Thread by @Pinboard

The idea that messaging apps are a problem (or for that matter the suggestion that QAnon believers shouldn't be allowed to talk to one another) is a poisonous direction for this debate to take. The problem is one of a major political party embracing extremism and irreality

https://twitter.com/donie/status/1400231752963088386

Censorship (or content moderation, or whatever you want to call it) is no substitute for the Republican party policing the crazy within its own ranks, and attempts to impose "moderation" that way will only backfire. There is no technical fix to what is a political crisis.

We also need to call out the moral panic for what it is. There is no organized insurrectionary movement in the US, the extremists involved are inept and derpy, and the threat of this has been overblown to serve political ends just like the "war on terror" was back in its day.

How to bring back a shared public sphere, when a third of the electorate has floated off into la-la-land ,is the most pressing question in American civics. But making up our own scary fantasies, or forbidding our ideological opponents from speaking, is no solution to that.

I'm really glad someone made this point. Why do I rail against cryptocurrency and defend encrypted messaging, when both can be used for bad or for good? Because the nature of money means nefarious activity swamps laudable use. That's not true with speech

https://twitter.com/JudeCNelson/status/1400301439101120514

Evil people don't have millions of times more need to talk to one another securely than regular people. But they do need to send enormously more money than regular people. So the tradeoff is different for these two technologies. Moreover, encrypted messaging at least works.

The same basic tradeoff—use cryptographic tools to move some areas of human interaction out of the reach of government—has divergent implications depending on whether you're talking about money or speech. Where I land on this is "talk all you want, but hold on to your wallet."

(For the record, I do support size limits on E2E encrypted chat. I wholeheartedly support anyone's right to private conversation, but don't want to live in a world where 10,000 people can have an unmonitorable chat room. Luckily, Telegram removes the dilemma by being unencrypted)