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Comment by distrill | Hacker News Reader

Do any of these "counter bad information with good information" solutions address people who seek a narrative first and are not moved by more, or more factual, information that offsets their prior belief?

This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.

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I mean at the end of the day you have to leave the burden of responsibility with the consumer and the people disseminating the news. There has always been fake news, and there will always be fake news, better informed readers are how you counter it.

idk, this seems pretty dogmatic to me, and you just repeated my question as a statement. is better informed readers actually always the best solution? are there any conditions that could ever form where this would not be the case?

what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.

What if the censors seek a narrative first, are not moved by factual information, dismiss dissenters as being brainwashed?

Then they are bad at their job.

What if the police abuse their power, well then I guess we shouldn't have any.

> What if the police abuse their power

Then people are free to speak out against it. But if they weren't, that question would indeed be unanswerable.

You're implying that the "censors" would censor without limits, including complaints about them.

Yes that seems a reasonable concern. Indeed it's hard to censor something without censoring complaints about censoring that thing, unless these complaints are entirely on free speech grounds. But if we already don't believe in free speech anymore, then we would have to interpret a complaint about censoring something as an endorsement of that thing, and hence censor the complaint as well.

This is all hypothetical though since there aren't censors

So in the end you agree that there shouldn't be any as well?

Your second paragraph is an amusing self reflection on the first.

You're "becoming increasingly" one of the people you criticise.

Which is absolutely fine.

The question then is why would you seek government help to censor your own thoughts.

Free speech is the least bad option. All other options result in violence and persecution.

This isn’t even debatable either historically or in the present day.

The reason why people elect these facts as true is not because of the disinformation. So your approach must be wrong if you propose to remove it.

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