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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm not sure I agree. It can be helpful to have access to social media that contains perspectives outside of the control of the country you live in. Sure will it be slanted or even outright propaganda ? Yes but this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions. The idea that our “government” will curate content and sanctify what is true is simply dystopian.

Citizen these social media sites and these news sources are safe. We have curated this list for your safety and that of the community at large.

Geez things have gotten bad in a hurry :(

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>this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions.

This is a nice fantasy but it fails to a number of intractible social problems. Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism. You would need to use force that you do not have access to in order to even attempt the solution you are proposing.

Second, implicit in your argument is that people would be responsible for thinking critically about every fact that they believe. This is just too much work, the human strategy requires trust, and we have massive incentive structures called societies whose main job is to facilitate that trust through the establishment of systems of incentives. This complicated system of incentives has been demolished, wholesale, by social media, and we're not going to adapt fast enough to avoid serious damage.

We solved this by disallowing children from voting. Kids these days eventually learn not to trust anything they read on the Internet.

hard to see that we "solved" this, regardless of who's allowed to vote

> Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism.

Say huh? Where on earth did you pull this “factoid” from?

This is 100% true in a scary-large proportion of Protestant religious households. I don’t even mean the nuttier end like the Quiverfull folks or whatever, but much more common somewhat-more-religious-than-median-Protestant sorts, attending relatively normal churches.

Source: I ran which quite a few of that sort as a kid.

It could also be true of other religious groups (it definitely is with the even nuttier end of Protestants) like Catholics and Muslims or what have you, but that’s the part I have experience with, and that’s a lot of people. They don’t live in San Francisco or New York or Boston or Seattle, mostly, but they exist in numbers.

>" Yes but this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions."

Politicians will commit seppuku the minute it happens in their country. Independently thinking populace is their worst nightmare.

Luckily for them most people do not do that.

IMO the issue isn't that content should be censored and we shouldn't see ideas from other countries. It's perfectly fine to have an official CCP account post CCP positions anywhere. It's less fine when the CCP account claims to be Jeff from Iowa and it's even less fine when the platform is controlled by the CCP and certain topics or opinions hey amplified by the platform's algorithms. I'm not sure the latter happened, but we cannot even know and have to trust an actively hostile actor.

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