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Comment by asterialite | Hacker News Reader

> Who decides what is 'disinformation' or 'misinformation'? You? The Democratic representatives? Jack Dorsey? No thanks.

You are restating what I said almost word for word — but still disagreeing. Somehow. Everyone probably agrees that disinformation must be curbed; not everyone agrees on what exactly disinformation is.

You seem to think I'm biased against Republicans. This is the case. You seem to be biased against Democrats. That is the point. We have biases, and as such cannot agree on what the objective truth really is. That's why determining whether something is true, misinformation, or disinformation is hard.

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>You are restating what I said almost word for word — but still disagreeing. Somehow

I can elaborate. That you've elevated disinformation as a major societal issue that needs to be solved is itself a particular partisan talking point put out by Democrats to explain Hillary's loss in 2016. Trump never had the temperament to be a good president. He should not have been voted in and Hillary was a better candidate ... but he did get voted in because millions of your fellow citizens voted him in. But he was such anathema to the core Democratic base that it became permissible to brake every norm, break every rule and right, including gaslighting and lying, just to get him.

So underneath this 'concern' of yours is not a good faith attempt to tackle this problem objectively. You want a laser focus on your political opponents while you continue to turn a blind eye to the disinformation, misinformation, gas lighting and outright lies that Democratic party, along with mainstream media (which ostensibly became the PR department for the party) and Big Tech engaged in pushing one conspiracy theory after another, week after week after week for the entire Trump presidency.

> is itself a particular partisan talking point put out by Democrats to explain Hillary's loss in 2016

...No? Trump lied far less back in 2015. The reason he won is that media gave him a platform, not that he used it to lie. Most Democrats agree with this analysis. Curbing misinformation is not a partisan issue, either: Trump spent his entire presidency railing against "fake news" and though the fast majority of his complaints were inaccurate, falsehoods are peddled by media from both sides of the aisle.

> yours is not a good faith attempt to tackle this problem objectively

Neither is yours. Taking an aggressive stance from the get-go, claiming that Democrats are as bad as Republicans when it comes to lying – none of these are markers of good faith.

My whole point is that because misinformation can't be tackled objectively, it's far harder to censor people than it seems. Because of this, censorship is not as good an idea as one might think. I do say that "If the GOP had not been able to lie about election fraud, the Capitol attack might not have happened," but I spend the rest of my comment explaining why censorship is a bad idea.

>The reason he won is that media gave him a platform, not that he used it to lie.

He won because people voted him in as per the constitution. I'm sure there are a ton of factors around the particular mechanism of his winning. The media gave him a huge platform to be sure. They didn't do it because they liked him. They did it because of ratings and as a way to mock him because it looked like he would flame out (and he almost did flame out, many times). But OK, free press is free press and he got a huge amount of it.

But to be clear, it was the Hillary campaign strategy to let Trump tank himself by shinning a bright light on what a mess he was. At one point she literally stopped taking interviews and press conferences for months [1]. So if media attention is what wins election, what the heck was she thinking?!? And if Hillary didn't want the media platform, is it really the media's fault for giving it to Trump? In hindsight, that was a bad campaign strategy. Also, had Bill Clinton never decided to visit Loretta Lynch on her plane, she never would have recused herself, and that dummy James Comey would never have made himself the face of the email investigation (another thing Hillary brought on herself) and tank her poll numbers a week before election with that ridiculous letter to Congress (if there was one thing that lost her the election, that latter was it).

>Most Democrats agree with this analysis.

I'm not sure about that. For 4 years after Trump's election, the Democratic base, the Democratic party and the former nominee attributed Trump's win to foreign interference. I think every Democrat, Hillary included, has claimed Trump is an illegitimate president, who was clearly a Russian puppet, who stole the election because of Russian disinformation. That happened. And of course, prior to 2020, the party that ALWAYS claimed election fraud was the Democratic party. Every lost election, state or federal, was because of voter intimidation, or voter suppression, or voter id laws, or some variation of that. So who actually sowed the seeds of election mistrust? Where were the calls to curb misinformation then?

But yes, I do agree that legislating away 'misinformation' is fraught with problems.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/18/hi...

Not everyone agrees that disinformation should be curbed. And the reason many people, including the authors of the US Constitution, don't agree, is that they feel the risk of false positives is far too high.

That is _because_ I have no confidence that anyone doing the curbing, including myself, will correctly identify "misinformation", I don't want such curbing to be happening, period.

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