Creating and explaining your own definitions and circular logic make you sound like a fool.
Right now, there are foreign actors helping right-extremist campaigns in Europe. Those parties' goal is ultimately converting to Authoritarianism. You can connect the dots yourself now.
We already have. These foreign misinformation actors we're talking about have already convinced a majority of the voting population that democracy is bad, and they have voted to end democracy, and now democracy is in the process of ending.
This could have been prevented by blocking foreign misinformation.
Who decides what is allowed to be covered up? Surely not the public, if your goal is to hide those same “dangerous” things from the public.
Historically, this kind of control has always been a favored tool of the corrupt. If you build an apparatus of censorship, it will be used to harm the public.
The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.