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Comment by randomfool | Hacker News Reader

One side of it is deplatforming, but the other side is protecting more vulnerable family and community members.

The fact is that there are pied-pipers of disinformation on these platforms leading vulnerable members of our communities down rabbit-holes to who-knows-where. Normally we would address this with in-person confrontation but I think people are struggling to find the tools to protect their friends and families.

People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to.

I'm not trying to say that censorship is a good thing, just that the tools that we may have once used to protect our communities are not adapting to the new environments.

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> the tools that we may have once used

There were tabloid magazines full of "fake news" sold in supermarkets throughout my entire childhood. People would shake their heads and laugh at the silly headlines, but nobody, ever, talked seriously about censoring the tabloid newspapers just because they didn't believe what they were saying.

> protecting more vulnerable family and community members

So in other words, brainwash kids by only showing them one side of political arguments their entire life.

Then when little Jimmy starts hearing whispers about the evil Republicans, we'll tell him if he looks them in the eye he'll turn to stone.

> "People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to."

The subtext being that "we" are wiser and know better then those "people" and have the right and duty to protect "people" from themselves? I reject that; that way lies madness.

I'm not necessarily saying this point is incorrect, but the structure of the argument bears a striking similarity to the same justification for laws against heresy and blasphemy in the time of Galileo.

This. The main things we have to decide in the next decade or so is "who gets to decide what the truth is?" and "how can we allow creative dissent from that truth?"

We have to allow people to dissent, or we will have destroyed our own civilisation.

The shift in social discourse over the past few years helped me understand how the Salem Witch Trials came to be.

> more vulnerable family and community members.

you could've have just said ' vulnerable people'

We have 13 years of compulsory education in the United States to convert children into "We the People." Your ideological opponents (whoever they are) are not victims or imbeciles.

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