It is a recurring theme in political circles that giant digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube engage in bad behavior—distributing disinformation, allowing hate speech, removing conservative opinions, and so on—in part because they are protected from legal liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says they aren’t responsible for content posted by their users.
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Ralphdickerson
In this discussion, no one explicitly mentioned the inability to trust government to truthfully label misinformation; as we saw during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, government labeled as "misinformation" claims that the act would cause people to lose their preexisting healthcare coverage. President Obama repeatedly said, "If you like your healthcare you can keep your healthcare." His healthcare czar, I cannot correctly spell her name, even created a video in which she said it was absolutely false that people would lose existing healthcare coverage. As we now know, claims by the Obama administration of "if you like your healthcare you can keep your healthcare" were in fact misinformation. Bill Maher rated this claim by the Obama administration as a lie. If you give government the power to force "misinformation" off the internet, government will abuse this power and use it to scrub the internet to take away information critical of government, regardless of the political affiliation of the person leading the government.
Monday, August 2, 2021 Report this