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Comment by uniqueid | Hacker News Reader

  best way to fight disinformation is to 
  challenge it with true information.

When it comes to pandemic disinformation, there's 200,000 dead Americans who would disagree with that.

A better way to fight disinformation would be to challenge it with... an appeal to popularity.

But if Copernicus or Richard Feynman were alive and on Youtube today, they'd be unknowns compared to PewDiePie.

So neither sunlight, nor an appeal to popularity, are going to help us here.

I may not love censorship, but it beats having some deluded moron shoot at my car in a civil war, or infect me with Covid-19 thanks to a lecture by some Youtube science-ist.

If the choice is stricter Facebook moderation or to live in a new Dark Age... well, you catch my drift.

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2.8 million Americans die every year, so other risks, that are causing the rest of the deaths, have to be weighed as well.

Far more than 200,000 people can die in one year if we set up an apparatus of censorship, as these tools could always be commandeered by corrupt individuals and used to horrific effect.

Look at autocratic societies around the world, and see what giving any group, no matter how seemingly altruistic and enlightened, the power to censor, can lead to.

Once the social taboo against violating the right to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility, as it becomes possible for voices to be silenced and concentrations of power to magnify their control through constricting the flow of critical information.

  Once the social taboo against violating the right 
  to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility

I keep this bookmarked to save time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

The types of limits on free speech being proposed here go far beyond the traditional limits imposed in the Anglo sphere on speech.

The types of censorship proposed in the article deal with expressing beliefs pertaining to highly complex and contentious social issues about which powerful special interests seek to shape the public's perceptions about. Once this class of speech becomes acceptable to subject to censorship, politics becomes a much more dangerous, winner-takes-all game.

Facebook isn't exclusively just in America. Everyone in america has access to WHO webpage. How is it, that Americans need someone else to think for them?

200,000 Americans aren't dead because of something they read on Facebook.

Yes, lets use censorship to improve our democracies. Good idea! Let´s also put all those who disagree in prison.

And let me decide, what is truth and what is not.

As long as you don't spend your weekends monitoring 8kun for Qanon "drops", fine by me :)

I don't have to, Qanon is my messenger. :)

  Yes, lets use censorship to improve our democracies.

What democracies? Out of the three Western countries in which I have roots, only one is still a healthy democracy.

  Good idea! Let´s also put all those who disagree in prison.

No, we should only send to prison the handful of criminally negligent executives at companies like Facebook.

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