Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

The spread of lies or false information has always been the price the pay in order to have free speech.

It is the task of the individuals in free societies to discern the lies from the truth, or at least to choose their tools in doing so.

You’re lying to yourself if you believe you can have real human free speech with a system capable of censoring all lies.

Yes but once people mess up and choose the wrong thing it’s very hard to go back. There are plenty of examples of countries where bad actors have taken over all institutions and what then? There are not takesies backsies

Yes. We are supposed to be able to rely on evidence from investigations and hungry reporters with integrity to expose the truth eventually.

And you think censorship will solve this? You’ll just get a different sort of monster. One that probably appeals to your worldview in the short term because you fit the typical person you think will be controlling it forever and you think the scope will somehow to be constrained to a small group of things you don’t like.

Well intentioned, but extremely naive. Something our society will sadly have to relearn every century or so.

> And you think censorship will solve this?

A media company being punished isn't censorship , media companies aren't above the law.

Do you consider anti-government Chinese people, such as Falun Gong members or general pro-democracy activists to be bad actors and that censoring their speech is important to protect institutions from them? I'm trying to point out that you can't simply decide who's good and who's bad. Censorship entrenches whoever happens to be in power regardless of their merits. Maybe you think democracy is the important part and autocratic governments are wrong to do censorship while democratic ones are wrong to allow free speech?

That's a very black and white view of ways of restricting speech. Aside from the US most democracies have some sort of limits to free speech and not all of them have turned into autocracies. To counter your argument, absolute freedom of speech allows whoever controls the media to create narratives and manipulate public opinion without consequences

> A media company

Text from the 1st amendment: "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"

You see that part that says "The press"? Thats what a media company is.

Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech, and threatens it with legal action, that is by definition something that effects free speech and is censorship.

Definitionally, I cannot think of something that could be more accurately be described as censorship.

> Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech

That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals. Being the press don't give a company free pass to commit crimes and Xitter is paying for that.

PS: "1st amendment" is an American term that doesn't mean anything outside of american jurisdiction (and maybe not even inside, see Tiktok).

What's wrong with manipulating public opinion? People aren't complete idiots and are still responsible for their own beliefs and how they vote. They'll only believe lies that they want to believe. The Soviet Union used to control all the media and its people famously didn't believe what it told them.

> That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals.

If the government makes it illegal to publish certain things, that would mean that it is both a crime and censorship. So yes, that would be the case and my previous statement applies.

The government making it illegal for the press to publish certain things is definitionally what censorship is. There is literally no more clear example of what censorship is than that.