Comment by ClarityJones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClarityJones | Hacker News Reader

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That's not really relevant to my point, which was that new means of spreading information are capable of spreading both true and false information, and that history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.

So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was false). https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-th...

Or an article about how Luther was excommunicated for what he did with the printing press. https://www.history.com/news/renaissance-influence-reformati...

Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the dissemination of information that the Church considered to be false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's potential to spread false information. My point is that free speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are smart and even lies help listeners learn.

So, your point is not the printing press, but it was "the church". Well, in this case, it isn't "the church", so there any analogy already fails.

> history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.

And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery they imparted because something else overcame that? Or closer to home: we should simply ignore things like Cambridge Analytica and the meddling in the US elections, even though it moved, and still could be moving, the USA towards a fascist regime?

> people are smart

No, most aren't, and even what's normally considered smart people can believe in hoaxes and act to the detriment of society.

> even lies help listeners learn

You lost me there. Learning is not a goal per se. Learning from malicious information can lead to malicious outcomes. If you want to invoke a history lesson, that would be a good one.

It sounds like you're simply arguing against free speech.

Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?

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