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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

We really don't need more interference from Twitter, Facebook, et al to moderate political discussions. Time and time again they blunder it.

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I'm of the view that we need more powerful users, not moderation. Would be hard to enforce I suppose, given voting rings and whatnot, but I'd like to see a community like that one day.

I'm not sure what you are imagining but isn't a hive mind effect a challenge?

At least hive mind is real people being stupid.

Bots exactly misrepresent the will of the public.

I think algorithmic detection of agenda pushing is where the gold lies. I mean let's add to profiles "detected agendas: Russian state policy/US state policy/Vote for Democrats/Vote for Republicans/Buy bitcoin/whatever". There are probably some (a lot of?) caveats, but still.

If only someone would hear you and just do it...

Yes, lets suppress actual popular movements because they deviate from the norm and therefore could be suspicious.

Non sequiter. Interest and promotion in a movement != pushing an agenda. In the same way, interest in topics on reddit != spamming upvotes. It's literally the exact same process of looking for suspicious behavior and then moderating it.

Of course, reddit doesn't do that either nowadays. But the point stands: Blocking bot behavior does not necessarily mean blocking real users.

I would like to see an automated system that correctly knows the difference between interest/promotion of a movement and pushing an agenda. My level of interest may be different than your level of interest; one of which may be considered suddenly pushing an agenda.

Also, what's wrong with pushing an agenda exactly? Are we to ban politicians and opinion writers?

How is that suppression? I propose to show publicly the result of an algorithmic process which for now could be done by a human with enough time on their hands.

Yeah, just look how Google's Youtube extremist detection algorithm works.

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