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.
The supreme court was non partisan. Do you expect the truth arbitration department to go any better?
The 50% of people who believe false things are going to vote for truth arbiters that we don’t like. Surely it will be amazing when the correct party is in control, but inevitably the wrong party will be in control sometimes too.
The issue is that bad truth arbitration is “sticky”. Once a bad actor is in control, they have the power to silence their own opposition.
In order for this to work, we must either make sure a bad actor never ends up at the wheel - which will eventually fail, or neuter the truth arbitration process to the point of inefficacy.
The risks here are probable and tangible. We may have the techniques to do it eventually, but I don’t think we have them right now.
Thing is, the risks of doing nothing have definite consequences that we’ve already been watching. Should we do nothing and let democracy burn in fear that doing something will be abused in the future?
…no? the Supreme Court has always been a politically partisan entity. it quite literally has its most basic power (judicial review) because it usurped that power for itself as part of the political dispute at the heart of Marbury v. Madison. there is fairly compelling evidence that Chief Justice Marshall was seeking a means to enshrine judicial review into law irrespective of its constitutional validity and was not really deciding the case on merits. if the body was ever “non-partisan” then the word is meaningless.