The American appetite for social media censorship is apparently increasing: 48 percent of survey respondents now want the government to restrict misinformation, compared with just 39 percent in 2018.
…
That figure—48 percent—is significant. It means, that just about half of all people want the government to violate the First Amendment, which protects the free speech rights of private actors, including tech companies.
Robby Soave
August 20, 2021
48% of Americans Want the Government To Restrict Misinformation on Social Media
[I find it very telling that Democrats had a 25% jump in desire for government infringement upon the specific enumerated right to free speech.—Joe]
If that is true, it is a direct result of our educational system having gone completely off the rails in the last 20 years.
OTOH, that poll may be as valid as the Nov 2020 election.
It’s all in how you ask the questions in the survey.
In 1930s Germany, it wasn’t sold as racism, because people don’t like racism. No no, it was “racial hygiene”, because people like hygiene and understand its benefits.
Likewise, it’s not censorship, it’s “restricting misinformation”.
Of course only government, in partnership with big tech, gets to decide what is and is not “misinformation”. Then every conversation is a federal case.
“It’s all in how you ask the questions in the survey.”
Bingo. And that make surveys more or less useless. The results say more about the sponsors and the answers they are looking for than about the subject.
Never the less I do agree with the results of this survey. It feels like it is just a matter of time before most social media will be restricted. Not only is the first amendment under attack, the entire constitution and the bill of rights are being questioned.
The question now is what should we individually do? Personally I think it is time to get out of Dodge and regroup with likeminded people.
Except in this case, the people for Liberty and against censorship by government or private corporations, (its partner in the process — making it fascism, btw) don’t know where “Out of Dodge” is.
Congratulations! This was your 1,000th comment here.
Correct, there is no out of dodge (yet), but there are some candidates among the red states if you can avoid their metros. And keep in mind that many rural areas even in blue states are potential candidates.
It’s not just a problem of “where”. The cloaking technology for Galt’s Gulch doesn’t exist. Being able to isolate, and enforce that isolation, from the parasites would seem to be very important.
Assuming you can achieve that then you are faced with the difficultly of being self sufficient. Where can you isolate and yet have access to fuel, food, medicine, electricity, water, and manufacturing (of all types)?
Perhaps we’re overreacting by extrapolating into the future assuming no counter reactions. What if the privileged like their safe and clean streets, nice homes, 24 hour shopping in nice and clean stores, neighbors that have the same values, and will not willing surrender them?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/40percent-of-san-francisco-residents-plan-to-leave-due-to-quality-of-life-poll/ar-AALFQQ1
Lyle, congratulations! This is a little late but I just noticed. This is your 7,000th comment here.
“Free speech can be messy, but the authors of the Bill of Rights believed that the federal government should not have the right to decide what ideas the people are allowed to express. ”
This sentence shows a fundamental problem that many people have today when trying to understand the Constitution and the philosophy that our founders have when it came to government.
The government doesn’t have any rights at all. What it has are powers- that is the POWER to restrict things. The government gets those powers because the people grant the government that power. This is a fundamental difference. The sentence should say:
“Free speech can be messy, but the authors of the Bill of Rights believe that the people never granted the government any power to decide what ideas the people are allowed to express. “
Correct. And among the people who don’t understand that governments don’t have rights are, unfortunately, most judges.
It’s Pew, so take it with a 50 pound grain of salt.
First, we have this header: “Partisan divisions have widened over role of government, tech firm in restricting *misinforrmation*”
But the actual questions were about *false* information. “Misinformation” isn’t necessarily false, just something “they” don’t want to hear. They asked one thing, but presented it as supporting something else.
Second, we have the survey methodology (that’s always good to check).
1. Not a random sampling of Americans. They started by building a 10,000 member “panel” of people to answer surveys. So they started with folks who a) answer random phone calls from strangers, b) actually logged onto the website and gave a *lot* of personal demographic data, and c) responded to this particular survey.
2. They “pre-weighted” the surveyed people by sorting through their total panel for a limited number of people to proportionally represent American demographics. Not bad, but…
3. Once they had the raw survey results, they “weighted” them again… to proportionally represent American demographics. I will guarantee they skewed the result to over-represent urban liberals and “moderate” Republicans. With their preselection, weighting is unnecessary.
Pew is cr@p. Probably only Quinnipiac is worse.
So, 76% of democrats have been brainwashed into never asking, Quo Bono? Or thinking it will never be used against them?
I can see that.
As for the constitution. What’s that? We live in a representative democracy now. And after the last election. A communist democracy.
We should quit thinking in terms of law. The communist have destroyed the meaning of the word. They don’t even consider it.. I mean the left has already been censoring anyone they don’t like. And the law be damned. They ignore the law anytime it pleases them. They control enforcement.
Their just all of a sudden having an attack of conscious or something? We need law and your approval?
No. This is just a way of making you feel defeated.
The only thing to consider these days is enforcement. Who has the power in your AO to enforce the insanity coming out of government? ‘Cause from now on all the law is going to do is prove communist insanity.
I’ve had a coworker express concern about the wide variety of information freely available on the internet. He doesn’t trust the average person to be able to sort out the difference between truth & falsehood by themselves. This same coworker clearly believes the MSM. In particular, he firmly believes in their fact checking and their take on all covid related matters.
In both graphs, the difference between the two datapoints was “my guy in power; their guy in power”.
That delta is 25-26% for Democrats and 9-11% for Republicans.
I’m interpreting that as the “it’s OK when we’re in power” part of each party. The hypocrite faction.
We’d be a lot more free and very much less taxed if people assumed that all government power will be executed by their worst enemies, and therefore should be constrained to jobs with the maximum objective verification.
That said, the Democrats seem to be firmly in bed with the Washington DC unelected administrative state uniparty, which may be why they have such a higher base approval of government power. Doesn’t matter much what the Republicans do when they have the majority of the Legislative branch and the Presidency. The opposing operatives are the ones that will interpret every rule, leak to their convenience and sandbag everything they don’t want to do.
Lies, damn lies and statistics. These “polls” are always conducted by the same
agenda driven assclowns……the same ones that SWORE in 2016 that Trump had NO CHANCE. They aren’t actual “polls” trying to discern facts. They are PROPAGANDA trying to sway opinion and push agendas.