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Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

This gives me some weird feelings. I mean, if you ask a website to turn some content "unpreferred" without user consensus, isn't that also some type of censorship? In fact, many Chinese websites are doing it right now, and it's very effective in terms of censoring contents.

However, I support the idea of content flagging, but instead of making them "unpreferred", maybe add a mark saying "Propaganda from XXX" so people can be more cautious about those information themselves?

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One of the problems with this is that there is not general agreement on what constitutes, "propaganda". The Taiwanese official cited in this article refers to it as, "disinformation" and many people wrongly assume that the government is referring to "fake news" or factually false information when it refers to propaganda. In fact, many governments and other organizations in a position to distribute information arbitrarily refer to any information that counters their narrative as "propaganda" whether or not its factually correct. You can be certain that the Chinese government regards any accounts (let alone praise) for the Tank Man as hostile propaganda, no matter how factually accurate it is, just like the US government treats narratives that reflect negatively on the US government narrative to be propaganda ("sowing dissent"). I'd be more much receptive to a system that had a way to flag information as "factually inaccurate" (as difficult as that may be) than a system that flags messages as "propaganda" which is far more arbitrary and subjective standard.

It may be that Facebook does not want to show articles in its news feed with the "disinformation" tag attached.

For the government to be more transparent, I suppose you could just publish the articles you marked as disinformation, and let people debate whether they were truly fake or not. Doing nothing, right now, does not seem like an option, in the face of propaganda coming from other countries.

I really like the "unpreferred" idea, but I think it should be just a setting. Sometimes the filtering/"unpreferring" should be opt-out (e.g. gore, porn), other times opt-in (left-wing propaganda, right-wing propaganda, ...), but at all times configurable by the user.

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