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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It has never in the history of western civilization been easier for people to inject random claims into the public discourse. Neither Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes nor Otis Chandler at the LA Times would have given an inch of space for QAnon or antivax, but the "giant corporations" you allude to today do so happily, and at a scale no newspaper publisher would have imagined 50 years ago.

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It's worse than that, the algorithms these companies use sometimes purposefully promote these random claims because they lead to more user engagement.

For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.

As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.

I had my first Internet Account in the 1980's via PLATO.

When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.

I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.

Holy shit was I wrong.

I remember free mp3s.

Plus a ton of guys arguing about free beer or speech, and me having zero understanding of why any of it was a big deal.

Conversely, it has never been easier to inject true claims that are inconvenient for gatekeepers. What tilts the balance of equities in favor of censorship for you?

It's coming from people that don't share his politics.

You won't find anyone on this board more quick to defend censorship along political lines.

Because it takes far longer to confirm if a claim is true or not than it does to make a claim.

The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.

"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Seems like it should be TRIVIAL; (if backed up by legal authority of governments - and that's the REAL trick) - to cause all claims to be properly categorized.

Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?

Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.

I don't even have to reach this question to support my argument. You're effectively comparing 2020 to 2015. I'm comparing 2020 to 1980.

You can't just toss out core enlightenment principles because a handful of loud simpletons latch on to bad ideas. Not without explaining why.

I object to the claim that I've tossed out any "core enlightenment principles" by observing that we have drastically fewer gatekeepers now than we did in 1980.

It is my understanding that toleration, free association, and free expression are core enlightenment principles that enable a civilization to be governed by reason. These are threatened by the censorious attitude of boomers and aging gen-xers with home equity to protect.

It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/democratic-enlightenment-philosophy-r...

Do you implicate that we need gatekeepers? If so, then yes, if not, then it was falsely concluded.

No, before you had to be rich enough to buy the newspaper to print crazy bullshit, but that certainly happened (and still happens) too.

That's still a filter effect. Now, crazy bullshit is being peddled at 100x the rates from before. It's not sustainable.

Yes, we should have never given those poors access to say whatever is on their minds, right? At least not in front of other people...

It'll be the end of civilization.

Everyone should agree with the rich and powerful.

Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?

If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.

Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.

If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered

I don't know how you follow this to any conclusion that doesn't advocate for locking down the entire internet.

That genie is out of the bottle.

> Isn't that basically what the Allegory of the cave is advocating for?

My interpretation of the allegory is that it suggests that everyone "should" employ epistemic humility.

I think it would be more sensible to fix the education system than to appoint uneducated people to government positions just to increase the representation of poorer people.

It's more about education and a skeptical but not paranoid and nihilistic mind, than about "rich and powerful". You should be "this tall to ride". In this case, "this tall to broadcast your thoughts to millions of people".

> rich enough to buy the newspaper

That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.

It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.

A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense

newspapers have reach, which is in the context we're talking about when making comparisons to twitter.

sure, you could cheaply print stuff, but you had to (pay people to) stand on a lot of street corners to get your message out there.

Thomas Paine made money off of Common Sense.

Really this is central to how the USA started, as there were several among the founding fathers who printed newsletters.

You know that Mike Wallace interviewed an Imperial Wizard of the KKK on his show in 1957, right?

And Ayatollah Khomeini.

I am well aware; read my comment in light of that.

In 1957 there was a television for just about every 5 Americans, an average family size of 3.6 and not that much programming to watch.

Mike Wallace effectively gave the KKK a forum reaching everybody in the United States... That's much more effective than Twitter.

Your comment doesn't read any better.

You can watch the Eldon Edwards video right now, with a single Google search, to see how untrue it is that the KKK had in 1957 anything resembling the access to the discourse they have today.

If you think the KKK is stronger today than in the 1950s, then you are so ludicrously out of touch that I can't continue this conversation.

They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.

As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.

Yeah, you missed my point. In fairness, I didn't make it super clear for you.

Very few people like the KKK. Arguably fewer than in the past.

QAnon is irrelevant aside from the attention they are getting from their supposed political enemies. You seem to need an image of an enemy. Same with flat earthers. They existed 20 years ago and they were completely irrelevant. Antivax had a lot of people joining because they had partly reasonable objections or trust issues towards official sources and some hobby Don Quijotes with a slight inferiority complex needed to prove themselves by demonizing these groups as if they were the devil. As expected, these groups didn't shrink.

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