That's the thing. Other countries don't have "their share" of bigoted media, if that refers to have a proportional amount that the US does. It's not really possible to have an actual career as a holocaust denier in some of those countries.
The US is far and away the worst for this.
Only two parties ever got successfully banned in Germany due to those laws.
One was the direct successor to Hitler’s party created shortly after the war.
And the other was the KPD, the communist party of Germany.
And that despite having some very mask-off neonazi parties like the NPD.
So it worked twice. Seems like you need to apply it to the AfD, if it's reasonable to do so. That's the nice thing about these laws -- you get to apply reason to them. There is room for interpretation. What would have been the outcome if you had no such law? Would the direct successor to Hitler's party have stood a chance? Would they now be part of the discourse?
It's nice to have the option to say "this will destroy us all and maybe we shouldn't do it."
And I don’t see how speech restrictions solve the problem with everyone vying for outrage and engagement on social media.
Algorithms promote that stuff. It's fine to have those ideas, but the you believe in the concept of such networks being in some way for the benefit of discourse, then they're badly broken. Algorithms are tilted to promote specifically bad ideas.
Imagine an actual town square where if you said "seems like things are okay" it comes out as a squeak, but if you say "I think we should burn down city hall" it is directly beamed into the ears of everyone in the city at full volume.
What's going to happen there? It'll be find because most people are reasonable? What about the 1% who aren't? How many is that? 34M people maybe?
If you attempt to regulate algorithms, they'd probably be protected as speech under US law.
You're basically locked into this path with the first amendment as it is. It will forever stuff garbage into all your feeds and you'll never even see people you follow.
It's not about whether or not you have it, it's about whether it's a good idea. This site would say it's always a good idea, even as democracy goes up in flames.
The last 40 years have been boiling the frog. Rush Limbaugh reading out the names of gay men who died of AIDS and laughing. Constantly platforming hate on your talk shows. Slowly sinking deeper and deeper into hatred because "it sells."
You set no limits and incentivized a bad outcome. Here is your bad outcome.
Other Western democracies are coming close, but aren't there yet. Imagine if you were the only one. Wouldn't that be embarrassing?
In the UK there are numerous examples of people being arrested for perfectly reasonable speech or even jokes. In Germany people are getting dragged out of their homes for criticizing politicians. In France, Macron has sued people for perfectly reasonable satire and criticism.
That would all sound absolutely horrible if we weren't watching the alternative play out in real-time in the US. A despot has seized power in part because you have absolutely no restriction on speech. Your networks spent years prepping the ground. And once you get one of those in power, your free speech laws aren't going to matter anyway. He's just going to tear them up. He's doing it now.
Other nations realized that the chance of such a person seizing power outweighs the downsides of having some restriction on speech.
Your social networks are keyed to promote material that enrages and therefore engages. This breaks the marketplace of ideas by promoting, very specifically, bad ideas because they're more engaging, artificially extending both their reach and lifespan. I mean why are we suddenly talking about flat earthers again? Because it's engaging. No amount of good speech can overcome this. And you can't restrict the algorithms because that's also free speech, and on those networks is basically the only place speech is happening these days.
It was always going to turn out this way. You set the parameter to allow anything, you incentivized the behavior that funnels down to only one thing.
I wonder what it would take for some people to admit this.
Mental health concerns (or lack thereof) aside, I think it's fine to have a bell to bell ban on phones. Children do need to learn to focus on something a task that may not exactly thrill them, and phones are just infinitely distracting.
I mean I'd support a ban on, you know, reading a novel while you're supposed to be paying attention to math.
We're allowed to have some rules.
Social media suffers from the same problem. The difference is that the responses to prompts are human generated. They are still filtered by a company with an agenda.
At the very least this filters on engagement, which pretty much universally means the worst ideas are promoted because they increase engagement.
It is directing our entire discourse toward stupidity.
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That's the thing. Other countries don't have "their share" of bigoted media, if that refers to have a proportional amount that the US does. It's not really possible to have an actual career as a holocaust denier in some of those countries. The US is far and away the worst for this.
It's not about whether or not you have it, it's about whether it's a good idea. This site would say it's always a good idea, even as democracy goes up in flames.
The last 40 years have been boiling the frog. Rush Limbaugh reading out the names of gay men who died of AIDS and laughing. Constantly platforming hate on your talk shows. Slowly sinking deeper and deeper into hatred because "it sells." You set no limits and incentivized a bad outcome. Here is your bad outcome. Other Western democracies are coming close, but aren't there yet. Imagine if you were the only one. Wouldn't that be embarrassing?
It's still distracting
Mental health concerns (or lack thereof) aside, I think it's fine to have a bell to bell ban on phones. Children do need to learn to focus on something a task that may not exactly thrill them, and phones are just infinitely distracting. I mean I'd support a ban on, you know, reading a novel while you're supposed to be paying attention to math. We're allowed to have some rules.
Social media isn't really different
Social media suffers from the same problem. The difference is that the responses to prompts are human generated. They are still filtered by a company with an agenda. At the very least this filters on engagement, which pretty much universally means the worst ideas are promoted because they increase engagement. It is directing our entire discourse toward stupidity.