New Community Guidelines prohibit misinformation and disinformation

I am greatly concerned about what it means for Discord to arbitrate what is allowable and not allowable speech between two consenting parties. I think taking a stance that things can be provably misinformation or disinformation is in itself a flawed point of view, but I think the far more dangerous point of view is what happens when you choose to silence some people forcefully.

Sure, they stop talking, but all you've done is radicalized them, and made them more sure of their ideas. You've also removed them from a chance of being corrected, and socially isolated them. A huge benefit to discussing ideas, including wrong ideas, is that people will notice a trend with a bad idea getting a lot of resistance, and they will be given legitimate responses by their friends and people they are discussing with, in trying to correct those ideas. To remove someone from your platform, even if it is a provably bad idea, is only going to further ingrain the issues they have, not help them at all.

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."
- Alfred Whitney Griswold

Lasse Kyuss

March 04, 2022 15:59

Agreed. This is very worrying - and I'm saying this being quite center politically. Who decides what is misinformation? This should've never made it into the community guidelines. When has adding something like this to a platform's guidelines ever worked out for the better? Youtube is using terminology like this in their guidelines to justify banning whomever disagrees with their politically backed narrative when their channels get too big. The potential for abuse of this is too big.

Like, for example say the subject is covid. There's thousands of serious scientists who think its no more dangerous than a flu. And thousands of scientists disagree. We know what the public narrative is. But by only allowing one of them on the platform (which these guidelines could be abused to achieve), actual scientific work is being disregarded that should be discussed instead.

Dangerous territory.

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