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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

The death of the press¹ has been an worldwide phenomenon, so attributing it to a single US legislative bill is a bit too reductionist.

It's quite possible that there was US protagonism on that process, and it's quite possible that the bill was a relevant factor, but the bill doesn't have an worldwide impact, and the US influence does certainly not come from it.

1 - It looks quite dead by now, nearly everything we call by that name is free of any usable information. Of course there's some activity here or there, but it's dead like a dead forest, something spurs here or there, but nothing is able to grow.

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Regardless - giving every single person, no matter what their accomplishments or talents, the same voice online, without anything out there filtering the garbage, was a really, REALLY bad move.

Unfiltered social media is an amplifier for bullshit. Truth, reason, a good analysis - they're all hard. Spewing out nonsensical mythology is easy.

Something needs to change.

Not necessarily, I think what we have today is far better than a world where a few people got to control what was said. That only works if they are well intentioned and trustworthy, but it’s corruptible. And they certainly aren’t necessarily arbiters of truth.

What we have today is orders of magnitude better. The main challenge moving forward will be designing information systems so as to promote challenging opinions rather than reinforcing them, which requires these companies to move away from optimizing engagement but something else.

IMO, solving that problem is a step in the correct direction.

Implementing systems that rely on credentialing and moderation are a net regression, even if they (maybe) solve this specific problem. It’s just going back to systems in the past where things appeared great but weren’t actually. Think of all the people who, today, legitimately thrive because we’ve broken down some of the credentialing gatekeepers (Ben Thompson at Stratechery comes to mind).

I'm not sure the flow of information is even necessarily the problem. People just aren't trained to think critically - and doing so for everything is exhausting however increasing the focus of education on how to think, not what to think would help immensely.

In the interim i would like to see some level of moderation, maybe citizens or states able to exact some kind of consequences against people who via any sort of media spread information which either they know to be or should know to be false (or alternative facts as some people call them). i.e. some kind of process where i as a person or an independent body have standing to sue breitbart for knowingly/negligently distributing false information.

I know we have to be careful with this but at the moment there is simply no way of holding organisations to account if i am not being directly libeled despite the fact that the misinformation harms me directly.

Hmm, the thing is though, this info is rarely 100% false... people have tried things like labeling posts with truth contents, etc. and it falls flat. In cases where it is 100% false I think your approach works (although it might not actually be a sufficient deterrent).

In practice they always seems to be mixed with partial truths (when you read past the headline)... plus, determining what's "true" is kind of a nonstarter, especially at that scale.

I am also certain you would find things on NYT, WaPo, etc. that is not 100% truthful, even if the consequences are not as egregious. It's not just Breitbart. I say this because people on the other side of the aisle will take whatever you design and throw it back at you.

Identifying critical thinking as the problem (as you did in your post) is IMO somewhat right but maybe too hard of a problem to solve (as you pointed out).

The way I see it... we're in the middle of a tug-of-war between the old guard that used news & other power structures to broadcast what they wanted, and the new, democratized users who felt they didn't need to trust them while simultaneously being empowered to have their own voice heard.

The former would manipulate our perception of what was going on through news (print / media), while the latter are empowered by companies that control the new media landscape (Twitter / FB / IG).

What's interesting about the latter is that they leverage a system that was designed innocuously ("serve better ads") but can be adapted to control someone's perception of what is happening in the world (targeted content / engagement).

As of late, I've been thinking that the way forward is going to be identifying the forces that drive extreme polarization and re-imagining them to reign them in.

When I look at what happens with the way feeds are designed, there is such a crazy reinforcement of what I already "like" that drives polarization that maybe it really is just as simple as re-designing the feed to promote more diversity of content. It could be enough to temper some of the extreme outliers of craziness we see on either side of the aisle.

I will admit I am arm-chairing a bit here...

Regardless - giving every single person, no matter what their accomplishments or talents, the same ability to vote, without anything out there filtering the garbage, was a really, REALLY bad move. Unfiltered universal suffrage is an amplifier for bullshit. Truth, reason, a good analysis - they're all hard. Spewing out nonsensical mythology is easy. Something needs to change.

Thank you for this -- I hope that the point (that I think) you are making is not lost in the large thread.

Yet, here you are, a relatively anonymous individual of whose talents, accomplishments or level of education we can't be sure, happily spewing out your own completely unsubstantiated opinion, essentially indistinguishable from garbage, to a reading public on a major news aggregation site.

I am struggling putting it into words, but I have to say I am deeply troubled by the widespread behavior of adults second-guessing the ability of other adults to make distinctions between between competing pieces of information.

It seems to me that this reaction of "we must regulate what is said so that nothing false is ever said (because someone might believe it and even worse might repeat it)" has devolved into "we must regulate what is said because someone might be led to believe something different from what I believe."

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