Should lies be protected as free speech?

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ZenMode said:
Your post brings to mind a concept that I see frequently in the activist left movement - You have to break a few eggs to make an equity omelette. In other words, if a few people are wrongly fired from their jobs because they say all lives matter or there are only two biological genders, that's ok. If a few business owners are looted or lose their business entirely because of a lie about Michael Brown and hands up, that's okay, too.

When police stop policing the homeless, but the activist left continues to police our language, that's also okay.

Unfortunately for them, wokeness, cancel culture and identity politics has now brought the worst person in history into the presidency... again.
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Yes, as you've established several times in this thread, you frequently see things that are not so, and then demand that these things be treated as if they are real.
 
HeelingAg said:
You think someone on this msg board is going to track you down in a metro area?
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I had someone on the previous board threaten to do just that and shoot me, so I'd rather not risk it. Hell, I'd even feel bad if they mistook me for someone else and targeted the wrong person.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
I had someone on the previous board threaten to do just that and shoot me, so I'd rather not risk it. Hell, I'd even feel bad if they mistook me for someone else and targeted the wrong person.
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Oh. That’s unpleasant.
 
HeelingAg said:
Oh. That’s unpleasant.
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It was. He claimed to be a former Army sniper. After he was (temporarily) banned he PM'd me and said he would track me down and that I'd never feel a thing. To be fair, I was a dick, but that shit was a bit too much for me.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
It was. He claimed to be a former Army sniper. After he was (temporarily) banned he PM'd me and said he would track me down and that I'd never feel a thing. To be fair, I was a dick, but that shit was a bit too much for me.
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Yeah, fuck that and fuck that guy.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
It was. He claimed to be a former Army sniper. After he was (temporarily) banned he PM'd me and said he would track me down and that I'd never feel a thing. To be fair, I was a dick, but that shit was a bit too much for me.
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Wow. Is that dude still around?
 
ZenMode said:
Your post brings to mind a concept that I see frequently in the activist left movement - You have to break a few eggs to make an equity omelette. In other words, if a few people are wrongly fired from their jobs because they say all lives matter or there are only two biological genders, that's ok. If a few business owners are looted or lose their business entirely because of a lie about Michael Brown and hands up, that's okay, too.

When police stop policing the homeless, but the activist left continues to police our language, that's also okay.

Unfortunately for them, wokeness, cancel culture and identity politics has now brought the worst person in history into the presidency... again.
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Ah yes, we once again are doing this idiotic thing where we blame the left for Trump being elected, rather than blaming the people freaking voting for him (and the people working nonstop to manipulate those same people).
 
rodoheel said:
Ah yes, we once again are doing this idiotic thing where we blame the left for Trump being elected, rather than blaming the people freaking voting for him (and the people working nonstop to manipulate those same people).
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Well....there has to be a reason people vote for a specific candidate, right?
 
ZZLPHeels said:
I was raising this issue in 2016 and essentially got kicked off of the ZZL for it. The Republicans may have owned the lies in the past few years, but the Democrats ran with their own lies with the BLM movement (remember "hands up, don't shoot?"). Even after their lies were exposed, they doubled down. Kamala Harris posted on Twitter that Mike Brown was murdered by Darren Wilson long after the DOJ conclusively proved allegation to be false. No one cared about the facts because they felt good about the message.

Fast forward to 2020, and Republicans start lying about COVID and the vaccines and the election. Truth suddenly matters again to the Democrats. Truth no longer matters to the Republicans. The cycle starts anew. And the only thing that really matters is that my side has to be right and your side has to be wrong. For those of us not blindly loyal to a side, it is frustrating.
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lol, just this same false equivalency BS, over and over again.

"Hands up, don't shoot" wasn't a massive lie started and spread by Democratic party leadership. It was based on the immediate reports of Michael Brown's friend who was there and set that was what happened. Prosecutors and a grand jury subsequently decided not to charge Darren Wilson because they found Wilson's account more credible than Brown's friend. But at most, one person lied. Everyone else was basing their slogan on an actual eyewitness report of what had happened. I have no problem with someone criticizing the quick spread of that phrase or how it was deployed - or plenty of things about the BLM movement - but to act like the whole thing was built on a calculated, manufactured lie is absurd.

That is easily contrasted with Trump's "big lie" about the election, among other things, which was a literal attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. It involved the freaking president of the Untied States, many of his inner circle, and numerous elected officials from his party outright making shit up left and right for the purposes of reversing the outcome of the election and putting Trump in power. The lies were constant, numerous, and pervasive. They lied in court, they lied to the media, they lied constantly. Trump and many other Republicans are still lying about it, to this day. And it is laughable to suggest that Republicans "started lying" in 2020. Trump has been an inveterate liar his whole life. From the start, he built his political career on lies, starting with birtherism. The first Trump campaign was built on lies about all sorts of things - especially about the Clintons and made-up scandals like Uranium One. There is no "cycle." There is no "one side does it then it switches and the other side does it." Lying to people has been the foundational principle of the Republican political strategy for the entire Trump era and well before.

Ultimately, even leaving aside the hundreds of other lies Trump is always telling, there is no equivalence whatsoever between (1) incorrectly leaping to judgment based on immediate eyewitness reports that are later determined to be not credible, and (2) making up and spreading malicious falsehoods for the express purposes of exploiting them. Both things are wrong. They absolutely are not equivalent. It is simply laughable to suggest that no one has any basis to criticize Trump's constant shameless lying because Democrats aren't perfect. This is just the same "bosides" cynicism that Trump has built his entire rise on - the idea that everyone is lying so who cares if he does it? Just like everyone is supposedly corrupt, so who cares if Trump does it? The whole strategy is for him and his media allies to shriek about every speck in Democrats' eyes while ignoring the logs in their own. And people like you are who make it successful, by being so easily duped into this idea that both sides are the same. This is exactly the reason that Trump wins such large margins among people who don't follow politics closely and is so far behind among people who actually do follow it.
 
ZenMode said:
Well....there has to be a reason people vote for a specific candidate, right?
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Of course. Look at how people voted based on what their sources of news were and you'll have the biggest part of your answer. But directing your supposed anger at Trump being elected at the people who were fighting against him rather than the people who supported and promoted him (like, say, Silicon Valley billionaires and MAGA white nationalists) is so stupid that one almost wonders if you're really being genuine about how you feel.
 
ZZLPHeels said:
Except the lies about Mike Brown and Darren Wilson actually had an impact on my life, as they directly led to rioting (and deaths) and the rise of the BLM movement which in turn led to further rioting in places all across North Carolina from 2016-2020. I was in the middle of one of those riots, as was one of my family members was caught in the middle of another and had to evacuate from her downtown apartment in the middle of the night. Additionally, The subsequent rise in crime that came as a result of this movement due to people abandoning law enforcement en masse has had tremendous ripple effects in nearly every community.

As far as your second paragraph is concerned, you can't say "I'm going to completely lie about X in order to pander to my base and shore up some votes" and then criticize your opponents for doing the same thing.
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Michael Brown was shot in 2014. There was unrest in Ferguson at that point. Michael Brown's shooting or subsequent discussion in the media did not create riots anywhere in NC between 2016-2020. You were not in the middle of non-existent riots, and you didn't have a family member caught in the middle of another (that is implausible on its face even if the riots weren't imagined).

It takes some chutzpah to lie your ass off in a post complaining about other people who lie.

There was no rise in crime traceable to Black Lives Matters or any other effect. You're probably referring to the now-debunked Ferguson effect. In any event, that's not what this thread is about. Go start a BLM thread if you want.
 
rodoheel said:
Of course. Look at how people voted based on what their sources of news were and you'll have the biggest part of your answer. But directing your supposed anger at Trump being elected at the people who were fighting against him rather than the people who supported and promoted him (like, say, Silicon Valley billionaires and MAGA white nationalists) is so stupid that one almost wonders if you're really being genuine about how you feel.
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Multiple things can be true at once. There can be lies that people believed and people can vote against real events they view as an issue.
 
Back to the topic at hand.

1. We have two posters who like to bullshit endlessly who also think that the government should have no role in controlling misinformation -- not a regulatory agency, not an increased role for the courts, nothing.

By my count, there are three posters other than myself who believe that misinformation is a rampant problem that should have regulatory attention. For the most part, though, they did not opine on the question of whether there is a public interest sufficient to justify state action.

Personally, I don't know exactly what should be done, but I strongly believe we can do more and better, without compromising our commitment to free speech in any meaningful way. That is to say, our current system is inefficient, and we could get the same benefits of free speech with fewer negative effects from reforms.

2. I actually don't mind some of the ideas, generally speaking, in the Texas and Florida anti-social media laws. I do mind the motivation, which is based on silly nonsense persecution complexes. I do mind when states try to unilaterally affect the regulatory framework nationwide, which was a major problem with the Texas and Florida laws. But overall, the idea that social media platforms should be regulated is good, if done correctly (and don't ask me how because I don't know, having almost no experience with social media). That doesn't remotely solve the disinformation problem in the country, but it is interesting that I've identified a bit of common ground with MAGA.

3. It just troubles me when a vice-presidential candidate goes on TV, admits that he made up the story about eating pets that got broadcast nationally and repeated during the debate, and suffered no consequences from it. It bothers me that a presidential candidate can say that armed brown-skinned gangs are taking over towns and cities in the US and face no consequences. We do not have to accept these lies.

4. We do not have to accept the system that we have. Even if you fear the prospect of government-decreed truth (and I fear it too, and have expressed as much many times), surely we have a very far way to go before we are in any danger. We have so much low-hanging fruit. We should not tolerate political candidates who say or even hint that vaccines cause autism. We should not tolerate lies about how J6 was peaceful, when it so very clearly was not. We don't have to live in a society where politicians scapegoat anyone who lives here for problems they had nothing to do with. And we can do all of these things while preserving a buffer zone to prevent chilling speech that is not quite as obviously false.

If you think that Kamala lied when retweeting something about Michael Brown, why would you think that acceptable? I would not say that's sufficiently false to be criminally or civilly chargeable -- again, to preserve a margin of error -- in the same way that many of Trump's lies are not. If it's reported that Trump called soldiers suckers and losers, and Trump lies when denying it? Eh. It's not important. It would be hard to clearly prove. It's not the sort of thing that threatens democracy. Claiming election fraud that doesn't exist does threaten the republic, taken to an extreme. Lies about minority groups inspire violence, and that should be unacceptable when they are so obviously lies. We wouldn't want to go after anyone who just forwards a tweet or something like that, unless they are in a position of responsibility or a position where knowledge of falsity can be imputed.
 
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