alt Hacker NewsFrom a libertarian perspective, I also thought this was a bad law. It totally abandons faith in the idea of free speech, and admits that China’s “great firewall” was the right idea. I think it’s better to document any lies that were being spread on TikTok, and counter them with truth.
If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society, and all that’s left to do is argue over which group of shadowy billionaires should get to control everyone.
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> If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society
While I believe in free speech, free speech isn't some panacea. Nor does it magically exist without protection from powerful interests. What good does speaking up do, if "algorithms" managing the majority of speech have big money riding on promoting irresponsible speech at the expense of sidelining responsible speech.
This isn't a neutral open marketplace of ideas, battling on merit. It is a pervasively manipulated market for profit, and those who will pay to tilt it.
The right way to deal with surveillance and dossier based manipulation by external actors, is not to pick on one actor, but to make surveillance and dossier based manipulation illegal for all actors.
Nobody buys a TV wanting their watching habits to end up impacting what ads they see in web views, and vice versa.
That kind of behind the scenes coordination of unpermissioned data, as leverage against the sources of the data, is deeply anti-libertarian. Anti-liberty in both right and left formulations. (The idea that "libertarian" means the rich have a pass to do anything they can achieve with money, underhanded or not, is a corruption of any concept of individual liberty.)
The enshittification of the world is being driven by this hostile business model. Via permissionless (or permissioned by dark pattern) coordinated privacy violations. And it isn't just foreign adversaries who are benefiting at societies cost.
The constant collecting, collating, and converging of data on anyone doing anything that pervades the private/public economy now is deeply parasitical.
Free speech, like every other right, only achieves its real value in a healthy environment. I.e. a healthy idea competitive environment. I believe in voting too. But similarly, voting only matters in a healthy competitive candidate environment.
>and all that’s left to do is argue over which group of shadowy billionaires should get to control everyone
Whichever is better for the majority of people. This the same answer for democracy
i think the "but that wont work" is about visibility.
who are you intending to tell about these tiktok lies? how do you know if youve told the right people? what algorithm is going to pick up your corrections as equally viral as the lies were?
if youre actually going to do it, i think you need your own shadowy billionaire funding paying the various social media companies to pretend that your version of the truth is popular. maybe multiple shadowy billionaires.