Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is Deliberately Misleading People On the Internet Free Speech?
Slashdot reader dryriver writes:
Before anyone cries "free speech must always be free," let me qualify the question. Under a myriad of different internet sites and blogs are these click-through adverts that promise quick "miracle cures" for everything from toenail fungus to hair loss to tinnitus to age-related skin wrinkles to cancer. A lot of the ads begin with copy that reads "This one weird trick cures....." Most of the "cures" on offer are complete and utter crap designed to lift a few dollars from the credit cards of hundreds of thousands of gullible internet users. The IQ boosting pills that supposedly give you "amazing mental focus after just 2 weeks" don't work at all. Neither do any of the anti-ageing or anti-wrinkle creams, regardless of which "miracle berry" extract they put in them this year. And if you try to cure your cancer with an Internet remedy rather than seeing a doctor, you may actually wind up dead.
So the question -- is peddling this stuff online really "free speech"? You are promising something grandiose in exchange for hard cash that you know doesn't deliver any benefits at all.
Long-time Slashdot reader apraetor counters, "But how do you determine what is 'true'?" And Slashdot reader ToTheStars argues "It's already established that making claims about medicine is subject to scrutiny by the FDA (or the relevant authority in your jurisdiction)." But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre? Leave your best thoughts in the comments. Is deliberately misleading people on the internet free speech?
So the question -- is peddling this stuff online really "free speech"? You are promising something grandiose in exchange for hard cash that you know doesn't deliver any benefits at all.
Long-time Slashdot reader apraetor counters, "But how do you determine what is 'true'?" And Slashdot reader ToTheStars argues "It's already established that making claims about medicine is subject to scrutiny by the FDA (or the relevant authority in your jurisdiction)." But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre? Leave your best thoughts in the comments. Is deliberately misleading people on the internet free speech?
Making it a free speech issue is taking it too far, it's always really just been about whether it's false advertising / fair trade / fraud / etc. We already have a lot of laws that govern what businesses can and cannot say to customers in their efforts to sell them things. None of them are free speech violations, they're consumer protection limits. Enforcement is the real problem.
then stop with the FUD that portrays those companies as actively working against the interests of society and most people.
All companies will actively work against the interests of society and most people if it is within their own interests to do so. Microsoft & the rest of the big tech companies do so everyday by actively evading paying their fair share of taxes.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The new problem is this:
For most of the past, free speech has come with the practical limitation that the person making the speech was associated to it, and had some burden of personal accountability. So, whether out of shame, counter-arguments, not being able to hide behind a fictitious agent, etc., people making demonstrably false statements would have limits to the quantity and quality of their speech. And, by the way, people's gullibility of it.
Now we have this new channel where everyone, including fake names and anonymous agents, are equal. In your Facebook feed, everyone has an equal voice, which contrary to some people's original idea of the internet, doesn't now make it possible for the best and most thoughtful opinions to be spread, but rather the worst. And not everyone is smart enough to tell the difference, or even has the time.
Newspapers, journalists, universities, governments, etc. previously served the role as our filter of what was "high quality". For good and bad, of course, because they're not always right.
But now we took off the filter. How do we get some of it back without taking away the parts we like?
Freedom leads to mistakes in the short term; critical thought and independence in the long term.
Censorship leads to safety in the short term; naivete and dependence in the long term.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Once money is involved, it's no longer free speech, it becomes "commercial speech."
Commercial speech operates under a different set of rules, with significantly more restrictions.
"False or misleading" commercial speech is explicitly against the law.
There is some wiggle room for "puffery" (world's best hamburger.)
There is also some wiggle room as long as warnings or disclaimers are included.
Some warnings and disclaimers are what we'd call "compelled speech," because the government requires businesses to say them.
Compelled speech is pretty much the opposite of free speech.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Ad's do not fall under free speech protection (at least in most countries). Most countries have legal frameworks for what is and is not acceptable advertising. For instance here in Australia most of those Ads are actually completely illegal as they fall under false advertising... good luck pursuing them on that though given most are not based in country.
And there's a moderation system here, theoretically designed to judge the quality of speech without actually restricting it. Granted, as any forum can become something of an echo-chamber then perhaps it is not perfect, but usually poor-quality comments get moderated down and high-quality comments moderated up.
As to the FUD about Microsoft in particular, Microsoft's history since its inception has been fraught with nefariousness. MS-DOS was essentially a clone of CP/M, at least as far as the particulars of the user interface are concerned. At one point Microsoft used an OEM licensing model that essentially froze-out competing OSes because the OEM had to pay for Microsoft for all personal computers sold whether or not Microsoft's OSes were wanted by the end-customer. Microsoft over the years has attempted to freeze-out competition through writing their own function-alike software and then once it becomes popular, writing proprietary components into it and pushing for those proprietary components to be widely implemented such that competitors' software is unable to work.
If Microsoft software was high quality, bug-free, security-hole-free, then perhaps there wouldn't be so much anger at Microsoft's business practices, but Microsoft's software has historically been both bug-riddled and terribly insecure and open for exploitation. Entire industries have been built to attempt to make up for mediocre software. It's no surprise when a new target-for-compatiblity becomes concerned, as history has demonstrated that by introducing compatibility, Microsoft will break that compatibility when it feels the time is right to get customers to migrate to Microsoft off of whatever previous software they used, and the cycle repeats.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The US Supreme Court has long held that Commercial Speech (speech that proposes an economic transaction) has reduced 1st amendment protection, particularly when said speech is false, misleading or coercive.
Free speech isn't absolute, the concept is more about freedom from prior restraint than freedom from all possible consequences.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
... then in effect are asking for a definition of "free speech" after the fact. Logically, this doesn't make much sense. However, if you *do* start from the axiom "free speech is good" you need to either find or construct a definition that is consistent with that axiom. In the meantime assuming that axiom does allow you to examine whether individual cases can be covered as "free speech".
If you start with the axiom that free speech is *always* good, then unless you think selling fraudulent medicine is good then your definition of "free speech" needs to exclude that.
If you start with the axiom that free speech is only *sometimes* good, then your definition can encompass selling fraudulent medicine; however that also raises the possibility that you should *sometimes* oppose free speech.
There are some people who clearly believe that free speech entails complete freedom from legal consequences -- including for libel, or deliberate misinformation that predictably harms or even kills someone. However I suspect there's an element of sloppy thinking there. We've all been raised to regard "free speech" as inviolable, so adopting a broader concept of "free speech" is a handy way of sneaking other things into the tent.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, hate speech is free speech. Of course, there is no requirement that people listen to the speech.
The violence one is a bit tricky since far too many people are now equating disagreement with violence (words hurt campaign).
-- Will program for bandwidth
You're presuming that truth = good, falsehood = bad.
Telling the truth can be bad. Lying can be good. Say you're at a mini-mart and an upset woman runs up to you saying her husband is trying to kill her, then runs into the bathroom. Then an angry man runs in holding a knife screaming, "where is that bitch, I'm gonna kill her." Do you tell him the truth? Or do you deliberately mislead him by lying, and say she ran out the back door?
Speaking the truth or lying does not necessarily correlate to good/bad. Your intent in saying what you say does - whether you're trying to help or harm. Unfortunately, intent is something internal to your mind. You can guess what another person's intent probably is, and in rare cases you can eliminate any other possibility and infer their true intent. But most of the time you can't be sure. And basing legality or punishment on something that most of the time you can't be sure of is just setting up your system for all kinds of trouble.
Take the anti-vaccination movement for example. It's based on statistical error (emphasizing single anecdotes over overall trends) or logical error (believing the testimony of a famous celebrity unskilled in the field over the testimony of a non-famous expert in the field). I would dearly love to ban it from the Internet. But if we set that precedent, what if some time in the future the conspiracy theory becomes true and the government is pacifying the population with mind-altering drugs under the guise of vaccination? Your well-intentioned ban in favor of the truth has then set a precedent allowing a misleading falsehood to be presented as the truth, and the actual truth suppressed.
The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that banning is not the answer. Educating the populace is, so most of them will not make the aforementioned errors. Yeah we're never going to convince 100% of the people that vaccines are good. But 99% should be good enough for most purposes. And I really don't think the tradeoff in future potential abuse is worth it just to get that final 1% to comply.
The fundamental premise behind Democracy is that The People are on average smart enough to usually make the right decision. If you feel we need policies which deprive The People of the right to make those decisions, then you're basically admitting The People aren't smart enough to make the right decision, and thus Democracy doesn't work. (I can actually seen an argument for a benevolent oligarchy being better than democracy. But if you're going to argue for that, then don't even bother with the pretense of pretending to support freedom of speech.)