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Comment by swirepe | Hacker News Reader

>One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.

Thinking dumb things about politics is how you end up bringing your AR-15 to investigate a pizza parlor... or trying to kidnap the governor.

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I’ll say everything sounds like a bad game of “telephone” — that maybe someone told a friend that there’s a guy Epstein that keeps videos of powerful people, and then somehow 10,000 stories later, the story becomes the “pizza parlor around the corner is a powerful pedophile ring”

For those unfamiliar, telephone is a game in the US (maybe western countries) where 12 or so children sit in a circle and one whispers a phrase to another around the circle, something like “there’s a banana in the cabinet.” Then everyone has a big laugh at how ridiculous the story began and then ended up after going around the circle.

So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them?

I don't understand your argument here. An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories.

Based on your argument, we also shouldn't report on police abuse because people may riot and burn down stores?

> So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them?

There is no "we".

The platform is YouTube. It is their prerogative (and indeed their right to freedom of speech) to host content as they see fit. The Senators are merely asking them to exercise their freedom to a very reasonable extent.

An astonishingly large percentage of the population are parroting this and all manner of other misinformation on social media, all day, every day, for months, and it's getting worse as one by one the dominoes fall and yet another impressionable mind is swayed and joins the chorus.

I don't think censorship is necessarily the right approach to mitigate this torrent of bullshit, but it's clearly out of control.

>I don't understand your argument here.

>Based on your argument

I was pointing out how "believing dumb things about politics" is a deliberate minimization of the effect of disinformation.

>An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories.

But an astonishingly large number of people are afraid of vaccines/black people/corona jihad/the deep state pedophile ring because they read something that isn't true. Can you think of any effects this might have had recently? Any you think of anything bad going on that isn't strictly a crime?

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