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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Some opinions are toxic due to their memetic power, their ability to rapidly spread amongst a population whilst evading critical reflection.

We're a global species. Technology made us become larger than the sum of our parts. It is our moral duty to police those opinions that are so polarizing, or so devoid of empathy, that they do harm.

"Policing" can be milder than all out censorship. Personalized feed algorithms can push us into filter bubbles, there's no reason why they can't police toxic views by injecting counter arguments or labeling (not censoring) rampant misinformation as such

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You're actually advocating for censorship on a global scale. We've truly regressed.

Uh no. Changing the algorithms to not push you into filter bubbles isn’t censorship.

This is exactly the point I'm trying to make.

Downvoters: please explain why censorship would be identical to moving feeds away from filter bubbles.

> our moral duty

Yes, but NOT by censorship, but with counterfactuals! And certainly not by a gigantic megacorporation like Facebook.

They are not the arbiters of speech and quite frankly it's too much to ask of them. And imo, anyone who is happy to be an arbiter of speech is somebody you should be very, very afraid of.

I think the question isn't about "can or can't" but about "should or shouldn't."

In my opinion, 24-year-old Stanford grads getting paid upwards of six figures directly out of college should not have any say in what people are or are not privy to seeing, hearing, or reading.

You mention it is "our" moral duty - who is the "our" here?

They are already deciding what appears on your feed via their recommendation algorithms. The question is if the algorithm they currently use could be "better" and what that would mean. Tweaking it to expose fewer people to ideas of white supremacy should be a no-brainer, but because there isn't a single person to point at who is "responsible" we argue in circles.

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