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Comment by tbatchelli | Hacker News Reader

People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time. When you choose to promote certain content because of its high engagement benefits you given its controversial nature, then you are poisoning the well of knowledge for each individual. If you do so in a feedback loop, considering what they were interested in before, you accelerate your earnings as well as the poisoning.

Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.

So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.

(edit: typos, many)

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Sometimes I see the argument made that people are hackable by lies, therefore censorship is needed as an antidote. But I don't buy it, because 1) lying is equally available to all, but censorship is available only to the powerful 2) the powerful are as flawed as anyone else, except with power 3) historically the powerful who dabbled in censorship have also lied a lot, and censorship has helped them lie more easily. So the "censorship as antidote to lies" theory is just total bunk from every angle.

I was just covering one side of the equation. I don't like censorship, and as they say: you should legislate as if your opponent is the one that will apply the law. You can apply censorship to take care of one "good" reason, but eventually censorship will be applied for a "bad" reason.

What I wanted to focus on is that it is not true that free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good. We limit speech already, you can't advocate for the killing of other people, races, etc...

Also, about free speech, if you can say what you want but there are very large entities controlling who gets to hear what you say, then in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed because they don't make money, so we all feel like everybody is either pro-this or against-this, and they're all really mad and or dangerous.

This is not an easy problem to solve.

> We limit speech already, you can't advocate for the killing of other people, races, etc...

Actually, not that I support such behavior but (at least in the US) you can generally advocate for it. People usually don't (thankfully) so I don't have any examples immediately to hand, but my understanding is that the legal test is "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)

> free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good

Rather than an absolute good, I would argue that it ought to be viewed as an absolute right. I would also argue that, whether used for good or ill, free political speech is a functional necessity of any democracy. (Necessary but not sufficient and all that.)

> in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed

Agreed, but it's a separate issue and I've no idea what anyone is actually supposed to do about it.

Yes, every censor claims to be doing it for the common good. The Catholic Church had its Index of Prohibited Books supposedly to protect innocent souls from heresy, and likewise in various Communist countries past and present the censorship is there supposedly to stop the spread of counterrevolutionary propaganda. The modern Western world, in theory based on Enlightenment ideals, traditionally rejected such arguments, because they believed the answer to bad information was good information. While I am not a fan of "populist" movements that reject evidence, I frankly fear the efforts to suppress them more.

> People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time.

I'm of the opinion that people are not rational most of the time, but operate on habit and reason by use of heuristics. My evidence for this is that rational thought is costly and in psychology they teach this (that people aren't usually rational, merely motivated and economical with their attention).

> Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.

This is a good reason why gatekeeping information is so dangerous.

> So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.

Unfortunately there is no test for truth. However if you control people's sources of information you can keep them from figuring out that they have been lied to.

How are we to ensure that the gatekeepers of information are honest and wise?

There has to be a good reason why psychological warfare is used, including by the United States in periods like the Vietnam War. The expectation is that statements written on paper or recited through loudspeakers or similar influence people's thoughts, which influences what actions they will take. Those actions are supposed to be beneficial to the forces scattering them from a helicopter or posting them on walls. They're trying to get you to do something regardless of what your preexisting thoughts are beforehand.

Now tear down the pieces of propaganda and burn them. Is this censorship?

I think human brains are sufficiently able to be hacked by the right information. With certain kinds of information, those people could end up causing material harm to someone who is completely uninvolved. That is the ultimate danger that I believe YouTube and the like are trying to avoid, and if true it would be an admittance of a sort that some kinds of information are dangerous to some kinds of people. The name "psychological warfare" implies that communication can be weaponized, in a sense. Certain people do not change their ways regardless of what you try to tell them.

I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today, and also recommend similar content using very effective algorithms. The more millions of people the content reaches, the more latent believers it will reach and end up converting, even if the conversion rate is a fraction of a percent. And many of these people are very vocal.

In a sense, the content takedown seems like an attempt to counteract the fact that the algorithms are too effective of a medium for misinformation. I don't think we would have seen this kind of scale with books or flyers.

> I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today

you and I couldn't. Oligarchs and their governments could and did. The difference is that now their position is threatened by the democratization of information warfare.

No one knows the truth, and that's why everything should be available for people to make the best decisions.

> Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.

(I hate this but...)

...and Hitler before them.

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