As I read your piece, you agree that there is a potential problem of government threats being used to suppress speech on social media but think many of Doughty's examples are mistaken. That raises the problem of how to draw a line between government actors exercising their own freedom of speech to defend their views and government actors using implied threats to pressure media companies to suppress speech the government disapproves of.
Consider the case of the Great Barrington declaration. It was attacked in very strong language — I would argue fraudulently strong given the background of the declaration's authors — by Collins and Fauci. Subsequently social media made it harder for readers to find arguments in favor of the declaration by instead steering them to arguments against. How can you tell whether that was Collins and Fauci exercising their free speech or Collins and Fauci pressuring the media companies with an implied threat? "Very nice restaurant you have. It would be too bad if something happened to it."
My conclusion is that, because of the problem of distinguishing between speech and threats, you can't prevent the speech. What you can do is to require all such speech to be public, as Fauci's, in this case, was, but as many of the communications that Doughty complains of were not. Media users can then decide for themselves what is being suppressed by threats and what media companies do or don't yield to such threats.
That was the theme of my substack post today on the case.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/murthy-v-missouri
"Those factors don't change when you saturate the market with trojan scripts. "
Sure they do. The more trojans are out there the greater the incentive to back up more often. The more often you back up, the less you are willing to pay.
Also, the more trojans are out there, the more likely it is that their authors share information about which targets pay up, increasing the cost to you of a generous payment.
That said, I would expect the major market effect to be on factors other than price--better protected computers in general and fewer vulnerable computers per spammer. That's analogous to the way in which the returns from burglary fall as the number of burglars increases.
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Defending the First Amendment
As I read your piece, you agree that there is a potential problem of government threats being used to suppress speech on social media but think many of Doughty's examples are mistaken. That raises the problem of how to draw a line between government actors exercising their own freedom of speech to defend their views and government actors using implied threats to pressure media companies to suppress speech the government disapproves of. Consider the case of the Great Barrington declaration. It was attacked in very strong language — I would argue fraudulently strong given the background of the declaration's authors — by Collins and Fauci. Subsequently social media made it harder for readers to find arguments in favor of the declaration by instead steering them to arguments against. How can you tell whether that was Collins and Fauci exercising their free speech or Collins and Fauci pressuring the media companies with an implied threat? "Very nice restaurant you have. It would be too bad if something happened to it." My conclusion is that, because of the problem of distinguishing between speech and threats, you can't prevent the speech. What you can do is to require all such speech to be public, as Fauci's, in this case, was, but as many of the communications that Doughty complains of were not. Media users can then decide for themselves what is being suppressed by threats and what media companies do or don't yield to such threats. That was the theme of my substack post today on the case. https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/murthy-v-missouri
Re: Doesn't make sense
"Those factors don't change when you saturate the market with trojan scripts. "
Sure they do. The more trojans are out there the greater the incentive to back up more often. The more often you back up, the less you are willing to pay.
Also, the more trojans are out there, the more likely it is that their authors share information about which targets pay up, increasing the cost to you of a generous payment.
That said, I would expect the major market effect to be on factors other than price--better protected computers in general and fewer vulnerable computers per spammer. That's analogous to the way in which the returns from burglary fall as the number of burglars increases.