JFC everyone is so worried about China, stop the propaganda and division within our own country first. Fox news, InfoWars.. etc, its tearing apart our country and has nothing to do with China, and everything to do with how our own social media and companies use propaganda to destabilize the US.
I would hope that we have the capability to worry about and address both of these very important things simultaneously. I concur that Fox News, Infowars, Newsmax and similar are a threat to democracy and civil society as well.
As the Dining Philosopher's Problem is meant to elucidate, it's not possible to do this.
This is after all why programs keep getting higher latency even though chips have gotten faster for decades. If we could solve more than one problem in a way that's concurrent with each of the problems (computing "parallelly"? dunno), we wouldn't have this problem.
In conclusion, we must solve a problem that isn't the topic of this article before we address the topic of this article.
(Note: I'm hungry, so I won't be able to respond to this thread for an indeterminate amount of time...)
Edit: clarification made before I started to deal with my hunger problem (obviously)
The tricky thing is that labelling speech/media one disagrees with as a threat to democracy is in itself a threat to democracy.
While I agree with you about those specific outlets, I also have no doubt that any powers introduced to restrict them would eventually be turned against the liberal-leaning media as well.
There have always been and always will be misinformed and poorly educated people who believe all kinds of ridiculous things with no factual basis. A healthy democracy doesn't deal with these people by declaring their opinions illegal.
Once you have the state deciding and enforcing what is and isn't true, any hope for a liberal democracy is gone.
There's a line between having an opinion and spreading verifiable lies, and maybe we could do something about the latter category. But yeah, the core of it will probably have to be grassroots, not a government intervention.
Sure there's a line, but it's extremely fuzzy and subjective. Everyone sees it in a different place.
Once you give the state the power to arrest people for spreading "verifiable lies", you now have to determine what "verifiable" means and who does the verifying. It's inevitably going to change a lot depending on the political beliefs of those in power.
It's the halting problem, "who watches the watchers?", etc. There's no way to have the state determining what's true and what's a lie, even in the most seemingly obvious cases, while maintaining freedom of speech and a free society more generally.
No, but it's usually the unsaid implication when stating that certain opinions, ideas, or media outlets are threats to democracy and "we need to do something". Perhaps instead of arresting, it's fining, or silencing, or some other method of enforcement. Regardless, the counter-argument remains the same.
The biggest threat to this country are white nationalists as stated by the FBI not tiktok. this is all a side show to say look over there -> look at the bad guys.
I have seen that and it is indeed very worrisome. I hope that sufficient resources are allocated to domestic counterterrorism and domestic counter-intelligence.
People think Al Qaeda, ISIS etc are a huge threat, and yes they're very concerning... But you know who's even better and motivated at killing Americans? Other Americans.
This has been a known thing since long before Timothy McVeigh, a Ryder truck and Oklahoma City in the mid 1990s. It has not been adequately addressed in domestic law enforcement.
Calling out blatant disregard for law from a foreign company can unite people with clashing views domestically, and isn't prohibiting doing what you suggest.
One of the social and education problems is that the vast majority of people will click "yes/i agree/I consent/etc" on just about any app that does anything they think is fun or cool without thinking about the full ramifications.
