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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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