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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

That would be self-defeating, as the moment that the word gets out that algorithms are now intentionally manipulating away from certain content, the Streisand effect will instantly kick in. Which is already is.

Plus, while I do not buy into election conspiracies, imagine if there was an actual stolen election. Getting all of the tech companies to suppress the actual evidence would be fantastic if I were a dictator in the making. For that reason, I would argue, allowing election conspiracy theories to propagate is a necessary evil of a functioning democracy.

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> I would argue, allowing election conspiracy theories to propagate is a necessary evil of a functioning democracy.

I think real-world experience has proven that this isn't true. I get the idea behind what you're saying but the US (and UK/Europe) has had pretty much a constant onslaught on election conspiracies at all levels of our democracy.

The outcome has not been to make our democracies better functioning.

What's the alternative? Every corrupt leader since Nero has called their opposition's true statements "conspiracy theories" or similar and suppressed their statements as such; or deliberately invented conspiracy theories about their opponents and declared the truth to be the conspiracy. You can look up speeches in which Fascist and Nazi leaders denounced the "conspiracy theories" against them, which were (at the time) actually "unfounded" despite turning out almost completely true. We didn't know about the true horrors of the Nazi death camps until after the war ended, despite the "conspiracy theories" running rampant and often violently suppressed.

The alternative is to, quite literally, allow someone to be an arbiter of the truth, and then suppress information they determine is not factual. To which I say, give me this power, and in 30 years, I will be an emperor.

The alternative is making it almost impossible to have corrupt leaders in the first place, through taking care of society and the people in it.

Strong local media, strong local politics, strong education systems, strong protections for whistleblowers, a healthy environment, clean water, good cheap food, affordable housing, quality entertainment - there are countries in the world where citizens have all of this. And they don't have "single arbiters of truth" managing it.

The alternative is listening to the people running the elections at the grassroots level. They should be a mix of people representing various interests. There should also be international observers. If there is widespread fraud, the word will get out before the results. And you will hear about the fraud from everywhere, not just from a handful of weirdos or from top-level people of one of the parties.

Every sane electoral system starts from the assumption that the authorities responsible for the elections cannot be trusted. Instead of trusting the authorities, you trust a large number of people watching each other. Then everyone knows that if there is widespread fraud, it will be obvious, and hence the electoral system can be trusted.

You could do it transparently, and without targetting certain content.

Assuming recommendation engines are showing people what they normally watch, you could simply have every X recommendation be whatever your model says is the polar opposite of that. Label it specifically something like "a change of pace", "counter points", or whatever, to make it transparent.

I do wonder if society has got so used to algorithmic bubbles, that just exposing people to the opposite viewpoint would cause outrage.

> that just exposing people to the opposite viewpoint would cause outrage

You mean in the way that video recommendations about stolen elections cause outrage?

I think this is one of those cases where optimization on the part of self-interested actors has ruined things for the rest of us.

It used to be that if one said, "allowing people to talk about obviously ridiculous things like conspiracy theories is fine, and important actually, because it's part of free speech," that would be pretty clearly true.

But at that time, the number of people actually talking about such ridiculous things was pretty small.

Since then, the number of people talking about election-related conspiracies has gone up precipitously, largely because of Trump and his supporters. Who, it apparently bears repeating, attempted an actual violent coup to force the election results to go the way they want them to, partly due to the constant repetition of the "election fraud" Big Lie.

So no, allowing these theories to propagate is demonstrably antithetical to the continued functioning of democracy.

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