Should lies be protected as free speech?

[ZZLPHeels]

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.

If you are going to lie about my own life experiences, I’ll simply ignore you. The riots in NC were very well documented. I’m sorry that you refuse to believe that they happened. That’s a you problem, not a me one. The fact that you are so eager to pretend that events that were captured on video, included in insurance claims and reported on extensively in the news simply didn't happen only reinforces my point further. You are OK with lies that make you feel better about your own positions. You are a hypocrite, which is exactly what my post was about. I understand being called out may make you upset, as it should. Just take a deep breath and leave your walls alone this time.

 

[ZZLPHeels]

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.

The problem is that once the lie was exposed people continued to repeat it. Hence Kamala Harris publicly calling Darren Wilson a murderer on her Twitter in 2020. That was a lie. Large portions of the Democratic party still believe that lie. And that lie gave rise to a movement that pushed many more lies in order to retain its credibility. Polls have shown that a large percentage of the Democratic party believes that thousands of unarmed Black people are killed by the police each year. The real number is about a dozen. Across the country, riots were fueled by similar lies that the left either helped propagate or did not push back on.

I agree that Trump and the right's lies are worse and have had a much larger impact on the country. But how can one side get upset about dishonesty when that side has shown how quickly it embraces dishonesty when advancing its own causes?

 

[Centerpiece]

The problem is that once the lie was exposed people continued to repeat it. Hence Kamala Harris publicly calling Darren Wilson a murderer on her Twitter in 2020. That was a lie. Large portions of the Democratic party still believe that lie. And that lie gave rise to a movement that pushed many more lies in order to retain its credibility. Polls have shown that a large percentage of the Democratic party believes that thousands of unarmed Black people are killed by the police each year. The real number is about a dozen. Across the country, riots were fueled by similar lies that the left either helped propagate or did not push back on.

I agree that Trump and the right's lies are worse and have had a much larger impact on the country. But how can one side get upset about dishonesty when that side has shown how quickly it embraces dishonesty when advancing its own causes?

But you can’t play the Bo-sides game on this topic. Regardless of one little tweet by Madam VP. The preponderance of evidence goes decidedly in one direction. Especially since 2008 in the realm of American politics and discourse in America between libs and cons. Nobody will take you seriously.

 

[ZenMode]

The reason that libel, slander and defamation laws work is because there is a mechanism to determine whether a claim was factual. That mechanism is the justice system where the two sides are given the opportunity to present evidence and a ruling is eventually made based on the evidence.

Outside of the process established in the justice system, what entity is going to be the determiner of what is true? Snopes? The media and which media?The government?

 

[rodoheel]

The reason that libel, slander and defamation laws work is because there is a mechanism to determine whether a claim was factual. That mechanism is the justice system where the two sides are given the opportunity to present evidence and a ruling is eventually made based on the evidence.

Outside of the process established in the justice system, what entity is going to be the determiner of what is true? Snopes? The media and which media?The government?

You realize that if we made a law criminalizing certain kinds of false speech, that the entity determining what's true is going to be the courts, right? Literally the exact same situation as with libel claims, except that of course you'll be operating with the higher criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) rather than a civil standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence).

To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of criminalizing certain kinds of false speech, though I like others have lamented the ways in which our existing libel laws fall short of remedying lying in the political context. I just don't think the criticism you made really makes much sense. The courts would be the arbiter, just as in the civil libel context.

 

[Centerpiece]

Any other way and we might as well go back to Colt, Remington and Winchester being the judge, jury and executioner of who is lying and who isn’t. I’m sure this is exactly what Maga would be satisfied with.
“He needed killing your honor, that lyin SOB”

 

[rodoheel]

The problem is that once the lie was exposed people continued to repeat it. Hence Kamala Harris publicly calling Darren Wilson a murderer on her Twitter in 2020. That was a lie. Large portions of the Democratic party still believe that lie. And that lie gave rise to a movement that pushed many more lies in order to retain its credibility. Polls have shown that a large percentage of the Democratic party believes that thousands of unarmed Black people are killed by the police each year. The real number is about a dozen. Across the country, riots were fueled by similar lies that the left either helped propagate or did not push back on.

I agree that Trump and the right's lies are worse and have had a much larger impact on the country. But how can one side get upset about dishonesty when that side has shown how quickly it embraces dishonesty when advancing its own causes?

I assume you're talking about the tweet discussed in this story, during the primaries leading to the 2020 election:

Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris’s controversial Michael Brown tweets, explained

The tweets claimed a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown. But that’s not what investigators, including those from the Obama administration, concluded.

www.vox.com

First of all, unlike the Trump movement, the left generally is not a monolith; there is wider diversity of opinion and less of an attempt to force adherence to the party leader's narrative. So, for example, you did not have a flood of other democrats feeling compelled to echo and support the statements of Kamala and Elizabeth Warren, and in fact some people criticized them. That is an article from a pretty leftist publication, Vox, calling Harris and Warren out for being wrong about the facts.

The second question goes to the issue of what "lie" is occurring, which is really just calling it a "murder" instead of a "killing" or "shooting" with the distinction being a question of intent and belief (something that only the shooter, Wilson, can truly know, but that has to be imperfectly determined by the judicial system). Certainly many of Brown's family and friends still believe that he was murdered. Those statements are certainly contrary to what was determined by the state and federal investigations of the incident. But are they lying? To paraphrase an old Seinfeld bit, it's not a lie if you believe it. But in any event, there's no question that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown; the only dispute is to his intent and reasonable belief when he did it.

That, to me, is worlds different than what we have regularly seen from the right and Trump for the last decade-plus. For example, compare Harris's tweet and the Brown case to the stuff a bunch of right-wingers (like Sean Hannity, Roger Stone, Newt Gingrich, etc) said about the murder of Seth Rich. Just straight-up making stuff up - or repeating stuff that was made up by Russian intelligence - to push a political narrative. Or take the 2020 election conspiracies that Trump continues to repeat to this day, despite the fact that everything he says has been repeatedly debunked, a lot of it being straight-up baseless lies invented from whole cloth by his advisors, like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who have been jailed or faced significant civil penalties for outright lies. Or take the birther conspiracy that Trump literally built his brand on, which again was based on complete lies, that Trump continued to repeat long after they had been continually debunked.

As for the statistic about people on the left estimating the number of unarmed black people killed by police in the thousands, I'd like to see the actual data you're referring to but it isn't surprising; in addition to the issue of people believing what they want to believe, across party lines, there is the fact that Americans in general (probably most people, honestly) really struggle with things like probability and estimating. You can see that phenomenon discussed here: Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias. Americans simply have a really hard time assessing the frequency that things happen, tending to overestimate things that happen rarely (like people being transgender or, say, unarmed black people getting shot) and underestimate things that happen frequently.

You seem to essentially be creating an impossible standard here, in which no one on the left is allowed to criticize the right's rampant, constant, pernicious lying unless every politician on the left is perfect too. Again, it's exactly this sort of cynicism and misleading bo-siding that has allowed Trump to flourish in the first place.

 

[superrific]

If you are going to lie about my own life experiences, I’ll simply ignore you. The riots in NC were very well documented. I’m sorry that you refuse to believe that they happened. That’s a you problem, not a me one. The fact that you are so eager to pretend that events that were captured on video, included in insurance claims and reported on extensively in the news simply didn't happen only reinforces my point further. You are OK with lies that make you feel better about your own positions. You are a hypocrite, which is exactly what my post was about. I understand being called out may make you upset, as it should. Just take a deep breath and leave your walls alone this time.

Oh stfu. You wrote about riots in 2016-2020. There was a riot in 2020 after Floyd, and one in Charlotte in 2016 (it was my mistake to remember that riot having been in 2015, but it doesn't change the point). I recall someone on the other board being caught up in 2020. That's probably you. So why did you write 2016-2020, as if there was a whole series of them and not just isolated events? It's because you know how ridiculously implausible it is to blame the George Floyd riots on Michael Brown. The George Floyd riots were triggered by . . . George Floyd and lots of spare time. It had nothing to do with the false claim about how Michael Brown was shot.

This is your desperation both-siding. You so badly want the liberals to be at fault for things, but you can't find anything remotely comparable to the firehose of dishonesty that comes from the GOP. So you just make it up, and blow up the few instances you can find from anthills to ostensible Mount Everests.

Thing is, there are times in which Dems do not tell the truth. Of course there are. First, everyone makes mistakes. Second, some Dems are indeed bad actors (e.g. Cuomo, Blago, Menendez). Third, all politicians spin, and the line between spin and falsehood is not a bright one. So if your point is that liberals sometimes lie, you're not going to get pushback. But that's not the point you want to make, is it? You're searching for equivalence.

If you want to ignore me, go ahead. It's your loss.

 

[ZZLPHeels]

I assume you're talking about the tweet discussed in this story, during the primaries leading to the 2020 election:

Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris’s controversial Michael Brown tweets, explained

The tweets claimed a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown. But that’s not what investigators, including those from the Obama administration, concluded.

www.vox.com

First of all, unlike the Trump movement, the left generally is not a monolith; there is wider diversity of opinion and less of an attempt to force adherence to the party leader's narrative. So, for example, you did not have a flood of other democrats feeling compelled to echo and support the statements of Kamala and Elizabeth Warren, and in fact some people criticized them. That is an article from a pretty leftist publication, Vox, calling Harris and Warren out for being wrong about the facts.

The second question goes to the issue of what "lie" is occurring, which is really just calling it a "murder" instead of a "killing" or "shooting" with the distinction being a question of intent and belief (something that only the shooter, Wilson, can truly know, but that has to be imperfectly determined by the judicial system). Certainly many of Brown's family and friends still believe that he was murdered. Those statements are certainly contrary to what was determined by the state and federal investigations of the incident. But are they lying? To paraphrase an old Seinfeld bit, it's not a lie if you believe it. But in any event, there's no question that Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown; the only dispute is to his intent and reasonable belief when he did it.

That, to me, is worlds different than what we have regularly seen from the right and Trump for the last decade-plus. For example, compare Harris's tweet and the Brown case to the stuff a bunch of right-wingers (like Sean Hannity, Roger Stone, Newt Gingrich, etc) said about the murder of Seth Rich. Just straight-up making stuff up - or repeating stuff that was made up by Russian intelligence - to push a political narrative. Or take the 2020 election conspiracies that Trump continues to repeat to this day, despite the fact that everything he says has been repeatedly debunked, a lot of it being straight-up baseless lies invented from whole cloth by his advisors, like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who have been jailed or faced significant civil penalties for outright lies. Or take the birther conspiracy that Trump literally built his brand on, which again was based on complete lies, that Trump continued to repeat long after they had been continually debunked.

As for the statistic about people on the left estimating the number of unarmed black people killed by police in the thousands, I'd like to see the actual data you're referring to but it isn't surprising; in addition to the issue of people believing what they want to believe, across party lines, there is the fact that Americans in general (probably most people, honestly) really struggle with things like probability and estimating. You can see that phenomenon discussed here: Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias. Americans simply have a really hard time assessing the frequency that things happen, tending to overestimate things that happen rarely (like people being transgender or, say, unarmed black people getting shot) and underestimate things that happen frequently.

You seem to essentially be creating an impossible standard here, in which no one on the left is allowed to criticize the right's rampant, constant, pernicious lying unless every politician on the left is perfect too. Again, it's exactly this sort of cynicism and misleading bo-siding that has allowed Trump to flourish in the first place.

You bring up a lot of good points here and this is a very fair take. One thing that I will lightly counter with is the fact that Kamala wasn't some no-name politician on the left when she made this statement. She was on the Democratic ticket for Vice President and ran for President this year. I voted for her despite this misstep because ultimately, as you stated, this lie was miniscule compared to what the right has been doing and there are no perfect candidates. My take from 2016-2020 on the ZZLP with a lot of incidents was "hold on just a minute, let's not jump to conclusions" and I was excoriated for that by many posters there. So, I guess my criticism is as much aimed at those posters (some of whom are still here, others are not) as much as it was aimed at Democrats as a whole. Points well made and points taken, though.

 

[ZZLPHeels]

Oh stfu. You wrote about riots in 2016-2020. There was a riot in 2020 after Floyd, and one in Charlotte in 2016 (it was my mistake to remember that riot having been in 2015, but it doesn't change the point). I recall someone on the other board being caught up in 2020. That's probably you. So why did you write 2016-2020, as if there was a whole series of them and not just isolated events? It's because you know how ridiculously implausible it is to blame the George Floyd riots on Michael Brown. The George Floyd riots were triggered by . . . George Floyd and lots of spare time. It had nothing to do with the false claim about how Michael Brown was shot.

This is your desperation both-siding. You so badly want the liberals to be at fault for things, but you can't find anything remotely comparable to the firehose of dishonesty that comes from the GOP. So you just make it up, and blow up the few instances you can find from anthills to ostensible Mount Everests.

Thing is, there are times in which Dems do not tell the truth. Of course there are. First, everyone makes mistakes. Second, some Dems are indeed bad actors (e.g. Cuomo, Blago, Menendez). Third, all politicians spin, and the line between spin and falsehood is not a bright one. So if your point is that liberals sometimes lie, you're not going to get pushback. But that's not the point you want to make, is it? You're searching for equivalence.

If you want to ignore me, go ahead. It's your loss.

Well, I can't ignore you because when I try to, these threads go away. So, I guess it is both of our losses then. I'm all for reasonable and even spirited debate, but I take offence to being called a liar.

I wrote 2016-2020 because the unrest that occurred had a common theme which to me makes it fair game to lump together. Kind of like how pushing anti-vaccine propaganda and boasting about the supposed healing powers of Ivermectin qualifies as COVID misinformation, even though those topics are not 100% the same. But a lot of the unrest from 2016-2020 can trace its roots back to the Mike Brown saga. Not only the riots, but the Dallas ambush that left 5 cops dead and the NYC ambush that left 2 cops dead. The Ferguson incident showed a recipe for results - build a story, even a fabricated one, run with it before anyone can effectively challenge it, and use the outrage generated to get what you want. That recipe was followed several times from 2016-2020. It was followed in Charlotte after the police killed an armed man there. It was followed in Kenosha after Rayshard Brooks was shot. It was followed in Detroit and Indianapolis.

Only after George Floyd did people get upset about someone that was actually murdered by the police. And that's the part that has always bugged me. The police have murdered or unjustifiably killed people. They do so every year. And yet instead of choosing one of those very real stories to focus on, the activists focused on pushing fake stories that were easily debunked but were debunked far too late to stop any damage from occurring. Rosa Parks wasn't the first Black person to refuse to sit in the back of the bus. But she was chosen because the Civil Rights Movement leaders knew that they needed to put a face in the public eye that people could relate to and sympathize with. And it worked. Fast forward 60 years and we're having streets shut down and people are getting murdered in order to honor a criminal killed by the police while actual innocent victims of police brutality are ignored for some reason. And then the VPOTUS echoes those lies and they continue to live on. Just a few months ago, on the anniversary of the shooting in Feruguson, a (Black) police officer was attacked by a protester and suffered life-altering brain damage as a result.

And yes, the lies and misinformation spewed by Trump and the right about COVID directly led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in this country and are unforgivable. The lies about the election being stolen threatened our democracy and are also unforgivable. But there is no shortage of people calling out those lies on this board and on the board that preceded it.

 

[ColdBlueSteel]

No, according to the "right wing disinformation site" The Hill it was called Ministry of Truth, I just couldn't remember the exact name at that moment.

Ministry of Truth sounds even MORE Orwellian.

…must not tell lies…

 

[evrheel]

No, according to the "right wing disinformation site" The Hill it was called Ministry of Truth, I just couldn't remember the exact name at that moment.

Ministry of Truth sounds even MORE Orwellian.

Nice try that was an opinion pieces written by a right wing propagandist not by the Hill. Next?

 

[chrissteel]

Mark Zuckerberg:

Hey everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years.

There's been widespread debate about the potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts.

That's millions of people, and we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do.

First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So, over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.

Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.

Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So, by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.

Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.

Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.

By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I'm excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect. There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.

 

[superrific]

Well, I can't ignore you because when I try to, these threads go away. So, I guess it is both of our losses then. I'm all for reasonable and even spirited debate, but I take offence to being called a liar.

I wrote 2016-2020 because the unrest that occurred had a common theme which to me makes it fair game to lump together. Kind of like how pushing anti-vaccine propaganda and boasting about the supposed healing powers of Ivermectin qualifies as COVID misinformation, even though those topics are not 100% the same. But a lot of the unrest from 2016-2020 can trace its roots back to the Mike Brown saga. Not only the riots, but the Dallas ambush that left 5 cops dead and the NYC ambush that left 2 cops dead. The Ferguson incident showed a recipe for results - build a story, even a fabricated one, run with it before anyone can effectively challenge it, and use the outrage generated to get what you want. That recipe was followed several times from 2016-2020. It was followed in Charlotte after the police killed an armed man there. It was followed in Kenosha after Rayshard Brooks was shot. It was followed in Detroit and Indianapolis.

Only after George Floyd did people get upset about someone that was actually murdered by the police. And that's the part that has always bugged me. The police have murdered or unjustifiably killed people. They do so every year. And yet instead of choosing one of those very real stories to focus on, the activists focused on pushing fake stories that were easily debunked but were debunked far too late to stop any damage from occurring. Rosa Parks wasn't the first Black person to refuse to sit in the back of the bus. But she was chosen because the Civil Rights Movement leaders knew that they needed to put a face in the public eye that people could relate to and sympathize with. And it worked. Fast forward 60 years and we're having streets shut down and people are getting murdered in order to honor a criminal killed by the police while actual innocent victims of police brutality are ignored for some reason. And then the VPOTUS echoes those lies and they continue to live on. Just a few months ago, on the anniversary of the shooting in Feruguson, a (Black) police officer was attacked by a protester and suffered life-altering brain damage as a result.

And yes, the lies and misinformation spewed by Trump and the right about COVID directly led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in this country and are unforgivable. The lies about the election being stolen threatened our democracy and are also unforgivable. But there is no shortage of people calling out those lies on this board and on the board that preceded it.

1. You can lump two things together without trying to lump in everything in between. I will accept your clarification and withdraw the implication that you were lying. You were merely misleading, and not necessarily intentionally.

2. This discussion goes on a different thread. If you want to start a thread about BLM, go ahead. I would just like to correct the obviously false claim that people weren't upset about police murders. I mean, YOU were just complaining about the 2016 unrest. What do you think caused that?

Some notable cases of people being upset about police officers murdering people: Breonna Taylor; Freddie Gray; Eric Garner; Tamir Rice; etc. All occurred before George Floyd.

3. You aren't going to get far on this board, or for that matter in life, by referring to George Floyd as "a criminal killed by the police while actual innocent victims of police brutality are ignored for some reason." He was actually an innocent victim of police brutality. Last time I checked, police are not executioners, and that's especially true when the victim has not even been charged. Maybe Floyd did something criminal and should have been arrested. I don't know and I don't care. He was murdered by police who are now in jail for doing so.

4. If for some reason you need the last word, take it. I don't care. I will not read it. Maybe others will

 

[superrific]

You realize that if we made a law criminalizing certain kinds of false speech, that the entity determining what's true is going to be the courts, right? Literally the exact same situation as with libel claims, except that of course you'll be operating with the higher criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) rather than a civil standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence).

To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of criminalizing certain kinds of false speech, though I like others have lamented the ways in which our existing libel laws fall short of remedying lying in the political context. I just don't think the criticism you made really makes much sense. The courts would be the arbiter, just as in the civil libel context.

This bears repeating.

Of course it was ZenMode so it would be more surprising if his criticism made sense.

What do you think we should do to control disinformation in contexts where defamation doesn't work? Not to mention, many of the most pernicious lies aren't defamatory about a person. Nobody can sue Trump says, "Venezuelan gangs have taken over many towns in America." That has to be stopped. The First Amendment value of that speech is negative.

 

[ZZLPHeels]

1. You can lump two things together without trying to lump in everything in between. I will accept your clarification and withdraw the implication that you were lying. You were merely misleading, and not necessarily intentionally.

2. This discussion goes on a different thread. If you want to start a thread about BLM, go ahead. I would just like to correct the obviously false claim that people weren't upset about police murders. I mean, YOU were just complaining about the 2016 unrest. What do you think caused that?

Some notable cases of people being upset about police officers murdering people: Breonna Taylor; Freddie Gray; Eric Garner; Tamir Rice; etc. All occurred before George Floyd.

3. You aren't going to get far on this board, or for that matter in life, by referring to George Floyd as "a criminal killed by the police while actual innocent victims of police brutality are ignored for some reason." He was actually an innocent victim of police brutality. Last time I checked, police are not executioners, and that's especially true when the victim has not even been charged. Maybe Floyd did something criminal and should have been arrested. I don't know and I don't care. He was murdered by police who are now in jail for doing so.

4. If for some reason you need the last word, take it. I don't care. I will not read it. Maybe others will

You misread my post. Floyd was the victim of murder that I was speaking about.