cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56719476
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
Censorship is, at best, a band-aid. And they can always find ways around it. The best solution isn’t to block them from view temporarily, but to teach people to evaluate what they say with empathy and critical thinking.
That is, of course, difficult to accomplish. But then again, there’s no easy solutions, only easy excuses.
The “you don’t need to censor fascists, bigots, racists, etc., you just have to be louder than them” idea hadn’t worked. The world had decades to make it work but didn’t succeed. It is ideologically pure, I’ll give you that. Really nice if you can drive those bad people out without dirtying your own hands with censorship. But I have lost confidence that that approach can ever work.
At no point did I mention volume, I implied education. I actually find just yelling louder to be worse than censorship, as all it does is increase the level of tension and push people towards extremes. Which helps no one.
I also didn’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t use band-aids at all, just that it’s a simple treatment, not a cure. Blocking certain speech and rhetoric can help to a degree… but not if it’s the only thing you do.
The problem with current strategies is that no one wants to go beyond that first step. Whether it’s censorship, or shouting.
You can’t educate people over Twitter. 😂