Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let’s not emulate him.
Let’s not pretend that whichever western states are included in “us” here aren’t similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.
I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.
Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.
None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it’s either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn’t mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.
Yeah Tucker should have been thrown off the air years ago for hate speech, not just talking to a Russian. Talking to Putin is nothing compared to the years of transphobic racist drivel he’s spewed. It’s such a clear bias in what free press in America actually entails.
Societies which stifle dissent, especially using the power of the state, grow weaker because they aren’t able to effectively adapt to change. Remember it is not too long ago that advocating for gay marriage would have been seen as morally deviant and repugnant. But strong speech protections allow us as a society to have that discussion and come to the correct conclusion which is that it’s fine to be gay, that love is love, and that gay people deserve equal protection under the law.
Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.
What makes it especially terrifying, and I’m speaking from personal experience, is that you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there’s also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that’s being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I’m not really a fan of that speech being free.
Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn’t even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it’s one conversation vs all the time they’ve spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don’t always win in the marketplace of ideas.
But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it’s always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.
but I’d propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces
You say that, but do you have any evidence for it? Are we just going to brush off the mentally unwell people that cults like QAnon prey upon as being a lost cause? As being people who would just be violent because the seeds of sin in their souls compel them to? You’re just arguing for a secularized version of Calvinism that is even more reliant on faith because it lacks the element of theological reasoning.
And that maybe it’s not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things
Maybe this obfuscates relevant factors, like how money controls media and it’s not just a matter of private citizens vs other private citizens.
What you’re describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech
It takes more of an argument than you have so far put forward to prove this, though I agree with you in a way that I suspect you would reject. Specifically, the blackballing of journalists and other sources who provide more useful explanations than exist in mainstream American Discourse is definitely part of the reason people resort to cults.
That said, if we are discounting questions like Class consciousness, your thesis falls apart entirely. These bubbles are largely self-selecting, based on marketing algorithms for the consumer-lifestyle brands that you call American politics. There is nothing stopping a brain-rotted Twitter Q freak from going on some socdem hive on Reddit, but they don’t want to and they have been encouraged to this mindset by various forms of conditioning on the multi-billion dollar skinner boxes that are social media platforms. Of course, there are less polarized spaces and ones designed for “open debate” (and again Reddit provides an excellent example of these empty gestures) but overwhelmingly what we see there is more tribalism, just with a different set of etiquette.
This shows one of the many significant failures of idealist fetishization of open society: People only have so much time and effort to put into research, especially more nebulous ideological subjects. Ideology is first and foremost a survival strategy, and people will budget their finite resources based on what they are able to project as best serving them from the limited information they operate within, starting from environments that are overwhelmingly controlled by the rich in neoliberal societies. You already have your goddam Marketplace of Idea and it has failed.
free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on.
Neutrality doesn’t exist and the bodies that claim to be neutral are just question-begging their own ideology.
Some people used to think that the internet would end war, but they were operating on a type of idealism similar to your own.
Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.
The other question I have is:
What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive.
Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?
I suppose time will tell whether that trend will grow to the point of being really significant. I don’t really trust the state as it stands to regulate speech in my interests. I do still believe in deplatforming hate speech when possible, and I don’t really see the marketplace of ideas as being reliable due to certain ideas having stronger signals, either from monetary backing or grabbing attention. As things stand though, I don’t really have a better answer than just personally using the fediverse over big social media sites.
The corporatization of the news media literally started with Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes who eventually found Rupert Murdoch to fund their vision with Fox News.
You know why they wanted to start their own media organization? Because they didn’t like public broadcasting, the organization for public broadcasting, the organization created by Lyndon B Johnson and Congress to fund public media (which helps fund NPR and PBS). They thought that public broadcasting would favor Democrats too much (you know that whole the truth has a liberal bias thing). So they decided to create a media organization in which they could control the narrative instead of letting independent journalists do their job.
It took until 1996 for them to get everything together with Rupert Murdoch and the rest is history. The corporatization of other media outlets was in direct response to how Fox News ran their business because they cared more about ratings and making money than actual journalism, which caused the other news media organizations to follow suit.
So you could very much make the argument that Fox News was the root of the issue, depending on how you look at it. You can either say Fox News ruined the atmosphere around journalism and they started the backslide on the slippery slope, or you can argue that it was an inevitable outcome of deregulation. It becomes a philosophical argument at that point.
Do you know why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996? Because on January 3, 1996 the Telecommunications act of 1996 was enacted. This completely deregulated the American media market and led to market concentration and is the reason corporations like Sinclair now reach 39% of the American market. (The max reach they are legally allowed to have). Murdoch announced Fox News less than a month later on January 31st, 1996 before Clinton had even signed the bill into law.
So even if you think the outcome was inevitable, Fox News certainly jumped on it faster than anyone else and were the ones to start the enshittification of news media.
I have to agree with your overall sentiment. However, there’s at least a valid argument to be made that providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths in a way that few examples of protected speech do.
There’s not an argument about the danger of platforming here, because his power doesn’t come from a media position. He’s the head of a State. His power is self sustaining, and is going to exist regardless if he’s interviewed or not.
I’m sure Tucker is going to do a shitty, glazing interview, but that’s pretty regular for him.
George Bush is considered by many to be a war criminal
Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
“First of all, it should be remembered that Putin is not just a president of an aggressor country, but he is wanted by the International Criminal Court and accused of genocide and war crimes,” MEP Urmas Paet, who previously served as Estonia’s foreign minister, told Newsweek.
we being free people can discern fact from fiction
Hmmm. I’m not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Where, exactly, should the line be draw then between “reporting” and “being a mouthpiece”.
Not sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, nor that it can’t be apparent when it’s been crossed.
The EU has good reason to fear anything that emboldens Putin or works in even the slightest to increase his chances of prevailing in Ukraine. It’s quite clear that a victorious Russia is an existential threat to its neighbors. With all this discernment of fact that’s going on, it seems like that should be fairly easy to understand.
push for platforms to not give airtime to hacks like Tucker.
How is this not exactly that?
The easier solution is to not grant the government that kind of censorship power,
To my knowledge he’s not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where’s the censorship?
I read that. And I read the rest of the article, where they were very vague about what those might be aside from travel restrictions, said it could be a long time before anything happens if at all, and that the folks trying to do this don’t have the power to do it alone.
Consider that optics matter just as much as the actual content of the sanctions. Even if it’s basically a nothingburger of travel restrictions, he will play this up to his audience as being persecuted by The Establishment for speaking truth to power.
In other words, they’re giving him what he wants. Or do you think he interviewed Putin just for fun? Or because he really likes him?
The so-called “state of Israel” is blatantly violating an ICJ order to cease their ongoing genocide in Palestine. Should it be illegal to interview Benyamin Netanyahu?
Notably, Putin doesn’t really need a mouthpiece. He’s not some unheard of hermit with no power to spread how ideology, he’s a dictator of an extremely large country. This is seen as in poor taste because it’s implying the former, while being an expression of the latter.
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Let’s not pretend that whichever western states are included in “us” here aren’t similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.
Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.
None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it’s either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn’t mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.
Yeah Tucker should have been thrown off the air years ago for hate speech, not just talking to a Russian. Talking to Putin is nothing compared to the years of transphobic racist drivel he’s spewed. It’s such a clear bias in what free press in America actually entails.
Dude spouted great replacement theory on his fucking show! Any government or party serious about stopping fascism would have jailed him over that
I agree with you in part, but:
Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.
What makes it especially terrifying, and I’m speaking from personal experience, is that you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there’s also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that’s being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I’m not really a fan of that speech being free.
Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn’t even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it’s one conversation vs all the time they’ve spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don’t always win in the marketplace of ideas.
But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it’s always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.
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You say that, but do you have any evidence for it? Are we just going to brush off the mentally unwell people that cults like QAnon prey upon as being a lost cause? As being people who would just be violent because the seeds of sin in their souls compel them to? You’re just arguing for a secularized version of Calvinism that is even more reliant on faith because it lacks the element of theological reasoning.
Maybe this obfuscates relevant factors, like how money controls media and it’s not just a matter of private citizens vs other private citizens.
It takes more of an argument than you have so far put forward to prove this, though I agree with you in a way that I suspect you would reject. Specifically, the blackballing of journalists and other sources who provide more useful explanations than exist in mainstream American Discourse is definitely part of the reason people resort to cults.
That said, if we are discounting questions like Class consciousness, your thesis falls apart entirely. These bubbles are largely self-selecting, based on marketing algorithms for the consumer-lifestyle brands that you call American politics. There is nothing stopping a brain-rotted Twitter Q freak from going on some socdem hive on Reddit, but they don’t want to and they have been encouraged to this mindset by various forms of conditioning on the multi-billion dollar skinner boxes that are social media platforms. Of course, there are less polarized spaces and ones designed for “open debate” (and again Reddit provides an excellent example of these empty gestures) but overwhelmingly what we see there is more tribalism, just with a different set of etiquette.
This shows one of the many significant failures of idealist fetishization of open society: People only have so much time and effort to put into research, especially more nebulous ideological subjects. Ideology is first and foremost a survival strategy, and people will budget their finite resources based on what they are able to project as best serving them from the limited information they operate within, starting from environments that are overwhelmingly controlled by the rich in neoliberal societies. You already have your goddam Marketplace of Idea and it has failed.
Neutrality doesn’t exist and the bodies that claim to be neutral are just question-begging their own ideology.
Some people used to think that the internet would end war, but they were operating on a type of idealism similar to your own.
Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.
The other question I have is:
Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?
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I suppose time will tell whether that trend will grow to the point of being really significant. I don’t really trust the state as it stands to regulate speech in my interests. I do still believe in deplatforming hate speech when possible, and I don’t really see the marketplace of ideas as being reliable due to certain ideas having stronger signals, either from monetary backing or grabbing attention. As things stand though, I don’t really have a better answer than just personally using the fediverse over big social media sites.
Tucker isn’t a journalist, he’s an entertainer, or at least, a propagandist.
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Tucker is one of the people helping delegitimize the press.
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I didn’t say anything about persecuting
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The corporatization of the news media literally started with Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes who eventually found Rupert Murdoch to fund their vision with Fox News.
You know why they wanted to start their own media organization? Because they didn’t like public broadcasting, the organization for public broadcasting, the organization created by Lyndon B Johnson and Congress to fund public media (which helps fund NPR and PBS). They thought that public broadcasting would favor Democrats too much (you know that whole the truth has a liberal bias thing). So they decided to create a media organization in which they could control the narrative instead of letting independent journalists do their job.
It took until 1996 for them to get everything together with Rupert Murdoch and the rest is history. The corporatization of other media outlets was in direct response to how Fox News ran their business because they cared more about ratings and making money than actual journalism, which caused the other news media organizations to follow suit.
So you could very much make the argument that Fox News was the root of the issue, depending on how you look at it. You can either say Fox News ruined the atmosphere around journalism and they started the backslide on the slippery slope, or you can argue that it was an inevitable outcome of deregulation. It becomes a philosophical argument at that point.
Do you know why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996? Because on January 3, 1996 the Telecommunications act of 1996 was enacted. This completely deregulated the American media market and led to market concentration and is the reason corporations like Sinclair now reach 39% of the American market. (The max reach they are legally allowed to have). Murdoch announced Fox News less than a month later on January 31st, 1996 before Clinton had even signed the bill into law.
So even if you think the outcome was inevitable, Fox News certainly jumped on it faster than anyone else and were the ones to start the enshittification of news media.
I have to agree with your overall sentiment. However, there’s at least a valid argument to be made that providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths in a way that few examples of protected speech do.
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Or Winston “I am highly in favor of using poison gas on uncivilized tribes” Churchill
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Dam its starting to sound like we just need to get rid of all private press
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There’s not an argument about the danger of platforming here, because his power doesn’t come from a media position. He’s the head of a State. His power is self sustaining, and is going to exist regardless if he’s interviewed or not.
I’m sure Tucker is going to do a shitty, glazing interview, but that’s pretty regular for him.
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Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
Hmmm. I’m not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Not sure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, nor that it can’t be apparent when it’s been crossed.
The EU has good reason to fear anything that emboldens Putin or works in even the slightest to increase his chances of prevailing in Ukraine. It’s quite clear that a victorious Russia is an existential threat to its neighbors. With all this discernment of fact that’s going on, it seems like that should be fairly easy to understand.
How is this not exactly that?
To my knowledge he’s not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where’s the censorship?
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I read that. And I read the rest of the article, where they were very vague about what those might be aside from travel restrictions, said it could be a long time before anything happens if at all, and that the folks trying to do this don’t have the power to do it alone.
Consider that optics matter just as much as the actual content of the sanctions. Even if it’s basically a nothingburger of travel restrictions, he will play this up to his audience as being persecuted by The Establishment for speaking truth to power.
In other words, they’re giving him what he wants. Or do you think he interviewed Putin just for fun? Or because he really likes him?
The so-called “state of Israel” is blatantly violating an ICJ order to cease their ongoing genocide in Palestine. Should it be illegal to interview Benyamin Netanyahu?
Notably, Putin doesn’t really need a mouthpiece. He’s not some unheard of hermit with no power to spread how ideology, he’s a dictator of an extremely large country. This is seen as in poor taste because it’s implying the former, while being an expression of the latter.