Hacker News Reader

> Not GP, but I propose doing absolutely nothing.

There are multiple places on the internet where you can access completely unmoderated content. 4chan and 8chan are two popular forums, and yet they are far from mainstream.

The fact is that moderation is a feature which people want. People don't want to go through 200 spam e-mails everyday. People don't want to spend tons of time going through bullshit.

Facebook and Twitter has never been about getting "unfiltered" news. Facebook became useful because your friends was there. Twitter became useful because you could read content from famous and skilled people.

> There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.

And these will continue to exist on the internet. The only thing that's happening here is that Facebook and Twitter is taking a stance that they don't want to become part of this group. Is that so bad?

Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world.

I agree that the ideal of every adult is being educated, taking time to check facts, having a critical mind.

But that’s not realistic. It’s not where we are. And the facts of democracy are that uneducated people vote. People unprepared for the internet crazies. They’re not handling Fox News as entertainment or tabloids. They think it’s real.

So, again, we can pretend that’s not happening. We can say, “well they shouldn’t be like that.” But that’s not reality.

Flood the internet with more disinformation that is generally harmless but ends up being moderately embarrassing or inconvenient to those who believe it enough to act on it. Teach people by negative reinforcement to not assume what they read is true unless they've vetted the source.

Or: Have a counter-disinformation group that responds to political disinformation by creating more disinformation that points in the opposite direction.

To some extent all of the above is done already, organically. In fact, to the extent that Facebook et al. manage to hide the stupidest crap, that would tend to make people believe that what does stay up must be true (or, at least, must have passed Facebook's fact-checkers).

My concern is that strong campaigns against disinformation might not actually help with this problem. They could make it worse, if people start to believe that Facebook and Twitter are sanitized media outlets that won't let you say the real truth.

> Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world.

The first amendment and the resulting USA would be my prime counter example. The US wasn't an accident, freedom of speech is a hard requirement for free people and letting companies censor people "for our good" is antithetical to the nth degree.

The first amendment allows companies to "censor people," that is part of the people's freedom of speech and freedom of association. It only prevents Congress from doing so.

It ensures the freedom of the press, and had the founders envisioned a day when three corporations miles from each other had more power than the entire press and government combined to censor citizen's speech I have no doubt that the first amendment would read a bit differently today. For a lot of people, social media has become the press in some ways.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a disturbing trend in these conversations of implying that the first amendment means something it doesn't.

If people want to advocate for nationalizing social media and forcing platforms to publish speech against their will, and making it illegal for them to moderate content, then they shouldn't pretend they're doing so in the spirit of the first amendment or what the founding fathers envisioned free speech to be.

They have that right regardless, they just have to declare themselves publishers.

No they don't.

It's a commonly spread fallacy that only "publishers" are allowed to moderate content, and "platforms" not. The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate user-submitted content without facing legal liability for doing so. Social media platforms have always been allowed to do exactly what they're doing.

I don't necessarily disagree, but one big problem is that there is no "adult world" on the internet. If you can't function without a school teacher and aren't ready for the "adult world," you can nonetheless get a Twitter or Facebook account just like anybody else, and interact with the adults, and maybe even fool some of them. It takes a while to sort out who's an insane asshole. The only way to tell is by listening for a while to what's coming out of their megaphone that unfortunately millions of other people can also hear. Finally you decide they're a metaphorical non-adult and, I guess, block or unfriend them, but meanwhile millions of other non-adults are like "Yesss, finally someone said what my lizard-brain has been thinking all along!!" That's not what happens with the guy on the sidewalk holding the sign.

Edit: Just noticed you said lizard and I said lizard. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. I meant something about the basal ganglia or limbic system, whereas yours is an exotic & fantastical sci-fi scenario. Although interestingly if you consider all the venality and viciousness in national politics, and the fact that every politician has that same part of the brain, it's actually kind of true that lizard-men are running the government!

Happy to see that at least one guy gets it. Every day I‘m more astounded how western civilizations got to be - it sure as hell wasn’t the Average’s Joe idea, and hundreds if years after most still don’t get it.

So basically you are arguing that if all the disinformation published on your site leads to terrorist attacks and worst case, a war (either civil war or think of how disinformation was used by Hitler to convince most of Germany he was doing the right thing), the most ethical thing to do is doing absolutely nothing. Almost everyone want as much freedom of speech as possible but ethically if it leads to huge number of people suffering/dying needlessly there has to be some safeguards. Also, note that FB not publishing something is not against freedom of speech, since they can always create a website to publish any disinformation they want. As long as the government doesn't make a blanket rule against publishing something, there is still freedom of speech.

Since you mention Germany: What if I told you that Weimar Germany had laws against certain types of speech, which were actually applied to suppress Nazi propaganda, and that the result was obviously ineffective and possibly counterproductive?

"In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.

In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews."

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2015/war-free-exp...

Yes, these laws were enacted after WW2 specifically because of the Holocaust, i.e. the horror that widespread hateful propaganda can cause

Pure ideology (how it ought to be) vs. immediate reality (shit is melting down in real time). It's easy to choose the former when you're not the one suffering.