this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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100%. We learned this lesson centuries ago during the Enlightenment. Censorship is harmful to society. Sure, if there were some magical and neutral arbiter of information, maybe it could work if democratically controlled. By there isn’t, and these tools are not democratically controlled. Every time people or groups get too powerful, they abuse the system for their own advantage. We should always presume companies like Google do the same using the age old premise of “protecting the children.” How many violations has this adage defended over the years.
This started with pointing out the author is a rabid conspiracy crank. His judgement for censorship was that these search engines didn't show the "truth" of his crazy conspiracies about the moon landing and vaccines, and he flat out called actual science and knowledge false.
This isn't a matter of censorship at large and what it means for society. This is simply a crazy conspiracy moron getting mad that his preferred false information is no longer being disseminated and he's mad that actual science is instead.
This guy straight up suggested that he would prefer not seeing science and would instead prefer to see his falsities instead. This isn't a matter of censorship, this is a matter of willful anti-intelligence.
You can claim "but I'm an adult, I can figure things out for myself" but you have to remember: so is everyone else, including all the anti-science, anti-vaxx, MAGA types. They have actively been causing harm for years now and this stops them in their tracks. It's not censorship to throw out junk data and keep proper data. That's just good information hygiene at a certain point. You can still find articles that cover these conspiracy theories on these search engines but you won't get fake news sites purporting lies as truth because the availability of these things has caused more harm to our current, modern society than any amount of censorship has ever come close to.
The idea of the democratization of information has proven to be an abject failure. Unfortunately information does need to be gatekept by arbiters, and we have only proved over and over again for the past decade.
Relying on a single place for all information is also a complete mistake. There's a good reason why every academic study or decent journalism always insists on multiple sources. You can't trust that you'll ever get the picture from one place.
Should search engines not have to do this? Yes. In an ideal world. But we don't live in one, and now we're likening these types of anti-science cranks to the scientific victims of anti-science cranks in the past. What we really learned from the Enlightenment is that those who pursue true knowledge should not be censored and those that reject it should be quieted.
And yes, finding the right people to be arbiters is hard. Yet this fucking guy should absolutely not be the arbiter of deciding what is and isn't censorship.
I still disagree. Arbiters of factual information can't be companies, and can't be governments. Currently we don't have a proper arbiter; I would argue that finding one isn't "hard", it's straight-out impossible.
On the same line, who is it up to to decide what does it mean to pursue true knowledge?
I strongly believe that censorship is not the answer- it's not the answer to anything. Let's say you are in a circle of strangers, and one of them starts shouting to the others that you did something horrible. The solution to this problem is not to kill him, but to present a different source of information that can stand more stable than is (ex: I wasn't there at that time, I have history of not doing that kind of stuff, you claim this for your own gain, ...).
The solution to ignorance is not to shut down dissident opinions or theories, as flawed or dangerous as they may be, but to be open to educate.
In this specific instance pertaining to search engines, the correct way to make misinformation available would be to provide appropriate disclaimers with reputable and independent sources, not to censor.
I mean, if you want to get away from the actual situation at hand, this entire argument is pretty moot since it's so open-ended.
But what we have here is a conspiracy theorist calling the idea of only being served science and not misinformation that he would prefer as "censorship". There's not much argument to be made in his favour.