God help us. A free speech gauleiter. They used to be called Stasi.
Instead of throwing insults about, let's please engage in conversation... and if you still disagree with me after reading the following... debate.
That said...
Free speech is extremely important. Individuals must have the right to free discourse otherwise we creep into totalitarian regimes.
At the same time, completely unrestricted free speech is clearly undesirable. For example, you can't shout, "Fire!," in a crowded theater when no fire is present. And drawing from current political events... gag orders are sometimes placed on individuals to prevent them from intimidating jurors. Free speech cannot be an absolute right regardless of what's said.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously stated, "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
And yet, here we are in the 21st century, where, currently, you are entitled to your own facts without even necessarily knowing that what you think to be facts are, actually, not factual.
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Perhaps my previous posts conflated two matters with regard to public statements. That of attribution. And that of fact.
With regard to attribution - I think it's going to get worse and worse due to AI. AI will shortly advance to the point where it will be possible to create fake videos showing anyone whatsoever voicing anything whatsoever you desire to be said. And social media - including foreign actors inimical to current governance - will amplify such posts - and indeed will create them.
I don't think, though, that this will be a major problem. Because, within a few years, videos will be digitally signed, proving their source (this is inevitable). And such digital signatures can be made safe even from quantum computing. In future, you'll know for sure, where posts originate, and can disregard posts from sources you don't trust.
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Yet, there remains the matter of factual posts, versus completely made up content.
And this brings me back to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan quotation. "... you are not entitled to your own facts."
What does this mean or imply?
As I've argued above, free speech is currently too free. There's far too little curb for telling outright lies. If it's a crime to yell, "Fire!," in a crowded theater that's not actually on fire... because in the rush to exit, people may well die, perhaps even 10s or possibly 100s of people, then why doesn't some sort of curb exist against, for example, claiming that covid isn't real, it's make believe, or that covid vaccination is unnecessary because you can simply take ivermectin if infected to cure yourself, even if this may result in thousands or millions of unnecessary deaths - orders of magnitude worse than shouting, "Fire!," in a theater.
The "yelling fire" versus "covid vaccinations are unnecessary" argument I've posed doesn't precisely overlap...
In fact, I think that you should be free to express doubt in covid vaccination, provided that your expression of doubt can be flagged as running counter to accepted science/medical opinion.
Granted... it's going to be complicated as hell to update free speech laws to the 21st century... but I think it's doable. But if it's not doable, then we're fucked... because you will be entitled to your own facts.
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