Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

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I think the idea is making things harder to access.

The failed idea behind making drugs illegal is that they'd be harder to access and less people would do them. There's evidence this didn't work.

I think the idea here is the same - if the big platforms ban certain types of egregious and harmful misinformation (that gets recommended to people susceptible to conspiracies) - these companies are hoping less people overall will watch this content, and probably more importantly, if anything bad comes of this, they won't have their brands tarnished because of it.

Will it work? Who knows. They're companies. Why can't they do what they please as long as it's within the law? Does the law require YouTube to keep up all content? YouTube has a Terms of Service and has censored lots of content for a long time. Why is there such a big distinction between beheadings, child porn, anti-vax, hate speech, and election misinformation? These companies already have a history of censoring "political" content for foreign countries.

What is new here?

I don't disagree, but the difference with drugs is that people specifically seek them out and there is a lot of effort and involved to make it happen through the whole supply chain.

The problems with social media are largely around removing all friction from the process, and adding a huge dose of virality and highly specific targeting. The former means people get a vast amount of information with minimal effort, and the latter enables targeted propaganda which then gets magnified in echo chamber bubbles by the algo.

The individual elements all existed before, but the combination creates pretty unique effects. I'm also skeptical these companies can effectively address the problem since these properties are what has fueled their growth.

Take qanon. I don't it naturally spreads as virulently as drugs. But when you add Facebook into the mix, people are able to disseminate this information instantly to people who just don't understand how to vet sources. The comparison to drugs just doesn't work.

Some people actively seek drugs out.

Some other people actively seek out suppressed information, even in face of higher barriers. Otherwise, we would still live in an ossified world of aristocracy and Church; the secular and republican ideas were once banned and persecuted by the powers-that-were. But they failed, all over Europe.

You are right that bans increase the friction of the process, but they also act as evolutionary pressure. After some time, the best dissenters will get really good at conveying information against all odds. A good example is Iran, where pretty much everyone can find out what is going on despite all the efforts of the Islamic Republic to crack down on unauthorized news.

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