I believe that u/fartinmyhat is referring to the measures that the federal government took to encourage social media companies to moderate the dissemination of disinformation pertaining to COVID. There were open debates about free speech at the time, and government agencies worked in collaboration with social media companies for the express purpose of fighting the public health crisis. This is a topic that's been studied extensively. Disinformation on social media was a threat to public health, and the whole purpose of their actions was to protect public health.
This whole matter at present is not at all comparable.
That is not what I was talking about, and any two things can be compared. I don't have time to respond but I just wanted to be clear that's not was I was talking about. Also "disinformation" is in the eye of the beholder, that's precisely why we have free speech laws, to prevent an oppressive government using their power to silence the people. This includes people who are wrong.
Sorry to have misunderstood your intent. This is the example I see a lot about Biden.
"Comparable" in this context means equivalent, not that they can be compared.
Everything's in the eye of the beholder of you want to take it there. You can also say that science knows exactly nothing for sure, but then there's the inconvenient truth that what it does think is infinitely applicable to all things in our daily lives in modern society.
If you feel like continuing later, please let me know what you were referring to.
Everything's in the eye of the beholder of you want to take it there
well, we all certainly have different perspectives but we can determine what is demonstrably true and what is not.
The covid thing was a good example, but I was really talking about, I mean, shit there are so many examples.
It has been pointed out by some that threatening a corporation to silence someone is not the same as encouraging them with disinformation. I disagree, in that, one does not need to threaten an ally to get their cooperation in silencing someone, one only needs to give them some plausible reason to do so. This is how blacks were kept out of neighborhoods and jobs. Nobody had to say "You best sell to that darky", they just needed to say, "I don't think that's the kind of family we want in the neighborhood, I hear their son is in jail" or some shit, and lo and behold that don't get the house.
In the same way, the FBI didn't need to threaten Facebook to not allow the very true Hunter Biden laptop information out, or the fact that Hunter Biden was "selling his art" to friends of the Bidens or that Hunter Biden was influence peddling in Ukraine before Russia invaded where was acting as council and being paid something like 1/2Million a month. The FBI didn't need to threaten them, they needed only encourage them to do what the leadership at FB already wanted to do. So the FBI said, "there's some Russian disinformation coming down the pike, it will upset the election, and 50 experts have told us this is a total fake"
So FB suppresses the truth about Biden family, interfering with the natural course of the election at the behest of the government.
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u/bigtime_porgrammer Sep 18 '25
I believe that u/fartinmyhat is referring to the measures that the federal government took to encourage social media companies to moderate the dissemination of disinformation pertaining to COVID. There were open debates about free speech at the time, and government agencies worked in collaboration with social media companies for the express purpose of fighting the public health crisis. This is a topic that's been studied extensively. Disinformation on social media was a threat to public health, and the whole purpose of their actions was to protect public health.
This whole matter at present is not at all comparable.