Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

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arthurofbabylon

I’m surprised by the outrage here. The proliferation of information is always subject to tampering - from news outlets picking headlines to social feeds oriented around engagement. Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties, from the beginning to the end. (If you had told me that powerful people/organizations could not get tweets removed, I would have been surprised; based on my experience functioning on 21st century tech platforms there is almost always a way to engineer content.)

In this particular case, the information revealed in the “get-your-popcorn” tweet storm was generally already public. So I’m surprised by all the outrage and excitement.

Call me dismissive, but I think this mob mindset around “free speech” and its “anti-far-left” hysteria is not in touch with reality. It complains and whines a lot, constantly outraged, and never clear on its actual ideological position.

A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome. Anecdotal, sensational stories (like this Twitter Hunter Biden laptop cover-up) are exactly that: misleading anecdotes. They aren’t useful, and being caught up in them is not healthy.

> Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties

Honest question: would you be similarly dismissive if it turned out that it’s secretly mostly the right who “shapes the flow of information” in order to influence public’s opinion and has already used that power during the past election cycles?

Remember - we’re not talking about some minor news outlet here. We are talking about social media platforms that are so pervasive basically every single person knows about them and is in one way or another exposed to the information that’s presented on them. To have the power to shape the flow of information on these kind of platforms is to have power to shape whole societies.

> Honest question: would you be similarly dismissive if it turned out that it’s secretly mostly the right who “shapes the flow of information” in order to influence public’s opinion and has already used that power during the past election cycles?

This indeed happens, The [Sinclair Broadcast Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group) being one of the most prominent examples. They're a huge nationwide TV station operator known for pushing conservative narratives nationwide and for supporting Donald Trump during his campaign.

One of Sinclair's assets is its reach and influence, and they are very transparent about that. If you're in the US and this is news to you, you might want to check if your local Fox or NBC (or CBS, ABC, etc) network is affiliated: https://sbgi.net/tv-stations/

I dont think OP was being dismissive about this whole thing, think OP explained their main point of view when they mentioned,

> A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome. Anecdotal, sensational stories (like this Twitter Hunter Biden laptop cover-up) are exactly that: misleading anecdotes. They aren’t useful, and being caught up in them is not healthy.

This is the key takeaway in OPs post for me. I don’t think it matters if this is the right, left, up or down it’s about finding better ways to communicate that doesn’t depend on centralized organizations that are prone to corruption of this sort.

This keeps happening and we keep using centralized authorities, even when we start building systems that start off decentralized, they somehow end up being centralized. There's something wrong in the way we organize and think about things. We need to find a better way.

> A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome.

I mostly agree with this, but the rest of your comment reads to me as "everybody else does it so it's fine", which is exactly the mindset that leads to this conversation not being had. A sensationalist story might lean the narrative one way and might be "out of touch with reality" but it's a much better starting point than nothing.

to many, the information isn't as important as the narrative

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