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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, we could have completely open and unfiltered platforms which guarantee freedom of expression but at the same time leave our institutions (public and private) vulnerable to malicious influence.

On the other hand, we could attempt to build systems whose purpose is to remove fake news, so defending ourselves against a particularly aggressive form of attack on our institutions, but at the same time creating a situation in which that system is given the power to decide what is fake and what is not.

Are highly speculative opinion pieces which make accusations far from the main stream fake? What about when a complex event takes place and there are numerous 'takes' on how the event played out. Whose version of the events - whose version of reality reality - does the system use to make judgments on the veracity of news?

The situation is complex and we must tread carefully.

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Is it complex? I don't think so at all.

Facebook can easily just tag stories they think are false, and give people a button to hide or show such stories (or even show ONLY such stories to make it easier for people to build trust in the system). It would be a kind of spam filter for news stories.

Facebook could then stay neutral, could avoid claims of censorship, people who want to only see "true" news could be happy, people who don't trust Facebook's friends to filter their news feed could also be happy, and everyone wins.

They aren't doing that because their goal is not to help people detect fake/false news. Their goal is to suppress it entirely. They do this because like quoquoquo above, they believe their userbase contains vast numbers of sheep who are incapable of rational thought. Just tagging things won't be the "solution" to the existence of such people, which is why their tactics are controversial.

Are they right about their users? It's a big world. But rather than try to help people spot BS and learn from it, their view appears to be that such people are irredeemable.

You're not addressing the problem of how a system could reliably distinguish fake news from real news.

They're correct. People cannot spot BS and learn from it, including you and I. We'll put much effort into mastering a certain area of reality and truth, and find other horizons clouding over by the day: we cannot, as humans, reality-check everything we're confronted with, because it's too much. We're not shepherds or subsistence farmers anymore, with a world tightly constrained and comprehensible. Our world expanded, leaving us behind.

I'm tempted to call this an iron law and suggest it's why we've never spotted alien intelligence in the so-vast universe. Perhaps intelligent species inevitably turn to expanding communication, and drown in it very quickly—their efforts turned to zero-sum gains, eventually triggering their destruction one way or another.

Speak for yourself. I've got much better at spotting BS over the years and frequently do my own fact checks on claims that are dubious.

We live in a single objective reality. There are ways to get at the truth.

Some of those ways are even easy. Can the claims be tested, sometimes this can shortcut you strait to the truth. Knowing how to check sources gets you one step closer. Knowing how to assess the quality of sources, helps. Knowing how to understand the original source material is crucial. Checking that a multitude of sources agree. Determining if the sources are trustworthy (in the web of trust sense). In the case of claims about the natural world being able to duplicate experiments is the ultimate source of truth. There is more but much of this can be done with just a few web searches.

Many Millions of people don't or can't do any this. How many times have we fixed someone's else's computer with just a google search?

Now for the part where I get downvoted. I blame religion. If you do even the most basic checking into most religions they start seeming off. The sources are often unverifiable books. They make claims about the natural world that don't line up with evidence if they are even testable, worse they often contradict themselves. They often have a long history of actively covering up the truth of reality as best they can. What chances does a mind have at navigating a potentially nuanced modern political landscape when its critical faculties have been dulled to the point of accepting as literal truth some or all of the stories about virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, denial of evolution, implausible claims of the earth's age and many other manners of objective non-true things. Religion damages critical thinking. Demagogues and autocrats have always like reduced critical thinking.

What makes you so certain we live in a world of objective reality?

Thank you for understanding this is complicated, it's a relief on this site.

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