Today, Fareed Zakaria, on Global Public Square on CNN, interviewed Richard Stengel, author of
“Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and
What We Can Do About It”, 2019, Atlantic Monthly Press, 368 pages, Amazon.
Zakaria described hate speech laws in Germany to the United
States today. You can be prosecuted for displaying Naza items in Germany. Private platforms may censor you but the First
Amendment makes it impossible to make it illegal.
Stengel says that if you travel around the world, people find
it remarkable that in the US hate speech is tolerated. Why are people allowed to burn the Koran in
public in the U.S.?
The answer is partly that the U.S. embraces individualism
more than other countries. The U.S. officially is less interested in protecting
people as members of groups as for the limitations they may feel.
Stengel also suggested that social media platforms should be
held responsible for hosting hate speech and that Section 230 should be much
reduced. He also suggested that we need to teach media literacy in schools, and noted the Pizzagate scandal in 2016 as an example of American gullibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment