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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I feel as though the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" argument has taken a beating in recent times, and it's not difficult to see why.

Take the example of QAnon. It's a movement based around utter nonsense conspiracy theory. It is debunked on a daily basis. It still has a lot of followers.

Compare to Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember around the time his social media accounts were banned that people said doing so was pointless, and that banning him would only increase his popularity by making him look like an outlaw. Yet his profile has sunk almost entirely.

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I feel like there's an elephant in the living room nobody is seeing, and that's general loss of trust in our institutions. These kinds of ideas have more traction today than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago because people trust their government and their public institutions less today than they did back then.

IMHO a certain amount of this calling for censorship is people from those self-same institutions refusing to look at their own role in undermining the trust basis of our society. How many mainstream journalists bothered to check on those Iraq WMD claims or investigate the realities behind the 2008 financial collapse? How many politicians?

Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. When it is lost it leaves a vacuum. If nobody is trusted the vacuum gets filled by whatever random nonsense sounds superficially good to someone.

To me the popularity of crazy populist demagogues is entirely explainable as a response to several large scale and very notable cases where our institutions have burned their credibility. If something isn't done to correct this and start re-earning trust I predict that this situation will only worsen and we'll be facing full-blown fascism shortly.

Censorship does not re-earn trust. In fact it does the opposite. Right now hordes of people out there are saying "see! Alex Jones must be onto something or why would they go to the trouble of banning him?!?" Microsoft's threat to ban Gab is the kind of PR money can't buy. I bet their traffic numbers will skyrocket.

Just curious - what are the notable cases that you're referring to which burned credibility of our institutions? By "our", I assume you mean NATO countries (or even just the USA).

Off the top of my head:

- banking crisis and the complete lack of judicial redress

- the WMD lies for the second Iraq war and the lack of judicial response for the perrpetrators

- tobacco/health disinformation campaigns and the lack of judicial response

- widening income disparity and the lack of political will/power to reverse it

- climate change disinformation and the lack of any meaningful political action

- systematic tax dodging via tax havens and the lack of political response

- militarization of police

In general, the fact that for-profit companies consistently succeed in undermining the ability for society to correct them (by "financing" politicians, by disinforming the public, or by simply cheating around the regulations).

One of the reasons that the GMO and anti-vax discussions can fester on is because organizations like the EPA and the FDA are viewed as completely corrupt; the authorities simply have no credible authority left.

> the authorities simply have no credible authority left.

But it's the Russians!

I do think there was a Russian bot campaign. It was kind of obvious. But the rush to blame the entire phenomenon on them strikes me as disingenuous.

Even worse is the desire to blame the whole thing on human cognitive shortcomings while citing likely-not-reproducible mushy soft psych studies. It's a high-brow with-citations way of dismissing people as just "stupid."

Iraq and the bank bailouts followed by absolutely no reform are two massive ones, but there had also been a death by a thousand cuts. I've lost track for example of how many nutritional recommendations have later been retracted. Those are small but they add up. Each time it's another reason to take official pronouncements with a grain of salt.

To this I would add a profound economic hollowing out. That always boosts distrust and brings out racism and xenophobia.

Trust isn't even that hard to earn (though it takes time), but insofar as one depends on intellectual sloppyness or even outright dishonesty for "legitimate" aims" (just think marketing, elections, etc.), then you cannpot attack those fallacious methods as such in those that use them for much nastier things. All that's left then is squabbling about those ends while leaving the means out of the frame, which leads nowhwere.

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