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When trying to combat verifiable misinformation. We've got people working in bad faith to muddy the waters in democracies around the world, they're purposely trying to amp up the chaos in the social space and sow division amongst different groups.
I think if some people are found to be purposely spreading misinformation on a mass scale, there needs to be some sort of special punishment that restricts their freedom of speech. Maybe they're restricted from social media altogether, fined, or there's jail time, I don't know, but something should be done to weed heavy, repeat offenders (above and beyond just misquoting something or throwing out an opinion or whatever 90% of the population probably does).
Obviously, some guardrails would need to be put in place to prevent Trump or others from turning around and using that to silence critics or journalists, but at the same time, people/organizations who are heavily abusing our democratic system should be punished somehow. It's a really fuzzy line between a journalist just getting their facts wrong on a developing story vs entire news organizations that are purposely trying to misinform people.
That's the real issue though, isn't it? No matter what "guardrails" you put in place someone is always going to find a way to exploit any kind of restrictions like this for their own selfish purposes
Exactly. The issue you run into is always that bad-faith actors are going to intentionally misuse laws and regulations, unless you write them to be very narrow. Most laws dealing with censorship need to be at least a little broad so that minor tweaks don't allow the targeted material to be tweaked to avoid regulation. But as soon as it's broad enough to prevent really repellent speech, it can be used against people that are already marginalized.
"Re-education" is an interesting question though. How are you defining that? We already know that we would sharply reduce recidivism rates if we made sure that incarcerated people were put in substance abuse programs and given access to college degree programs. (And those college programs cost less in the long run than recycling people through the criminal justice system again.) Does that count as re-education? What about having group therapy, so that people who had hate-crime multipliers had to confront their racism, etc.? Is that re-education?
To me the examples you listed would just fall under "education". The term "re-education" heavily implies imprisonment and forced brain washing.
If the condition of parole is successfully completing substance abuse treatment, isn't that a forced--or heavily coerced--brain washing? If it isn't, then what's the bright line between them?
The person in this scenario could still choose to go to jail instead of rehab. They could also slack off in rehab and start using again once they are released if they so chose. Obviously these are not ideal solutions but the person still has some kind of choice in the matter. Hopefully they would take it seriously and choose not to go back to drugs.
"Re-education" would be if they were sent to some kind of Clockwork Orange style reprogramming process where these choices were taken away from them, making them unable to ever do drugs again wether they wanted to or not.