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Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" would have been considered "misinformation", "propaganda" or "harmful content". These are considered "the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain" (Wikipedia)

So many of the great discoveries in science were controversial in their time. "On the Origin of Species", expanding universe, microbiology. Do you really want the government deciding what is acceptable? No, we don't. We fought a revolution to have the ability to think for ourselves.

I'm not that worried though. Even if platforms are subjectively regulated by companies or the government, life seems to find a way. There are plenty of other mechanisms to publish scientific breakthroughs.

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Neil Tyson, 2018: I’m okay with a US Space Force. But what we need most is a Truth Force — one that defends against all enemies of accurate information, both foreign & domestic.

Has a government ever made the wrong choice when it decided which scientific theories are valid? I mean... I certainly can't think of any! Hooray, Truth Force!

1 - https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1031556958153666561

The problem with Truth Forces of the past, such as the venerated Inquisition, is that they just couldn't be everywhere at once. They could never completely stop people from saying things in private, or from running to safe havens. If only the governments of the time had had platforms as pervasive and automated as Facebook and Google! They could have fact-checked and shadow-banned content about the earth being round or moving around the sun, the earth being older than 6,000 years, species adapting over time, etc. The damage has already been done, but at least we have proper censorship in place now to bury any such misinformation that may occur in the future.

"We will get to the truth... By force!"

We live in very different times.

In the past, every idea had to go through a filtering process in order to spread. I am not talking about some truth filter, but that the idea needs to meet some virality threshold since the medium of communication is very low bandwidth and slow. (Ex: scholars writing to letters to each other, or housewives gossiping about the latest folk remedy)

The greatest change that happened in the 21st century is that ideas spread at the speed of light, and any bullshit can be broadcast to billions of eyeballs very quickly.

Rather than a couple housewives laughing off how the neighbor tried the squeezing lemon juice into eyeball trick last week and found that it didn't work, you have some X% of people trying it immediately after seeing it on twitter.

> The greatest change that happened in the 21st century is that ideas spread at the speed of light, and any bullshit can be broadcast to billions of eyeballs very quickly.

On the other hand: those billions of eyeballs now have three gajillion hours of youtube presented to them any second. I'm fairly certain that a few large newspapers a hundred years ago had a much, much better reach when it came to implementing ideas into the general public, because there was so little else.

It's like hearing somebody speak that stands 5m from you in an otherwise silent room vs hearing somebody shout at the other end of a football stadium. If all the fans in that stadium coordinate to amplify their message, you will hear it and it will vibrate the seat you're sitting on, but they barely get that coordinated unless it's very simple messages that are incredible light on information.

Rather than hanging their neighbors for witchcraft, instead they moan about conspiracy theories involving QAnon or Russia.

On balance, the free dissemination of ideas seems to have helped truth spread more easily. Lies didn't have any problem spreading before we had electricity. Unless you think that we should still be basing our entire culture around the worship of gods carved from stone and wood?

That too will revert.

In many countries, the power of social media gives a platform for superstition and mystical thinking to expand.

In less developed nations, where religion and superstition are fundamental parts of the power structure, they travel even faster than facts, and those who argue for reason are silenced (Death of rationalists in India for example).

The leap from getting rid of hate/nation-state/conspiracy/medical/etc. misinfo spam to preventing the next scientific breakthrough seems not in line with misinfo nor science:

-- Social media (in the US) is a red herring for science censorship. Most research funding is already tied to the politics of NIH/NSF/etc. program directors and the administrations above them. I'd start there if you're worried about science censorship.

-- Social media misinformation has little to do with science. If anything, just as it is a cost for society in general, it has been a tax on science as well:

Ex: I have research hospital colleagues wasting pandemic resources having to debunk crackpot drug theories because of social media employees & VPs building world-scale companies that mainstream medical misinfo in exchange for higher engagement, and Republican politicians riding those manipulated constituents enough to impact how pandemic time and $ gets spent.

Ex: Misinformation often uses science as its vector, which in turn hurts the credibility used for supporting real science and translating its results

Twitter has a policy stating that you can't post things contradicting the CDC. The CDC originally said that masks don't do anything. A very obvious layperson assumption would be that masks do do something, because if it comes from your face, and you put a barrier over your face, that would seem pretty damn likely to reduce spread. It's 5-year old logic and obvious. According to these policies, saying so was prohibited behavior. Now we all wear masks.

If Twitter is a platform that actually harms people sharing thoughts on masks, how can this policy be trusted to be accurate for other things? Some of the drugs in question are not future research but are available today, and the question is just whether or not to try them. Some of these drugs are clearly very politicized as well. I already have no faith that the CDC can get it right from its own incompetence. I have less faith that it isn't also politicized. People should be allowed to speak freely, not ruled by the tyranny of the elite who think they know what's best for people.

The topic was on better misinfo spam enforcement not preventing the next Darwin - the industry of performing significant science.

Edit: for context, this comment was originally in response to a larger comment that I see has been pared down.

> it's unclear why medical misinfo should get a free pass in the US system

Because it's an arbitrary category. What about cars, or computers, art, or politics? Imagine having fact checks and censorship for what constitutes good art.

Handling misinformation is not an artificial problem, it's a systemic problem because it always comes back to human judgment, and humans are not and can never be omniscient.

Jack's supposed motivation for allowing or disallowing certain things doesn't matter in the face of what they actually implement in reality: banning both true information and false information, in the name of fighting "misinformation."

It is true that private citizens and companies can do whatever they want. And it would be really great if what they truly wanted was to fight "misinformation." But what is apparent is that everyone on every side of heated situations on the internet nearly always wants to remove information that they specifically disagree with - and if that information may actually be true, but there is an authority that can be appealed to who will vouch for the un-truthiness of it anyway - then that authority's opinion will be taken for granted and hoisted upon others.

It takes a lot of guts to say "I think you're wrong but I'm going to allow you to speak." Cutting people's voice out is cowardly, and dangerous at scale. When you attempt to cut off the bottom of the bell curve on the false->true spectrum, you never do just that. You cut off the top, too. When you simply remove false claims rather than let people engage in a way that they're corrected, they don't learn. It is more likely to stoke a resentment leading to planting down harder than anything else.

And when you cut out the top of the bell curve, you don't always just remove truths that counter mistruths. A small percent of the time you remove original thinking. And this is what the original commenter was talking about.

I agree that censorship is a short-sighted solution, but imo the bigger risk comes from the fact that social networks operate in a way that enables the loudest voices, increases polarisation/bias, thus creating a platform for misinformation and harm. It's a known (and well researched) phenomenon.

If anything, we're moving away from progress by wasting our brain power on giving voices to ideas that are proven to be harmful (think: M. Gove saying that "Britain has had enough experts", I'll skip the US president for the sake of brevity, or 5G, Covid conspiracies, it's tiresome). We need rebels, not idiots. Of course, it's not new.

> We fought a revolution to have the ability to think for ourselves.

When you say "we", who do you mean, specifically? Who does "we" refer to and what would you mean by "them"? How old are you?

In almost every imaginable way you or I share more with an Iranian mullah or a fisherman living in Wuhan than the people who lived in Northern America at the end of the XVIII century.

I agree that social media doesn't promote the best voices, far from it. But that is a process that would get better with time. Censorship is certainly the wrong approach in any way and can get very dangerous.

Survivorship bias - we see all the good ideas that were once revolutionary, but not the countless terrible ones.

The problem is that we don't know which of the ideas are good and which are terrible until we have hindsight.

This will always be true. But we need another argument for the basis of censorship.

Censorship is a problem not because absurd ideas get rejected - but rather ideas do not get rejected outright based on the power dynamic of the society of that time.

Freedom of speech to me is the discussion of ideas. We should be able to hypothetically discuss things, even if they may be dangerous - but that is different than, say, inciting violence.

But when it comes to many of the "revolutionary" ideas being spread today, we already have hindsight.

The "revolutionary" ideas that black people are categorically less intelligent than whites, and that therefore Africans would be incapable of civilization were it not for the effects of slavery and colonialism, that the only reason African Americans are disproportionately targeted by police is their genetically innate propensity for crime and violence, that multiculturalism and miscegenation are inherently harmful and a threat to white civilization, and maybe segregation and ghettos weren't a bad idea after all?

We've been there. We've considered that. We've had the debates, the civil war, the riots. We've realized that's a terrible idea. Most of us, anyway.

What about the "revolutionary" idea that the Enlightment was a disaster, and that democracy and egalitarianism should be abandoned in favor of a return to absolute monarchy, eugenics and neo-fascism?

We've been there. We've considered that. We fought wars to claw our way out of the divine right of kings and the brutal hand of dictatorship because we realized that it's a terrible idea.

Ok, what about the "revolutionary" idea that the earth is flat?

We realized that was a terrible idea before we learned to smelt iron. Ok, true, most people don't bother doing the experiments necessary to prove the Earth is round, and tend to take it on faith. But that's not because people are blind and ignorant sheep being led astray by the military scientific complex, it's because it's trivially obvious.

The Jewish Question?

That certainly had its time in the marketplace of ideas to say the least.

We don't need to keep QAnon's dialogue alive just in case it turns out in hindsight that the Democratic party really is a cult of satanic pedophiles who drink the blood of child sex-slaves to extend their lives after all, nor do we need to deeply and soberly consider the possibility that COVID-19 really is a globalist population control experiment manufactured by Bill Gates as a pretext to implanting everyone with mind control chips, nor do we need to "teach the controversy" around creationism just in case it turns out God planted dinosaur fossils just to test our faith.

Sometimes, despite attempts to obfuscate the fact, we do know which ideas are terrible.

> Sometimes, despite attempts to obfuscate the fact, we do know which ideas are terrible.

I don't disagree with any of the above, however, you managed to carefully avoid marxism-leninism/communism, a simple oversight, I suppose?

I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive list, and my comment is likely to be controversial enough as it is, but if you need it mentioned, then fine - marxism-leninism/communism bad.

nice, thanks! Now that we've agreed that Marxism is bad, we should ask Twitter and FB to censor certain leftist movements who are openly (and semi-openly) marxist, right?

Everyone from card carrying Stalinists to Hillary Clinton is called a "Marxist" nowadays, so no.

what about self-proclaimed Marxists, clearly they should be censored, now that even current POTUS is getting censored?

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