The Trade-Off Between Censorship and Freedom

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The more you try to silence the dangerous idea, the more it'll find ways to circulate clandestinely. When you create silence, then you hurt good ideas as well as hurting bad ones. Do you want to have censorship in place so that things that are directly advocating hate speech and especially misinformation are dealt with? You absolutely do. But if we're in the midst of a problem where we're having a giant crisis of misinformation and hate speech, a huge portion of that is because we have Facebook algorithms that are showing people nothing but that.

Read the full transcript here.

How does the current information revolution compare to previous information revolutions? What kind of event or set of events counts as an information revolution? Why do new information technologies usually amplify the most extreme voices first? Why are intentions not very useful as a metric for determining whether a particular kind of censorship is good or bad? When, if ever, is censorship appropriate or morally acceptable? Why were officials of the Inquisition much more worried about slight deviations in theology than outright agnosticism or atheism? What are the implications of using AI to censor certain kinds of information? What do people misunderstand about history? Why are there so many more futuristic dystopian stories than utopian stories? What is "plural" agency, and why do we need more stories about it?

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and her first book is Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Find out more about her at adapalmer.com.

Staff