When you think of the concept of censorship, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s probably either Facebook or UC Berkeley, which are now teaming up to fight fake news, reported Campus Reform. Facebook’s investing $7.5 million in a project with Berkeley, Cornell, and the University of Maryland. Hany Farid, one of the Berkeley professors working with Facebook, says “We will be working towards developing new technology to detect fake news, fake images, and fake videos….This is part of a larger effort by Facebook to reign in harmful and dangerous mis-information campaigns on their platform.”
So you can guess where this is probably going to lead. The Nancy Pelosi video with her words slurred? Gone. But think about it: who’s probably the most edited and spoofed person online? I’d bet it’s President Trump, but something tells me we won’t be seeing those videos banned.
Now, Farid’s interested in making Big Tech corps publishers instead of platforms, which would open them up to getting sued, but it looks like his issues with social media are bullying, hate speech, privacy loss, and fake news. Loss of privacy is definitely important but I think the other three are just a BIT less important than mass swathes of people kicked off the platforms altogether just for being conservative. And that’s why even from the start of this little project, I’m pretty black-pilled.
But let me take you for a moment to Boston University, where Professor Marshall Van Alstyne offers another solution to fake news: just tax the crap out of people who distribute it.
Marshall says “You could sample messages, find out some proportion of false and damning information, and then tax in proportion to the damage that’s being done,” according to Campus Reform. Yup, that sounds like something that could be done totally objectively, especially the “damning information” part.
He continues “what you’re doing is you’re taxing the damage. You’re not taxing the speech.”
Yeah but damage according to who, Marshall? Honestly, is this the level of scholarship these guys are getting paid tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct?
