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Comment by denydenydeny123 | Hacker News Reader

Any site that engages in censorship can never serve as a trusted news source.

The onus is always on the reader to engage in critical thinking. You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such. You should also be able to read "information" and easily discern as "misinformation" as well as the ability to read "misinformation" and discern it to be factually consistent and potentially correct.

Do not trust others where your own brain is needed to figure shit out.

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> You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such.

I'm afraid this is equivalent to saying "You should be able to be offered high-sugar food, and avoid it to an appropriate degree." This may be true in the moral sense, but practically speaking most people will fail this test.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting the answer is censorship, but just pointing out that large numbers of people cannot meaningfully deal with misinformation.

I am constantly reminded Forbidden Planet was about a civilisation that developed social networks.

I think we have to trust the people to govern themselves in a democracy even if they can’t deal with it properly, and that applies to misinformation. The problem has always been that what one person considers misinformation is just something the other hasn’t learned yet. There is no reason to censor misinformation that is already known to be wrong. Also there is no reason to censor truth. We are left with only censoring gray areas where the populist does not have a clear opinion which you don’t want to censor because it’s not clear if it is misinformation and needs to be discussed. The answer is always don’t censor information. Then beyond misinformation we have lying which you do want to censor. News is considered to be the truth and therefore any news outlet presenting misinformation must be censored or sued. YouTube creators and the internet itself used to be assumed to be filled with bad information. Growing up we couldn’t use an internet source in your paper, especially not Wikipedia which was known to be a bad source. It’s gradually earned respect over time but that respect on Wikipedia really only should apply to undisputed topics. You know that little Twitter message that says “this statement is disputed,” well that should be on every single YouTube video, Wikipedia post and more, UNLESS they specially claim that is true, and that should set them up for lawsuits and more. There is no reason “misinformation” should be censored online.. the public either needs to have education to re-learn that I’m the internet is full of bad information, or every single video and post needs to clearly be marked “we don’t claim accuracy to any facts in this (insert format here)” until people do re-learn this.

Unfortunately what you describe as "easy" isn't for a lot of people. Spend anytime on Facebook and you will see clearly bogus stories racking up likes/comments and driving people nuts. That is the reality of the situation, and you saying what should be doesn't actually help make that reality true.

And to this I will add that neither you, nor I, nor any other intelligent person, is immune to misinformation or disinformation. Knowledge and critical thinking make you more resilient to bullshit, but if you're fed enough of it, it's going to change how your brain is wired.

This is quite naive. The fact is people have always been vulnerable to misinformation and someone will always exploit that, and that exploitation will hurt people.

And people have always exploited the power to limit what others are allowed to see and know.

I agree, but "critical thinking" itself needs to be monitored or the methods of fact checking and narrative questioning can become weaponized and pervert it into conspiracy. Danah Boyd has some decent talks about this phenomenon. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-03-07-danah-boyd-how-criti...

No, "monitored" critical thinking is not critical thinking by definition. And no, just because something implies nefarious acts by people in power doesn't mean it's wrong. Conspiracies do exist, the government has and can do evil things. See Operation Gladio, Project MKUltra and Operation Northwoods as examples.

I understand your perspective, but your brain is an unreliable editor.

I agree that censorship is bad, and that also we have entered an era where private organizations own platforms where potentially they should not be allowed editorial license because of scale.

Do you have well-cited, well-researched strategies on being able to read any and all misinformation and know easily whether or not it's true or false?

This should be the goal of (higher) education.

I couldn't argue that someone is educated (regardless of degree) or wise without a practiced mind geared toward (critical) thinking.

This is a "no true scotsman" fallacy in which one can shift goalposts endlessly with any misinformation with "so and so wasn't really highly educated".

Give me concrete, well-researched, well-evidenced claims about the easy identification of misinformation, because it's so easy.

If there are any take-aways from the previous year, they might include that "well-researched, well-evidenced claims" may later turn out to be false.

The process of understanding is a continuum that we strive towards.

There is an entire replication crisis in scientific literature debunking "well-researched, well-evidenced claims".

The only way out is to think.

I do. I will publish them as soon as you publish the studies showing that people can rightly be trusted to limit the information others are allowed to present or consume.

Do you consider YouTube a news source?

YouTube today and for the last few years engages in strong censorship and in no way represents diversity of free ideas.

I would expect YouTube only to report honestly (as a news source) for things align with it's commonly held beliefs.

YouTube doesn't "report" anything. They host videos that other people create. Nothing there is necessarily "endorsed" by YouTube, and there's not even an implied agreement to only upload newsworthy or even good-faith or non-invented videos to the platform. You should only trust uploads from actual news organizations.

This is demonstrably false.

YouTube endorses everything it does not censor.

edit: And you should not put blind trust in any "news" organization either. Every observation deserves your full cognition to figure out what is plausible, consistent, implausible, inconsistent, let alone "true" or "false".

YouTube doesn't endorse things that are in violation of their TOS, regardless of someone's ability to evade a censor for whatever reason.

And yeah, sure, everything should be judged on it's merits, however there's simply not enough time in the day to independently verify all facts. It's much easier and generally reliable to start with the mainstream news sources like NPR, who we can generally assume to be trustworthy.

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