65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
my counterpoint to that would be: hasn’t COVID demonstrated how ineffective this actually is versus deplatforming incorrect information to begin with? people did do a lot of that during the pandemic, and yet there are still tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people, who were misled and now believe things contrary to even basic science. i think to a lesser extent the anti-vaxx movement has demonstrated similar limits to this approach against deplatforming.
There’s a lot more reasons that count for that. That became a very big social and political issue, which is a separate issue. I ask you then, how would we enforce this if non megacorps were forced to comply? Should decentralized media like Lemmy be forced to comply as well? Would US be forced to defederate with other country instances in the situation they may not govern their speech? Would encrypted communication that cannot be governed get banned so we can carefully make sure misinformation doesn’t get spread? As soon as you think of the how would this be enforced, you quickly realize how terrible of an idea this is.
Of course it’s easy to say misinformation bad, nobody is disagreeing with you. But actually going into actual practical solutions that maintain freedom and privacy is the hard part.