Is There a Difference Between Free Speech and Censorship?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In science, there's a goal for truth seeking. And we actually care about both figuring out what we currently believe to be true that isn't true. In each of these games there's a lot on the line, we create rules like what can and can't be said. We're talking about finding more objective ways to measure our misperceptions. What we're talking about here is a classifier that could say, hey,. given this facebook group, we're given this news feed with these kinds of stories, weu know, for this population. Imagine this town or city, or tis class went down when they were shown this kind of content. And then the machine learning can

What do you think the other side thinks? Guest Dan Vallone is the Director of More in Common U.S.A., an organization that’s been asking Democrats and Republicans that critical question. Their work has uncovered countless “perception gaps” in our understanding of each other. For example, Democrats think that about 30 percent of Republicans support "reasonable gun control," but in reality, it’s about 70 percent. Both Republicans and Democrats think that about 50 percent of the other side would feel that physical violence is justified in some situations, but the actual number for each is only about five percent. “Both sides are convinced that the majority of their political opponents are extremists,” says Dan. “And yet, that's just not true.” Social media encourages the most extreme views to speak the loudest and rise to the top—and it’s hard to start a conversation and work together when we’re all arguing with mirages. But Dan’s insights and the work of More in Common provide a hopeful guide to unraveling the distortions we’ve come to accept and correcting our foggy vision.