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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

We all know it this ideal of "just debunk it" doesn't work. Not just because a correction doesn't have the same reach, but because one audience will actively reject and ignore the evidence and then continue using the article on social media as "evidence" itself.

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The audience for the BMJ is clearly listed as 'intended for health professionals'. I do think that these people would take seriously evidence for opposing views or experiments and draw their own - valid professional conclusions. These people are also unlikely to get their information from social media and take action on patient care because of it.

I am firmly against this lowest common denominator approach of people not being able to publish any 'hard science' anywhere through fear of it being taken out of context on social media - particularly after the push of recent years to do the exact opposite and make such stuff open access for all.

The BMJ is not the problem in the world of fake/outrage/out of context news online.

So you're in favor of Facebook's policy on this? The article can still reach its intended audience (as you say, health professionals don't get their information from social media) and surely the BMJ will be more - not less - willing to publish controversial articles if they don't need to worry about them being used to mislead the public at large by being shared out of context.

Facebook can do what it likes - but it needs to be honest and say something like:

- We think the BMJ is too complicated for you to properly understand.

as opposed to

- We had some group independently check and the BMJ is objectively wrong.

The first one seems a little un-pc, so I would say that people sharing stuff online and a loud minority going off on some mad conspiracy is the [acceptable] cost of being open with science and research.

False binary. The BMJ article might not be wrong on pure facts, but it omits critical context. That is not the same as "too complicated to properly understand". Just because we have sort of supposed that medical professionals likely bring enough context on their own doesn't mean the publishing of that article is still not reckless.

I’m afraid I disagree. I haven’t ‘sort of supposed’ - I’ve fully expected medical professionals to bring their own context. It’s a medical journal, one of the most historical and leading ones in the world. There is nothing reckless in what they’ve done.

I want to say the opposite. The truth tends to win on the long run. On the other hand, allowing institutions to simply censor whatever it does not like by pressing a button never ended well.

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