You can’t use the full power of government sanctions and criminal charges to silence the people you disagree with (for whatever reason. Even if they are valid reasons) so you try to find creative ways to punish them. Well… not really “creative”, since the idea of excommunication is not new. But my point is that this is still about using power to silence voices you don’t like - you just use a slightly different power in a slightly different way.
Excommunication? What? This is requiring journalistic integrity to work in journalism, just like how medical malpractice can make you lose your medical license or legal malpractice can get you disbarred. There is precidence for this system, and I chose it specifically to reduce punishments and make sure those affected can still make a living.
I even point out one of the big issues of truth being difficult to define, and how this system might just push the problem down the road, and wonder if the actual problem (politics becomming unbound by reality for political gain, or a loss of political integrity) can even be regulated at all.
You want to silence certain voices (the one telling lies) but can’t/won’t use proper government sanctions, so instead you coordinate the community to keep distance from these voices, hoping to deter people from voicing them and preventing the ones too determined to be deterred from getting any reach. This is excommunication.
My problem is not with the exact way you are trying to censor your political opponents - it’s in the very fact you are set out to censor them. You don’t have to listen to them, you don’t have to give them a platform, but if you try to establish a wide system to prevent other people from hearing these voices - that’s censoring.
Is medical malpractice censorship? Legal malpractice? Financial malpractice? Engineering malpractice? Academic malpractice?
I don’t want to use government sanctions explicitly because government decisions tend toward political or popular outcomes, not reasonable outcomes. When a doctor SAs their patients, we don’t saction them; we revoke their medical license. Fiduciary negligence calls for a lawsuit, not direct government action (although lawsuits have issues as well).
I’m not advocating for community action either (I would hope individuals would check for integrity, but that obviously doesn’t happen enough ATM), shunning or excuding people from certain communities is something I want to avoid. This is definitely not excommunication (even if we broaden the term beyond it’s explicitly catholic meaning), I very much do not want to banish or otherwise impact affected persons’ quality of life. It’s simply about practising a privileged profession.
You should be able to say whatever you want without government censorship, but we shouldn’t be giving all ideas privileged platforms. Libel is a very difficult thing to prosecute for, but I think we need to challenge more publically broadcast statements. To broadcast as “News” or something authoritative would be a privilege, like practing medicine or law.
Even in this hypothetical situation, the definition of reasonable accuracy would have to be determined methodologically, as political entities and the public cannot be trusted to decide in good faith. That’s the crux of trying to implement public deplatforming; objective value judgments. We can get useably close with peer-reviewed papers, but it’s still vulnerable to political and monetary influence.
To summarize: I do not want to silence anyone, just restrict access to the official-looking megaphone and clipboard. Even then, how that access is restricted is a difficult problem considering the conflicting interests around it.
but we shouldn’t be giving all ideas privileged platforms
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it’s his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word “news”. Which… I don’t think is going to be very effective. They’ll just do this whole “we can’t call ourselves news because the government doesn’t want you to know what we are going to tell you” shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.
You can’t use the full power of government sanctions and criminal charges to silence the people you disagree with (for whatever reason. Even if they are valid reasons) so you try to find creative ways to punish them. Well… not really “creative”, since the idea of excommunication is not new. But my point is that this is still about using power to silence voices you don’t like - you just use a slightly different power in a slightly different way.
Excommunication? What? This is requiring journalistic integrity to work in journalism, just like how medical malpractice can make you lose your medical license or legal malpractice can get you disbarred. There is precidence for this system, and I chose it specifically to reduce punishments and make sure those affected can still make a living.
I even point out one of the big issues of truth being difficult to define, and how this system might just push the problem down the road, and wonder if the actual problem (politics becomming unbound by reality for political gain, or a loss of political integrity) can even be regulated at all.
You want to silence certain voices (the one telling lies) but can’t/won’t use proper government sanctions, so instead you coordinate the community to keep distance from these voices, hoping to deter people from voicing them and preventing the ones too determined to be deterred from getting any reach. This is excommunication.
My problem is not with the exact way you are trying to censor your political opponents - it’s in the very fact you are set out to censor them. You don’t have to listen to them, you don’t have to give them a platform, but if you try to establish a wide system to prevent other people from hearing these voices - that’s censoring.
Is medical malpractice censorship? Legal malpractice? Financial malpractice? Engineering malpractice? Academic malpractice?
I don’t want to use government sanctions explicitly because government decisions tend toward political or popular outcomes, not reasonable outcomes. When a doctor SAs their patients, we don’t saction them; we revoke their medical license. Fiduciary negligence calls for a lawsuit, not direct government action (although lawsuits have issues as well).
I’m not advocating for community action either (I would hope individuals would check for integrity, but that obviously doesn’t happen enough ATM), shunning or excuding people from certain communities is something I want to avoid. This is definitely not excommunication (even if we broaden the term beyond it’s explicitly catholic meaning), I very much do not want to banish or otherwise impact affected persons’ quality of life. It’s simply about practising a privileged profession.
You should be able to say whatever you want without government censorship, but we shouldn’t be giving all ideas privileged platforms. Libel is a very difficult thing to prosecute for, but I think we need to challenge more publically broadcast statements. To broadcast as “News” or something authoritative would be a privilege, like practing medicine or law.
Even in this hypothetical situation, the definition of reasonable accuracy would have to be determined methodologically, as political entities and the public cannot be trusted to decide in good faith. That’s the crux of trying to implement public deplatforming; objective value judgments. We can get useably close with peer-reviewed papers, but it’s still vulnerable to political and monetary influence.
To summarize: I do not want to silence anyone, just restrict access to the official-looking megaphone and clipboard. Even then, how that access is restricted is a difficult problem considering the conflicting interests around it.
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it’s his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word “news”. Which… I don’t think is going to be very effective. They’ll just do this whole “we can’t call ourselves news because the government doesn’t want you to know what we are going to tell you” shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.