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Comment by yutijke | Hacker News Reader

Unchecked Censorship by the government can be a problem, but I find it hard to take voices in this space on face value since they are often the most vocal cheerleaders when a government or political party they like is doing the censorship since it's "Human rights" not politics.

Given the dissolving line between Social media and the Town square, who should be the arbiters of speech on Social media?

A committee appointed from "Interest groups" with all the right "credentials" and "expertise"? Effectively an incestous group with circular pats on the backs.

A separate body elected by the people just for this purpose?

Something else?

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Democracies cannot function if the people are shielded from all the evil things that necessitate thinking critically. Bad information is a fact of life, not social media.

The only way you get someone to think critically is putting them in a situation where they have to. If you constantly censor and baby them, they won't make better decisions they will make worse ones.

The idea that censorship has to happen in order to protect democracy really fulfills horseshoe theory.

But most people do not think critically. Even if we try we do not have access to perfect information.

You read a news article. Is it fact? Is it a tilted spin? Is it truth that omits strategic nuances?

No matter how critically I approach it, I will not be able derive objective truth from biased and fuzzy information.

At some point you will need to trust someone to curate.

You're absolutely correct. Curation is the ethical answer, not censorship. Gigantic difference.

>No matter how critically I approach it, I will not be able derive objective truth from biased and fuzzy information.

That will always be true no matter the source. There are no truth fairies. There limits of mediums (TV vs Article vs Book vs Movie vs Stream vs etc.) before you even get to individual biases.

I dont know. But the idea that we pick a group never sits well with me. The election to that group becomes highly political, & eventually the group will fall out of grace.

There's the idea of forming digital juries to hear cases. http://digitaljuries.com/ In the case of censorship it's less about moderating a person, so I think a more fitting flow would be to have the censor build a small case, say why they think there's an issue, then let a jury vote.

I do think we'd need some meta-moderation of a sort. The jury system itself should be broadly open access, but it needs some checks too.

There is a bright line between the town square (which is a public space) and social media (which is private property). Pointing to this line and claiming that it is dissolving is counterfactual and seems, to me, to be an unsubtle yearning for government control of private property, which is very close to an unmitigated evil.

IMO, create a policy constraint one person, one account and One company, one account would help a lot about this because it will be much easy to identify and punish those who spread fake news. Anonymous accounts are, IMO, the biggest problem of social networks.

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