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    Warning Donald Trump’s anti-censorship drive is fuelling misinformation crisis in UK
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    Warning Donald Trump’s anti-censorship drive is fuelling misinformation crisis in UK

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    25 Comments

    1. TheClemDispenser on

      If censorship includes stopping misinformation, then I guess I’m pro censorship for stopping misinformation.

    3. Sometimes-funny on

      You know what? That is exactly the person the UK needs an opinion from!

    4. merryman1 on

      I fail to understand how exactly he is anti-censorship when his administration has already cut literally thousands of individual research projects and forced various government bodies to hide away any reference to things like women in the workplace, workplace diversity, anything that could in any way possibly link back to a concept of “workplace DEI”.

    5. SoggyWotsits on

      The article almost implies that Facebook was full of facts and Truth before Trump’s second term!

    6. FollowingExtension90 on

      Unfortunately there are too many cargo cultists in Britain, who couldn’t stop sucking up to America.

    7. Virtual-Feedback-638 on

      Get yet noses outta America’s fart lane and exist as a sovereign state…who the F3CK is the Orange criminal who thinks it’s okay to grab women by their meows, to influence what happens in the UK?

    8. GenerallyDull on

      Let’s not forget all of the things that were labelled as misinformation but ended up being true.

    9. Soaring670 on

      I don’t really understand US politics or law particularly well, but aren’t they banning books over there at the moment? The “Don’t Say Gay Bill”. 

      Heck, even Trump’s pal, Mr ‘free speech absolutist’, made terms like cisgender a slur on his platform. Musk was also accused of silencing critics on Twitter by suspending journalists who reported negatively on him.

      So they should probably get their house in order first.

    10. GardenSecret2743 on

      You’d think the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd would be all about fact checking. Funny that… Almost as if facts aren’t on their side, but that couldn’t be right could it?

    11. raerae1991 on

      The USA is a big neon flashing light of how dangerous unchecked misinformation/disinformation is. This is how social media will be the downfall of humanity

    13. codspeace on

      Quickly now while we have the chance….. what else can we say is Trumps fault??? Taking our cue from US democrat party. Maybe we can blame him for the immigration crisis?? That would benefit Tories and Labour alike.

    14. LifeFeckinBrilliant on

      The misinformation is that it’s ant- censorship… What they really want is no fact checking.

    15. digitalpencil on

      This is what their calls for “free speech” have always amounted to, a license to spread lies far and wide, amplifying them across networks they de facto control.

    16. tarxvfBp on

      There are enough people who want to belief nonsense that they will create the misinformation necessary to prolong their delusion. That’s it. Game over. Truth has already died.

    17. EarCareful4430 on

      My Facebook feed has, without me interacting with them, got a lot more full of right wing misinformation pages.

    18. WebDevWarrior on

      Before anyone says it’s not that bad here, we should remember:

      * We had people brutally attacking engineers for trying to fix the mobile phone infrastructure because they believed 5G conspiracy theories.
      * We have doctors and nurses living in fear for their own safety because 1/4 doctors will get attacked by a patient (its 1/6 for nurses)… every single year thanks to how the government has left the service to fester, and people are using that as an excuse to lash out (motivated by pharma & antivax conspiracy theories in some cases).
      * Brexit (fuelled by Russian money).
      * Constantly re-voting for the tories on the promise that they were “making the UK great again”.
      * Climate change denial, still a pretty big issue in the UK.
      * American anti-abortionists have been on the rise here, pumping anti-science crap on the streets.

      It doesn’t help that the UK doesn’t give a shit about science. We have a lot of really dedicated scientists and people who care about all aspects of STEM but the pay sucks, the funding is scarse (thankfully we’re back in EU Horizon), and many of those industries are in real difficulty. What makes it worse is that science education for the public is pretty crap. The BBC used to be a pioneer for educational documentaries and now they are a shadow of their former selves.

      I feel like we’re genuinely living in a second dark age.

    19. FlakTotem on

      I used to be extremely free speech, but I’ve slowly moved further away over time.

      Everyone likes the slogans of free speech and to say ‘buh who decides and watches the watchers?!’ but while pointing to a problem is easy, there’s a complete vacuum of thought in the areas of ‘can free speech actually support itself *without* help’ and ‘what is the alternative?’.

      Free speech is a tool. The purpose of that tool is to increase the **quality of discussion** by ensuring concepts can be raised, refined, and evaluated through discussion.

      But the idea that this is self-sufficient in the modern day of echo-chambers, false narratives, foreign interference, and misinformation just doesn’t hold up to the evidence of the world around us. Bad actors and catchy memes (not lol pics, the term) that are false can and will outperform truth in this environment, and by burning our bandwidth on the junk the quality of the substance often suffers.

      Giving financial institutions freedom didn’t lead to a free financial system. It just allowed it to crash and burn. In the same respect, just *giving* speech freedom instead of **facilitating** freedom will not get us there either.

    20. Whatever-and-breathe on

      No censorship (particularly to spread disinformation and hateful speech) unless it is something that Trump doesn’t like or want to hear. Palestinians genocide anyone? Help spreading of Russian propaganda and support for anti LGBTQ+ community?

    22. disaster_story_69 on

      Ill translate this for the gallery: fact checking ‘charity’ whose sole objective is censorship and control of information, raise alarm that allowing people to draw their own conclusions from uncensored, unvetted sources that is not them is dangerous.

    23. Dense_Bad3146 on

      Unfortunately people seem to have forgotten how to think for themselves

    24. Veritanium on

      Ok redditors. You get your wish. The government now decides what is misinformation.

      Ten days later, there is a Reform UK majority government, which now gets to decide what you see and hear by defining what is and isn’t misinformation.

      How are you feeling in this situation?

      You try and post your favourite little studies about the positive economic impact of migration, and it’s removed for being disinformation. You try and post a trans-affirming statement and it’s removed for misinformation.

      But this is fine, right?

    25. Wafflecopter84 on

      If you think the establishment has a right to silence you by deciding what you’re allowed to say, you’re part of the problem. They have lied so much, yet somehow zero consequences. If this is you, you support fascism.