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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has certain been a vehicle for the spread of misinformation, but I'm not completely sure that they should answer for it. Having Facebook control what information is "true" sounds awfully dystopian.

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>Having Facebook control what information is "true" sounds awfully dystopian.

But that's exactly what Facebook already does. How would attempting to minimize the spread of disinformation be any more dystopian than optimizing it for maximum utility?

For that matter, why, in these threads, is it only ever a slippery slope to attempt to counter misinformation, but never such to let it spread unchecked and be weaponized by any interest capable of doing so?

Facebook never was, nor ever claimed to be, a neutral arbiter. Their entire business model depends on distorting the truth, which arguably implies some degree of social responsibility on their part.

Choose your poison then. Either we let idiots run loose and we are definitely screwed, or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc, and then MAYBE we're screwed if we pick the wrong ones.

>or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc

We've been down this route in several countries during the 20th century and it doesn't pan out well.

Every nation did this until the internet. Those companies were collectively called “the press” in the western world.

Which kinda worked until the press worked out that favouring contentious topics and maintaining two viewpoints was more profitable.

You’re really going to throw the press in Britain, along with independent anti-establishment papers like Socialist Worker and Marxism Today alongside the Times and the Guardian, into the same bucket as that of Soviet Russia, Maoist China and North Korea?

Given my point is that you don’t need to be a dictatorship to do it, yes.

Not that being free from government influence frees you from the political preferences of your owner, as this recent non-sequitur headline from the Express should demonstrate: “EU BLACKMAIL: Brussels threatens FOOD AID to UK in 'last throw of dice of Project Fear'”.

Like I said, we're probably screwed anyway.

If we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications, we might be okay if we picked the right ones. The problem is, they have to continue to be the right ones, basically forever. That... won't happen. People retire and get replaced; people get corrupted by power; people see what they could do with power and put themselves in place to be the one to replace someone who's going to retire.

There is nobody - no person and no organization - who it's safe to trust with that kind of power.

Can we perhaps come up with solutions in which we have fewer idiots, or have barriers against the rapid spread of unverifiable information in general?

> solutions in which we have fewer idiots

Not unless you are willing to avadakedavra them all, and this avenue is also wide open for abuse, as you may imagine

I was hoping for solutions more along the lines of education than “killing the idiots”…

In a democratic society you don’t control, you elect strong leaders who guide and mentor the people to the positions that are best for society as a whole. We build a culture that believes in reason, science, humanitarianism, and progress. Then we work on spreading this culture and belief to others around us every opportunity we have.

The problem is democracy is about popularity, not reason. Most people do not elect the "best" leaders. We are very far away from that ever happening, regardless of culture.

The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious. At all. Nor do anti-vaxxers pose a significant threat. At all.

> The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious.

Every fucking outbreak is serious. Please learn something about epidemiology, and about measles in particular. I've been involved in tracking an outbreak, and have (separately) known people who were seriously harmed by measles. Dismissing any outbreak as "not serious" is truly sociopathic.

Well dystopian or not, we either have some form of control, or not and end up where we are now. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.

FB failed on so many basic moral expectations that I have 0 sympathy for that company, and IMHO yes, their purely for-profit product is definitely responsible for the content it provides.

> FB failed on so many basic moral expectations that I have 0 sympathy for that company

Oh, for sure. But I’m cautious of instituting a blanket policy here that could end up being applied in other contexts where it may end up doing harm.

There are certain topics that are verboten in almost all of society. The obvious example here would be an invocation of Godwin's Law. We can all keep an open mind and have hypothetical, Devil's Advocate discussions, but nobody can seriously say "Hmm… Maybe systematically slaughtering Jewish people was the right thing to do".

Given that diseases have killed more people than the Nazis ever did, I don't think it's unreasonable to make that analogy.

I'm absolutely an advocate for free speech, but I am also in support of Amazon's recent move to pull any material pushing the fraudulent vaccine/autism link claim.

> I'm absolutely an advocate for free speech

You're also an advocate for the removal of free speech. Let's just be clear.

You can be both, depending on the situation. You are both. Many people here are both.

Facebook should be treated like a publisher and be held responsible for any and all content it disseminates. If someone wants to publish something there publicly (visible to more than let’s say 50 people) it should have to be reviewed. This is what for example tagesschau.de does with every comment.

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