An Insider's Guide to "Anti-Disinformation"
An Insider's Guide to "Anti-Disinformation"
Andrew Lowenthal spent more than two decades defending digital rights, and watched as peers and partner organizations switched to an opposite mission called "anti-disinformation." An inside account
cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/87954
More decentralized, open-source and secure platforms are needed to resist corporate, philanthropic, and government capture. There are only so many people with $44 billion dollars on hand.
The challenge is generating the wide audiences that drive so many users to large platforms. Bitcoin demonstrated that such decentralized network effects are possible, but this needs to be made real in the social media field. Nostr appears to have some potential.
The even bigger problem is a culture that supports widespread censorship, particularly among its previous guardians, progressives, liberals and the left. Free speech has become a dirty word for the very people who once led the free speech movement.
Changing that is a long-term project that requires demonstrating how free speech is primarily there to protect the powerless, not the powerful. For example, the Virality Project’s censorship of true stories of vaccine injury left us to the predation of BigPharma, making us less safe. More free speech would have resulted in a better informed and better protected society.
Most important is to return to strong principles of free expression, including for ideas we dislike. The shoe will one day again be on the other foot. When that day comes free speech will not be the enemy of liberals and progressives, it will be the best possible protection against the abuse of power.
Rough edges are the price we pay for a free society.
