Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party in Skokie, IL). There were UHF stations on TV where they held forth.

Yet democracy did not collapse. Why? Because humans have the ability to weigh evidence and discard the nonsense. They have agency. They can decide for themselves what to believe. They don't need you to control their information flow.

"Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim. "Now we have to control their conditioning!" No, it's actually not, and no you don't. Now the public has more exposure to views that you don't like. That doesn't mean they swallow them all -- that's just your nightmare of how those other people act.

I might obviously be wrong but I do think it's different. People didn't spend a good chunk of their day at newspaper stands waiting for new content. No one got "The Daily Worker" recommended to them because of their person (age/sex/income/location/communication/...). I feel like that fact often gets ignored. The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but that FB is actively shoving it down people's throats in a sinisterly targeted way to increase their bottom line through increased engagement.

>The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but...

Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team are literally government operatives lobbying for more censorship on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625

It's different only because people new on the scene aren't familiar with what happened before they were born. Or even before they were on the scene.

Nothing is being "shoved down their throats" unless they choose to eat it.

> "Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim

Because it is. Our modern legal constructs of free speech came about in a semi-literate, printing-press pamphleteering age. It was revised in the era of broadcast television. "It was like this before, and so it should be forever after" is not an argument.

We're at a point where we have to talk in terms of first principles. Not ideologies or teams. That's tough, because we haven't done it properly--in America--in at least a generation.

'We' have been talking in first principles about this and other constitutional touchstones for generations. 'We' don't agree with you in sufficient numbers to allow you alter our concept of free speech.

Actually, "It was like this before" IS an argument. Unless you can demonstrate that allowing unpopular speech was always bad, you lose. The world did not begin with you.

"semi-literate"?? Literacy rates in the US were always very high.

And no, we are not "at a point where we have to talk in terms of first principles." Because we have a Constitution to do that for us, is has not been abolished, and it is not going to be.

I agree with your point completely. The 'misinformation' is unimportant. What is important is restricting access. You correctly note that, where legal, any of those groups were allowed to hand out nonsense printed on cheap pulp. Today? Not so much.

Democracy has absolutely collapsed. Our days are governed for eight hours by autocratic bosses and for eight hours by autocratic "products" and "services." We have no say about how our work is conducted, nor about what poisons hit the shelves.

It's astonishing to me that anyone thinks we have "democracy" under Capitalism, where plutocracy masquerades as meritocracy – which isn't democracy, anyway!

> They can decide for themselves what to believe.

In a vacuum, perhaps, but not under the inescapable deluge of marketing for not just commercial and classically "religious" institutions but the "patriotism" of American Civil Religion. Our consent to all the above — to the taxes we pay, and to the work that we do — is all manufactured by this propaganda. Our agency is tightly, tightly constrained by plutocratic machinations. (To say nothing of the constraints applied especially to marginalized identities, some of whom are living in a post-apocalyptic hell-scape and surviving literal genocide).

Democracy has long since collapsed. Count yourself lucky not to have noticed.

Okey, dokey, Noam. Have fun when you move to Caracas.

I don't share your idiosyncratic connotations enough to understand how this is an insult.

The fact that over 40% of Americans are still not fully vaccinated and thousands of people per day are still dying needlessly proves that people actually aren't good at filtering out bullshit.

.. and therefore they need their information filtered for them by their betters, i.e. techies?

It proves that after people are repeatedly lied to - remember "don't buy masks"? Remember "go out and celebrate!"? Remember "restricting international travel is racist"? Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"? that's just covid crap, there was 10x that on other topics, I'd just nominate "fiery but mostly peaceful" and let it rest at that. After all that overwhelming torrent of lies people don't believe a word that is coming out of our ruler's mouths anymore. And I hardly can blame them. Every gatekeeping institution that was supposed to take care of them has failed, has failed miserably and has failed willingly and eagerly. Of course people are looking for information in random weird places - because non-weird places they used to trust lied to them so much they finally gave up on them.

Very good points. Rogan said Google is hiding information (which they are).

Once you lose your trust, it's difficult or impossible to get it back. "Let's lie to them, but do it better & more comprehensively" is what the censors seem to be saying.

That's the worst aspect of it. When the elites started lying and people started turning away from them, the conclusion that they made - and still are making - is not that they have to stop lying and try to rebuild trust, but that they need to lie harder, more creative and suppress any alternative information sources harder, so there wouldn't be any way to contradict them. They are not seeking to re-establish the trust, they are seeking the situation where your trust doesn't matter anymore because you don't have any choice.

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