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Comment by thitcanh | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone ever looked at history and figured out that humans are pretty damn awful? Facebook is just a catalyzer just like Twitter is. Every platform has their own disgusting self-centered bubbles and that’s not because of the platform.

The bar to get banned from any online platform is pretty high. Just look at how long it took for the most prominent Twitter offender to get rejected.

You can ban all public forums you want, then people will just continue sharing BS on WhatsApp without you even noticing.

The problem isn’t Facebook but people. Governments should punish people, not outsource the policing to companies.

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>Has anyone ever looked at history and figured out that humans are pretty damn awful?

Humans can be awful, and they can be wonderful.

>Facebook is just a catalyzer just like Twitter is. Every platform has their own disgusting self-centered bubbles and that’s not because of the platform.

Pretending like system design has no effect on user behavior is just silly.

>The problem isn’t Facebook but people.

I think there's some truth to this, however someone could easily try to use the same argument for different topics. "People are awful, the problem isn't heroin, it's people." There's some truth to that too, but frankly, if we could magically remove 100% of heroin from the world things would be slightly better. In other words, it's clear that Facebook is making this worse, even if we carry most of the blame.

It's the same idea behind "guns don't kill people, people kill people" juxtaposition. The idea is that both play a role in the problem, not just one scapegoat. People tend to point fingers, but there is always a statistical correlation, between both entities catalyzing fuel to the fire.

> Governments should punish people, not outsource the policing to companies.

Governments shouldn't be in the business of deciding what is truth and what is "misinformation", and they certainly shouldn't be punishing people based on the outcomes of such determinations.

Otherwise, we'd have to ban the church and jail all the priests.

Governments are already in the business of deciding many truths. It is called the court system.

There are people who are deliberately spreading misinformation to make money. I think that we absolutely should be investigating and prosecuting such people. We simply lack the policing resources to effectively combat online fraud, online bullying, and online extortion. I think we need a fundamental restructuring of policing on our society to make this feasible.

> There are people who are deliberately spreading misinformation to make money. I think that we absolutely should be investigating and prosecuting such people.

The US constitution prevents bans on televangelists.

In the US, to achieve your goal you'll have to start off with a constitutional amendment repealing the first amendment.

I think you'll find that the first amendment is much more limited in strength than you would like to think.

There is a long history of the US courts abrogating free speech. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" originated as a metaphor to justify preventing pacifists from distributing anti-draft pamphlets.

If the televangelist can be demonstrated in court to not believe the stuff he is telling people to make money, I see no reason why fraud charges shouldn't stick.

They should and they already do. Spreading misinformation can be classified as terrorism. Saying that there’s a man in the sky should be ok; Asserting that there are chips in vaccines is a matter of public safety. Someone will avoid getting the vaccine and die as a consequence of that post.

As for the punishment, it could be as simple as community service or losing access to public benefits for some time.

“Doctors are killing people with the vaccine?” Ok, find and pay for your own doctor, you’re not welcome in public hospitals.

What about asserting that the NSA is spying on everyone? Prior to the Snowden whistle blowing, it was considered a conspiracy theory by most people.

What about people saying you should be wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic, when the CDC and WHO were saying you didn’t need them?

> Spreading misinformation can be classified as terrorism.

Anything can be "classified" as anything if you draw your venn diagram circles big enough; that doesn't make it so. Furthermore, "terrorism" isn't itself a crime, the violence that usually comprises it is (such as murder, bombings, et c). A rather good thing that, or otherwise people like yourself would love to "classify" more things as something illegal, bypassing the actual authority in our society tasked with making new laws.

Spreading falsehoods is protected expression, at least in the US.

A lot of things have to go wrong in a person's life for them to see a "vaccines are microchipped" post and decide to believe it. Qanon and Flat-Earth started as jokes, people posting absurd conspiracies in front of their clique -- should the government make a determination that satire has gone too far now that the common clay of the west take it seriously?

To engage with your point tho, who is to blame for the spread? the person who posts the disinfo or the programmers who decide the disinfo is good for engagement?

Banning the church and jailing all priests is likely to be a net positive effect on society. I have failed to see any religious institution that solves the problem of stable empires or societies. Maybe it's about time we treat delusions of religion like we do all other delusions.

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