Similar to the question of criminalizing "hate speech" - who gets to decide whether an engagement reaches the scientific threshold?
Is it not obvious how policies like this can be weaponized to quell valid dissent?
> That’s a vague hypothetical
Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers
This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.
Speech restriction being able to be abused doesn't mean that speech restriction is never appropriate. There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.
> This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.
> Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.
> The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property. This isn't a societal priest class.
Even an extremely slanted Supreme Court didn't find that the actions of the government had significant influence on social media companies and their tamping down of covid misinformation.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-side-with-biden-...
