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Comment by j_m_b | Hacker News Reader

> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime.

It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.

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How would it be possible for a system like that to be accurate all the time?

Facebook is a trillion dollar company. Spend more money on content control and content verification. Use intelligent humans and more of them. It may not be profitable but it will increase trust in the platform immensely if the fact checkers are fair and consistent. Not nameless bots or people that don’t give a fuck.

This is a one off mistake isn't it? I'd rather 1 good article get cancelled by accident if it mean 100-1000 disinformation memes or troll accounts get cancelled.

I'd normally agree with you. But in the case of Covid, some political actors are launching coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform millions of Americans in regards to a virus that has, so far, killed over 800,000 people here.

How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?

Why don't the mainstream actually inform people of all important facts? Them being trustworthy, will make people less inclined to believe misinformation. If you skip over important questions, these gaps will be filled with bull**ters.

How do we know the misinformation from the authorities is not similarly a problem? CDC and FDA flip flopped so many times over the last few years. WHO and CDC were telling us not to worry about pandemics, and instead worry about "stigma" instead as late as March 2020.

https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1229137314074505216?s=20 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1224734993966096387?s=20

Censorship is not the answer. It actually gives more credence to the persecuted/wrong and lets them gain more supporters. Just like we dont ban KKK or Nazi stuff, we openly destroy their arguments with facts, not fascism.

So what's the answer then. I see a lot of "this doesn't work because x or y" but no one has any answers. The fact is, it's a lot better to police thousands of pieces of dangerous misinformation than to hide a few legitimate pieces. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.

> Censorship is not the answer. It actually gives more credence to the persecuted/wrong and lets them gain more supporters. Just like we dont ban KKK or Nazi stuff, we openly destroy their arguments with facts, not fascism.

Destroying their arguments with facts doesn't work, because they just replace them with new arguments. Since it takes much less effort to generate new but plausible sounding incorrect arguments than it does to refute such arguments, the misinformation wins.

It used to work back when distribution of ideas was slow or expensive or both. Those times are long gone.

They also don't listen anymore, thanks to echo chambers.

CDC didn't flip flop. They used the information they had on hand. If you don't like it then don't listen to it but they weren't "wrong" given the information they had at the time. We haven't actually ever been through this sort of thing in over 100 years. I trust them more than Fox, Trump, and Breitbart news. The secret is they are willing to change their interpretation rather than stick to their guns when the evidence says otherwise; unlike right wing media who continue to say it's just a bad flu and that we should just get over 800,000 dead people and quit being "wimps".

Did they, though?

Information of some kind of flu/pneunomia-like sickness in central China was available on December 31st, 2019, the day I learned about it from our local news media. Chances are the CDC had that information before I, a non-medical civilian, had it.

On January 15th, with me noticing a significant difference between what the Chinese said and what they did in Wuhan, I realised shit's going to hit the fan. I bought a few extra conserves when I was going for groceries, some extra toilet paper, started to invest in my home office situation, "just in case". Nothing too prepper-style crazy, but enough to be prepared. And - figuring that any flu/pneunomia-style sickness would also be commuted by coughing, I got me some 100 cheap masks, some nitrile gloves, for good measure (arguably didn't use them much), and some isopropyl alcohol for disinfection. You know, things that I see doctors using when they get into a potentially infectious zone.

No-one at the CDC, packed with medical professionals, watched Chinese news reports and did some "what could possibly go wrong" reasoning?

Around mid-march, people in the west finally started panicking. By now, what I got over two months, slow and steadily, they needed to get all at the same time. Suddenly, they realised that this is not just a Chinese thing. "Don't panic buy'", the powers to be claimed, "There's no need! Supply chains will hold". Well, today we know they didn't, and back then, people sometimes found themselves lacking basic necessities.

"No need to buy masks, they don't work", the CDC (and health officials around the world, with the exception of countries who use masks every time it's flu season) said - yet every single doctor and every single nurse I've ever seen dealing with Covid Patients go in like medieval knights in armor.

I've been vaccinated trice by now, having made the appointment for the booster shot two months in advance. "No need to do that", we (non-us) were being told. "there's enough vaccinations around for everyone". Well, right now over here (non-us), we have people standing in line in the cold for up to four hours, and vaccinations are actually running out quickly, because the former government decided to not order enough, let the next guy deal with it.

You are right not to trust Fox, Trump, or Breitbart News. But there's also no reason to believe news media or official offices on "your" side of the turf war. They will all lie to you. Watch like they are doing, closely, and make your own decisions.

I don't agree with the premise that censorship helps in the first place. If Facebook established a new policy that nobody's allowed to say bad things about fast food, and you saw an article explaining how fast food is healthy and good for you, would you trust it?

Ah, that's the tricky part.

It's not about what you or I would do, it's about what the median user does when the topic is public health and safety. And half of everyone is below average.

Erm, no, it's not. "It" is about taking principled actions, regardless of the outcome. "Outcomes over principles" is one of the most destructive and evil ideologies known to man, and the source for all kinds of tyranny disguised under the banner of "We know what's best for you". Censorship, in the sense of suppressing one's opinions and freedom of expression, is morally wrong, full stop - and even if it weren't, it's not even effective in the case of Facebook, because censorship just feeds (crazy) conspiracy theories and breeds distrust.

> censorship just feeds (crazy) conspiracy theories and breeds distrust.

I think we saw enough of crazy conspiracy theories occurring before the latest trend of service info-shaping to conclude that it's an independent variable.

Silicon Valley companies held the line on being agnostic media for decades. The result was a world that appears to have necessitated another approach, because bad actors figured out how to exploit the laissez-faire approach of the digital media to signal-boost crazy conspiracy theories, misinformation, and propaganda. It was the laissez-faire Facebook of the mid-2010s that allowed foreign companies to signal-shape a US election via paid-for advertising and micro-targeting [https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17339864/congress-russia-adver...].

No, half of everyone is below median :)

I feel this is the new "will someone please think of the children?" argument which showed up every now and then, with every other law officially meant to "stop child pornography", a goal no sensible person would dare to speak out against, but were later used for far less noble purposes.

If you cut out a man's tounge, you do that because you are afraid of what he might say - or that's what people will think. It's better to make better arguments than they do. If you resort to obvious censorship, you are just creating martyrs.

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