I'm genuinely shocked how little backlash there's been against big-tech censorship. I grew up as a liberal in the 90s and early 00s. Freedom of speech and fostering an environment for information to propagate freely were ideals held sacred. It's been sincerely disappointing to see how many of my fellow so-called-liberals are willing to accept huge multinational corporations (of all things) censoring information "For their own good".

This isn't an Orwellian phenomenon. This is just the typical bad reading of Orwell that Americans have tried to squeeze out of the book because of their free speech fetish.

The central key issue of the book isn't a big scary guy with a mustache stealing your newspaper, it's reality inversion, it's the inability of everyone in society to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, which is the basis for, not the consequence of totalitarianism. It's the moment when someone blatantly tells a lie, and everyone eats it up, when the world starts to feel unreal and like a bad movie.

The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar. What's Orwellian is people going to Facebook, reading blatant lies and untruths, and being unable to distinguish that from what is real. And that is actually caused by the disappearance of gatekeepers, who play a vital role in maintaining liberal institutions.

There's merit in examining from both perspectives for any given issue. However, if our objective is a better signal-to-noise ratio of truth in the context of slamming every human's stray thoughts, emotions, and urges into each other in realtime, the 'freedom from' perspective is probably a better approach right now.

From this sentence, I assume that Stalinist Russia's approach to the subject of 'truth' would constitute a 'productive use of authority'?

Do you think that the reporting in the early 2000s mainstream media regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed stockpile of chemical weapons constitutes a good example of the establishment media being good stewards of the truth? This propagation of blatantly false information by the establishment led all the way up to the invasion of Iraq. A war that is these days generally seen as a regime change for the benefit of interested parties, established under false pretenses.

Or is all of this just 'not true communism' to you? Do you support the ways that governments, intelligence agencies and the media have been proven to have colluded to invert our reality? Or would you support some other, idealised government doing it? I have no idea what world your head lives in.

The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible.

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What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid.

Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts.

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> The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency.

We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes).

Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.

You're wrong. The difficulty has always been that the most pervasive so-called 'misinformation' is usually fairly plausible, difficult to validate, or simply matters of opinion or interpretation. The notion that Obama is a Muslim strains credulity, and it's not a widely held belief. What about more complex information, such as religious or political texts? These are even more difficult to validate and cause much more harm. Maybe we should just outright ban the communist manifesto? That seems to have caused a large amount of social harm and could be fairly readily classified as 'disinformation'. What about the Christian bible? The Koran? They're full of difficult to validate claims.

> What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here?

What disinformation? The information you don't like, or the information I don't like?

> We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war... > Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain...

The fact that you seem to see that information has been weaponised, but can't seem to see that big-tech's censorship is pursuant to their own political aspirations is alarming. Are you legitimately this biased, or just being disingenuous?

Its a held belief in my family. My very mother, my uncles, and more. Whether or not it is "widely held" has little-to-no bearing on the seriousness I take it.

Since my mother believes in it, I will take the alternative fact seriously.

> What disinformation? The information you don't like, or the information I don't like?

Disinformation like: Obama is a Muslim (or Obama was born in Kenya). Surely you can agree with me that such a fact running across political discussions is unhelpful.

> but can't seem to see that big-tech's censorship is pursuant to their own political aspirations is alarming

I'm prioritizing issues. I see misinformation / alternative facts to be a bigger problem than big-tech's censorship. As such, I'll stand in support of big-tech's moves here, if it helps the misinformation problem.

And no one in my family believes that. Myself included (though I wish the Muller report were written with stronger language to clarify itself: its conclusion had extremely weak wording).

I talk about the misinformation that I can see personally and in my social circle. Fortunately, none of my family members are getting sucked into Q or some of the more dangerous stuff... but the misinformation across the spectrum online destroys discussion as a whole. Far more than "censorship" of posts by Twitter or whoever.

After all, I don't do Facebook. I honestly don't care about it: I'm practically "self-censored" from Facebook because I don't use it at all. What I do care about is the misinformation my family is getting from it.

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I mean, it seems clear to me that you are a user of Facebook, and you seem to agree with me that misinformation is running rampant?

I'm blind to it, since I don't read Facebook at all. I can only tell you what has come through my Mother and Sister's mouths in my discussions with them. But as far as I can tell, you're just confirming my point: that there's a huge amount of misinformation here. And I applaud Facebook's announcement that they're fighting against it.

No, I don't use Facebook. I haven't for a long time. While I agree that there is propagation of misinformation happening on the platform, that's not my main concern. My main concern is that Facebook, and other platforms, will use their framework for 'removing misinformation' as a tool for censorship in the pursuit of their political agendas. My chief contention is that this poses a larger risk to society than the propagation of misinformation in the first place.

I don't have Facebook. I discussed things with my mother and sister personally. Our relationship is closer than just online crap. We actually talk together on a regular basis.

> Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life

This belief of my mother has an effect on our political discussion. In particular, she doesn't want to vote for a Muslim. It sets the stage for the rest of the discussion to come.

Where do I start? Do I start with Muslims aren't bad people? Do I attempt to prove Obama is a Christian? Etc. etc. These facts and beliefs lay the groundwork to the very discussion. And I have to take it seriously if I so wish to have an intelligent discussion with my family.

> Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.

I know that Obama is a Christian, and that Breonna Taylor was innocent. I don't expect to know the truth to everything, but I'll start with the facts I know about and work my way up.

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I don't believe myself to be the "defender of truth" or whatever. I can point out to my mom and my sister that I disagree with their "alternative facts", but I'm not so arrogant to believe that I can change their opinion on just discussion alone.

But when I see such obvious untruths seep into their talking points, it does make me weep inside on behalf of the truth.

Surely you've seen the multitude of stock posts in both directions, of any stock that you're interested in? And they're quite correlated to stock prices these days. Its not just political topics, I'm including everything here. Disinformation is the cornerstone of social media strategies and marketing.

The current focus is on the election, because that's in less than a month. But Facebook / Twitter are still at the center of plenty of other issues relating to this propagation of alternative facts.

That is an interesting example because while Obama is factually not a Muslim, period, the question about what Breonna Taylor "deserved" is a political one- a matter of opinions. So you're putting in the same bucket objectively fake information and opinions with which you strongly disagree, and calling for measures that can prevent both from spreading.

EDIT: Note that the warrant in the case was for Jamarcus Glover. I can accept Jamarcus Glover being a drug dealer (or having some connection to drugs), but seeing Breonna Taylor wrapped up in the drug charges is clearly misinformation.

I don't know anything about her karma or what she deserves, but the allegations that she was a criminal are not based on any information known to the police involved and was mostly invented by people who wanted to defend the police before gathering any facts.

But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream.

So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece.

I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.

This is a side-effect of the legacy media organisations no longer having a monopoly on the dissemination of information. Think for a moment on what kind of disinformation you may have unwittingly taken at face value for fact simply because every single news media outlet reported it.

This is exactly the concern that my original post highlighted. My fear is that if we allow them to become the arbiters of online information, it goes far beyond simply censoring the ridiculous and becomes a highly effective means of pursuing their own political agendas.

> But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new...

It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.

Whether the phenomenon being new or not is beside the point. The concern is that conspiracy theories are spreading more than they were in the past, and that groups have learned to exploit the them to accomplish their goals.

This has a parallel to what happened with computer malware. It's existed for about as long as home computers have, but up until 2000 or so, the bulk of it was merely childish pranks and wasn't very concerning. Since then, it's exploded in volume and danger, as criminals realized it could be used to make money by sending spam, stealing passwords and payment info, or by holding data ransom. I remember getting a virus on a floppy disk when I was a kid, but that doesn't make me comfortable with getting contemporary malware on my computer.

Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all".

But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.

Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.

The Russians didn't give a damn what Trump wanted. He was simply a useful buffoon that they could use to disrupt the election, and they succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.

Both problems have the same effective solution: break up the monopolies.

Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience, selective promotion, discovery, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of centralised control.

Gatekeeping and censorship are functions of excludability, audience gating, distraction, negative selection (obfuscation), stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of centralised control.

Audiences, a public, divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to either propaganda or censorship.

Or of surveillance, whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state-actor varieties, which is also an inherent property of centralised control.

It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface.

It's becoming more clear that general humanity has less and less interesting things to say and is clamouring for power via outrage. I'm all for maintaining the vital ability to sort signal from noise outside of class and cash mechanisms. There's got to be some signal left to find though.

Straight commercial censorship is predictable and fightable. The coming danger is thought control from religious people who think their interpretation of what-not-to-do is more important than your liberalism.

Who thinks this? Are you just assuming that anyone who approves of social media networks removing disinformation also thinks that is a bigger problem than the social media networks being powerful gatekeepers?

It's really just as simple as do you support CDA 230 or not? Anti-trust concerns are a different conversation, where there should be strong enforcement too.

While not mutually exclusive, it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information.

The less power Facebook has, the less important it becomes that they, in particular, remove disinformation.

The more power Facebook has, the more they become a disinformation SPOF.

Yes, but not proportionally to the power Facebook should have to distribute information.

Well, yes, though arguments can be made as to whether the two are orthogonal, or if the relationship is an inverse linear one, or something more complex (I'd lean toward an S-curve and that we're currently in the middle of it).

Huge engagement pays the bills for FB and twitter.

If we expect change we need an analog to a carbon or pollution tax for social.

“Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”- Charlie Munger

Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on. Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.

Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform. Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).

I suspect there are some here who won't believe this; a few may be tempted to throw out a certain pithy Upton Sinclair quote. I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.

First, when a company has shitty earnings, what metrics do they typically use in their investor reports to make the company still look palatable? New user acquisitions. Increased engagement. It doesn’t matter that the engagement is not generating money because it still lets them say “well, we lost a billion dollars this quarter, but user engagement is up 80% YOY so things are looking good for the future! (Please keep buying our stock/fund our next round!)”

Second, engineers working at a social networking company can’t directly influence what advertisers spend, but they can influence the behaviour of users, and leverage that for personal gain. “Look at how valuable I am, I developed this enhanced rage generating machine that increased engagement by 20% in A/B testing! Give me the big bonus now!” It’s a much harder sell to say “hey, Boss, I deleted a feature which was causing immeasurable subjective harm to society! It probably caused 100,000 users to delete their accounts and move to Gab! Give me the big bonus now!”

> I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.

Cool, hi.

> Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does.

half-truth; engagement in the aggregate does not pay the bills alone, but advertisers pay for people to see sponsored tweets, and more people see the sponsored tweets if more people are online for more time, and more people are online for more time if engagement is higher, so... engagement in the aggregate does in fact pay the bills.

> Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.

false; this is a nice rosy image of advertisers as rational actors operating with perfect information that is not at all realistic.

If an advertisement performs poorly, who is to blame: twitter? the ad copywriter? a graphic designer? the product's dev team? A product owner? The marketer who made a buy on some specific targeting segment? Their manager? The guy who hired those two? The CMO? The CEO? Marketing teams get fired constantly, almost annually, but very few firms are ever going to all-out stop advertising on social media platforms on the basis of poor conversion on their ads, because they cannot know for certain that it's not their fault, and they have to keep playing the game even if it is rigged.

The thinking here is easy to comprehend: "Walmart is still doing it... so we must be doing it wrong."

> Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on.

again, false. Advertisers do this all the time, because they're cargo-cult following buffoons and there's money sloshing around fucking everywhere.

Advertising money gets laundered, advertising money greases wheels, advertising money gets used by incompetents and people's nephews and rapacious over-confident investors who are running their own little schemes, and a billion other things, and it even occasionally gets used by savvy nerds who come to suspect it isn't actually working, but I assert: most advertisers will repeatedly pay for a lot of dumb shit that does not work at all. Always has been.

> Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.

This is an interesting academic distinction and I'm sure you know more about specific content -> behaviour readouts than I do, but the theory is simple: more time online results in more impressions and more impressions yields more conversions. Not a higher rate, mind you: just. more.

It does not really matter why or when or how we see the words "coca cola". All that matters is that we see those words more. Every day, more times per day, more places, more people. We need to be thinking about them always.

That is what they're paying for, and it doesn't even have to make sense! That might not even get them anything, but they have more money than they can possibly spend, so they may as well spend it on trying to get us to look at and think about them.

Can it be more optimal? Could you squeeze blood from this stone? Sure, probably, but whether I'm on twitter reading great video-game recommendations or reading flame wars is a pittance compared to whether I'm online or not at all.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the optimal situation is to make users cycle in and out of the outrage content: get me mad so I stick around a bit longer, cool me down with something funny/sweet, then show me an ad, then get me mad again. Repeat.

> Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform.

this is absurd. It's absurd! It really makes me question your intent and good faith.

The platform is designed to be used, by definition! What, are you telling us twitter does not want its users online? You're saying that engagement is "expensive", is twitter running some kind of other service? Something outside of users looking at and posting tweets? This is nonsensical to the point of being upsetting.

It is like Philip Morris fretting over all the tobacco they're going to have to pay to harvest so that people can keep smoking. If only they didn't have to! You made an advertising platform and people must be present on it to be advertised to. End of story.

Now, of course, there are costs to be optimized. A dumb example: if you know you can't show me an ad between now and when I will naturally end my session, you should maybe try to get me offline right now, before I download any more video data, but that stuff is just sand on the beach for the difference it makes.

Maybe you think this matters because it is the work you do, or it's work you know does get done, but it does not matter in the big picture.

Side-rant: Twitter could fire 95% of its employees tomorrow and probably be more profitable than it is today in the long term, but it won't, again because of cargo cults and social wisdom.

Almost none of the feature work that has been done by twitter in the last 8+ years has materially mattered: the product is done, and you're mostly paid to arrange deck chairs on a ship that's sailing along smoothly and to look pretty. Employee headcount, profit, ad impressions: at the end of the day, all of this is just disembodied marketing metrics for investors to speculate on and to try to extract cash from before the whole thing tanks out someday.

> Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).

This recap of your argument is just a rehash, but it restates the basic flawed premise in full:

"Advertisers are rational and have perfect information and will pay only for the optimal conversion strategy up to the optimal point of cost/benefit, so if we ever over or under-shoot at all, we'd lose money and we'd go right out of business!"

So, let me recap as well:

- Twitter is an advertisement platform.

- Twitter relies on dollars spent by advertisers. We agree so far, I think.

- Advertisers pay both per impression and per click.

- Advertisers have bad information, and act on social wisdom as much as or more than anything else. They cannot evaluate your performance by how well their advertisements do on your platform. This right here is the secret sauce!

- Engagement (i.e. time spent paying attention to the platform) may not raise conversion rates, (i.e. clicks per impression), but higher engagement is strongly correlated with more conversion overall. People gotta be online.

- Engagement is the core metric of your business.

To put this all very simply: if I am on twitter all day, it's a hell of a lot more time for me to run into and to think about Harry's Razors than if I never went on there at all.

That is the product you are selling to advertisers, and they will pay for it for a long time, even if it doesn't really make any sense or money.

I have no idea about Facebook. I barely even use it so all my information is second-hand.

> Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section?

We're not, at least not intentionally. Do you think we are? If so, why?

The Trending section is still biased towards things that are being talked about frequently. Unfortunately, that means outrage-inducing topics will tend to bubble up there. We're working on making trend identification more sophisticated in order to provide better context, but it's a really hard problem with such short snippets of context.

> Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative?

"Political engagement" overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, "outrage engagement". Outrage engagement is a net negative; political engagement that does not devolve into misinformation and toxicity is not. We are actively trying to decrease engagement with misinformation and outrage, but it's a hard problem. Also, frankly, it's being hampered by a lack of focus internally that is leaving the teams involved with no clear direction other than "do something, now!".

Non-toxic political engagement is a net positive for us. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting it all down, assuming we even could (it's fundamentally the same problem, though a little bit easier). I see how other people might see that as the better option to shut down the toxicity and misinformation, though.

I haven't been an active Twitter user for years, but whenever I visit it these days, Trending looks like it's at least partially optimized for outrage. I understand it's not actually "what's popular" (because otherwise it would constantly be about Justin Bieber & co), it's curated, or at least topics need to be approved in some form to be allowed to trend, right?

> Non-toxic political engagement is a net positive for us.

I've seen very few non-toxic political engagement on Twitter, but maybe we have a different understanding of what is healthy engagement. I'm not sure there is a baby in that bathwater. I'm not even sure it's bathwater.

From my perspective, it's either a shouting match with a lot of groupthink and -speech or somebody talking to their followers about how evil the outgroup is. And that's not because I'm looking at controversial things, I believe. I visit some developer's Twitter feed and one or two clicks later I'm in the middle. It's like that Wikipedia game where you start on a random article and need to make it to Hitler with the least amount of clicks, but it's less challenging because almost all clicks lead to outrage.

You seem to be more focused on whether what engages the users is factually true. Is it that advertisers don't want to be seen next to obvious fake news? Do advertisers not care to have their brand associate with not-actually-honest-but-not-fake-news-either outrage-engagement by, say, Robert Reich?

Brilliant. I'm swiping it.

Can you talk more about this? On its face, this seems like an explicitly anti-leftist position. Some philosophers even claim that the role of the political Left is the organization of societal rage. For instance, if Twitter had its way in the domestication of political speech on its platform, then it might have suppressed conversations about BLM and prevented it from having a chance to become mainstream.

We've understood those tendencies much better since Edward Bernays, but I do not know of any young-adult curriculum that teaches them. It would be good for everybody.

One claim I saw passed around recently, for example, was that this particular video on the White House lawn was greenscreened. The people I saw discussing it were saying things like "you can tell cause of how pixelated the background is" or "look, the trees are on a 10 second loop!". I don't know what we could put in the public education curriculum to stop people from falling for this kind of thing.

How long since this curriculum was adopted state-wide in California? And what's it officially called? I couldn't find any information about it when I searched for "skeptical analysis" on the California Dept of Education website.

We watched Dr. Strangelove in Social Crit and had a two-hour discussion following. It was awesome.

Engagement only measures engagement. I find Star Trek engaging, but one thing it isn’t is educational.

Social networks pray on the deeply rooted instincts that are hard to suppress.

It's laughable and frankly patronising that they even pretend to not have an opinion or a political leaning. The more they try to wiggle out of the Web of "disinformation", the more firmly they become lodged in it.

Facebook/Twitter cannot truthfully claim "Whoa, we can't remove holocaust deniers! We're a neutral platform!" and then turn around and show me trending topics, news, and people.

If you're so fucking neutral, then only show me things I follow, and don't insert ad content into the feed like it's real. Put if off to the side like a regular advertisement.

They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Will less popular media outlets be flagged as illegitimate? What if a site pushes a conspiracy theory that's actually well-backed but is considered harmful by one of these companies? Even assuming good faith, look at the coronavirus filtering and compare it to what the "trusted" media sources and CDC were saying back in January and February regarding masks. If you were to independently say, "hey, what they're saying about mask efficacy doesn't make much sense. Everyone should wear some kind of mouth covering just in case", would you be flagged as dangerous misinformation? Because that position would be correct and warranted but also fly in the face of the cited authorities and experts (who were curated in a biased way to begin with, ignoring Chinese scientists' recommendations and the experiences of East Asian countries with other pandemics). Remember, in January and February, those in the US and often EU were being told that masks didn't really protect you, could even increase your risk, and to specifically not purchase and wear them. This was always an inconsistent narrative, of course, because the point of this misinformation was to reserve stock for healthcare professionals because masks do work and healthcare professionals needed them.

We need better systems for addressing misinformation than placing the burden on platforms who will inevitably work in their own interest and attempt to automate processes that should be manually (and expensively) done on an individual basis.

I think this is the more important bit, I don't know how they prevent abuse by the same network again. These guys can just manufacture new identities.

If you find a botnet you can assume they have an additional ~50% or greater 'clean' accounts on standby for exactly this situation. These become easier to obtain over time via purchasing or black hatting accts, etc. The longer you run undetected the longer you have to stockpile clean accts as you know its simply a matter of time.

I would imagine if 100% of your revenue depends on it you'd be even more prepared.

I know back in the Diablo 2 days some of us were friendly with blizdevs who would warn us of impending banwaves, upcoming updates to server code and whatnot. I'm quite sure the same still applies today only at a far larger scale since back then online communication was still young.

Anyways all this to say if they are experienced and know its coming they wont be down for long, if at all.

Minutes!

Social media is the new tabloid salacious media.

Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure.

The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more.

Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.

We’re living through a modern rehash of yellow journalism [1]. Both were spurned by free societies adapting to new communication technologies.

How so, exactly? This is kind of an odd moment, where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out.

There are definitely some aspects of the traditional media that fit your description (all cable opinion shows are best avoided by everyone), but that's by no means all of the media.

Deeply incompetent is an opinion, not a fact. So yes, it is a form of bias.

Actual fact-based reporting would be articles like "President did XXXX on YYYY" and leave the opinions and talking heads out. It would also be fairly dry and not generate outrage click traffic which media companies seem to thrive on these days.

I don't blame you personally for propagating this misunderstanding of journalism as there is a lot of power and money behind not having actual journalism, but "actual fact-based reporting" is a canard designed to keep the populace dumb. Reportage--journalism--has always contextualized information and explained why you should care. That cannot, repeat cannot, be divorced from the act of reporting. A stock ticker is not journalism. You can get it if you want. But it doesn't mean squat to the overwhelming majority of people, nor is it expected to, and the dull ignorance of a wave of decontextualized "facts-only" reportage is an idea designed to create a dumber and less civically capable society.

It also happens to make the comfortable and the comparatively powerful, a class to whom I belong, feel less challenged about things. Convenient, that. But bad for us, no matter how convenient it is.

Pretty much any competency can be demonstrated that way.

The original comment was arguing whether any of the POTUS work was competent. And that H1B change seems to have been competent, according to the general consensus on HN.

Is the entirety of the rest of POTUS' work incompetent? Maybe. That wasn't the original claim though.

We don't know anything about the political layers of the onion batting for control of the US democratically elected leadership, but we do have a daily torrent of candidate abuse, undermining and negativity from the two big corporate camps and zero coverage of anything else (Greens, Libertarians, candidates rejected by their party etc etc). The person currently in power usually gets the worst of the abuse and second guessing as who-knows-who fights to depose and replace. (I'm a registered Dem in Cal FWIW, not arguing a political point here).

I spent about a half hour scanning some of her stuff, and I'm getting a strong conspiracy-theorist vibe from that person:

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/09/investigative-reports/b...:

> [Rosa Brooks] was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.

> OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power.

The Soros stuff is a bit of a red flag. Also, Ukraine wasn't non-aligned, but aligned towards Russia. Anecdotally, the Ukrainians I know weren't fond of Yanukovych and were happy to see him go, both times.

https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312730357175902209:

> Good ole sheep herder Bernard!

Referring to people as "sheep"?

https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312430264870674438:

> My opinion:

> This is about ramping up fear and distracting everyone from the VERY DISTURBING revelations in just the past few days on something the creepiest part of the military you've never heard of is up to. Stay tuned!

The "this" she's referring to is Trump getting Covid-19. Apparently she thinks it's part of some kind of coverup rather than the very obvious end-result of the choices he's made for himself and his staff.

The mainstream media is usually anodyne in comparison to conspiracy theories, because the latter can have extra drama injected into them and push more emotional buttons.

Take that first article I linked to above. The "clear Trump win" scenario Whitney's article dwells upon and gives a sinister cast also included a large popular vote win for Biden, which she completely failed to mention and which would have undermined her "planned power grab" narrative significantly if she had. A constitutional crisis is much more understandable if the winner of the electoral college lost the popular vote badly, given it's always been a broken system and it seems illegitimate to a lot of people for the winner of an election is not be the person who got the most votes.

But it's way more dramatic if you can make it sound like the Democrats are planning on stealing the election regardless of what happens.

> Separately the term 'conspiracy theorist' is both anti free speech and extremely unhealthy in a democracy. One person's investigative reporter is another persons 'conspiracy theorist'...

Nope, sorry. I'm not impinging on anyone's free speech rights by using the term "conspiracy theorist." I'd argue it's also rather healthy term to use in a democracy, since a democracy will fail to function effectively if such thinking becomes too dominant.

And some people think ancient aliens and UFOs are serious areas of study, but most reasonable people think it's nonsense. That disagreement on this kind of thing is possible doesn't make every perspective equally credible or vital.

I actually agree with your point:

>>>>> To presume to know anything about what goes on in the rarified power struggles at an intercontinental/global levels requires free speech and giving serious researchers/writers a viewable voice.

Where I disagree is that people like Whitney Webb can shed any more light on those power struggles than Bob Lazar. If the article of hers that I read is a good representation of her oeuvre, she offers tendentious and misleading interpretations of already public information. I think the best that can do is offer a false sense of deeper understanding.

A real deeper understanding needs someone to take serious risk, like Edward Snowden did, to bring secret things into the light.

If anyone else is unfamiliar with the term, I found a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Thinking is hard and it requires training and conditioning to do. I'm not talking about what to think, but rather how to think.

It's an incredible convenience to delegate thinking, like the difference between spending 3 hours debugging some code versus having the answer readily available on StackOverflow.

Conversely, that convenience comes with a cost of a stunted intellect, where an individual can become so dependent StackOverflow that they are incapable of doing something new or difficult if it hasn't already been done.

Neither is necessarily better or worse, there are good arguments for the "hard way" and the "easy way". The important thing is recognizing the distinction and appreciating the value of both.

Who's on Stack Overflow all the time? I've never even made an account. I guess I referenced it more often when I was a younger programmer but never all that much..

Of course somebody has to ask the question first, but with StackOverflow, one person can ask it, and then everybody else can find it via the magic of Google. (And I do mean "magic": beyond matching keywords, a search engine can, on a good day, point you pages popular with people having similar problems.)

I'm on StackOverflow any time I need to learn a new piece of software, which is pretty common. When I'm "just programming", I can get my work done without it due to decades of experience. But keeping current with new technologies often means getting lost in the implementation weeds, and it's great when others have already been there and can give me a shortcut out.

That said, intelligence (g factor) isn't simply being conscientious. Being intelligent means that your personality is flexible and you're able to apply different aspects of your personality depending on what the situation calls for. Conversely, less intelligent people are generally stuck with the personality they have and are less able to modulate their behavior depending on the context.

Anyway, I used the StackOverflow analogy because it's more likely to resonate with the HN audience. The point was more about knowledge and relying on others as a crutch to avoid having to think for yourself. It's not inherently a bad thing, but doing it too much has consequences that may not be obvious.

I'm not sanguine. Be honest, which would you bet on happening in the majority of cases?

I wonder sometimes if it's almost part of some fundamental psychology?

It takes time but people do seem to get better at filtering out mis-information. I believe (and we have some evidence) that we can speed this up by helping teach critical dissection of articles and content and build the skill set to weigh sources.

The problem will never go away entirely. It's an arms race between people who want to get closer to understanding reality, and the people selling a story to some end (profit, power, etc). Like all arms races, sometimes one side lags behind but they usually adapt and leap ahead.

+ Software engineers get paid a higher average salary than babysitters

+ Yesterday was before today (and any other tautology)

+ My feet are cold

There are plenty of truth value functions we can evaluate for non-physical states including tautologies, personal opinions, statistical norms with broad support, historical events and so on. They may have different truth value functions (how we determine the truth of my opinions on how cold my feet are is different than how we determine the truth of what I ate for lunch) but they still have truth/non-truth outcomes.

Anytime you get into awkward philosophical quandries about the state of things, state the problem to a small child and see how they answer. This technique would of really saved Anselm a whole bunch of time and trouble.

Humans have a "truth default" in communication. We take almost everything we hear as fact by default. Bots will have no trouble at all making the majority of people think, see, and do whatever they want.

I'm afraid it's more like Snowcrash, where the Internet is akin to the "snow", the static pattern that crashes most people's brains, and only a few are naturally immune, naturally critically minded.

>Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.

I think this is unfortunately the case, most people are basking in their confirmation bias and social media dopamine hits. Reason is hard, finding reliable trustworthy data is hard, etc. Path of least resistance is to give in.

If you gave an industrial corporation a grant of immunity for emitting pollutants, would you be surprised if they set every river they could on fire...?

> Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.

I find a tinge of irony in this: HN being a form a social media in itself, and this statement also reflecting a general mistrust of social media within HN.

When it comes to social media I think it is sprawling. Even a topic as pedestrian as lawn care is completely overrun by inorganic material.

And yet only independent journalists on social media are being silenced. Funny how that works out no?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their internal data, there is certainly technical stats to identify related accounts participating in bad faith campaigns.

I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.

However, if you look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day, you can see that a lot of bullshit, emanating from every possible angle of the political spectrum, still exists. Much of it organic, much of it bots, I'm sure. Let's stop hitting the panic button every time they remove Iranian bot networks.

I mean, these companies have a monopoly or near monopoly on communications, and they have openly said they are going to arbitrarily remove information that they don't like, without any kind of transparency or accountability.

Is the fact that congress is not enacting a law supposed to mean that it is not censorship, and that we can't complain about it?

Would you be ok with other private networks doing it?

Besides, if we must have censorship, could we at least have someone more deserving of our trust do it? These policies of removing "fake news" greatly worsened COVID-19. As late as February, they were removing "disinformation" that it was infectious human to human.

Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned.

Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us.

These companies should be begging us for a second chance to filter the truth for us.

Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year.

Why are people so eager for this?

>arbitrarily

What is arbitrary about it? do you assume that because you don't have a list of their rules of engagement, that you don't have the "warrant" for these takedowns yourself, that it is arbitrary and politically biased in motive?

>Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned.

I straight up think that's bullshit. I would want evidence of that occurring or evidence that that was ever laid out as policy.

>Would you be ok with other private networks doing it?

"Private networks" do it all the time. Newspapers decide what to print, and whether they print lies or truths, and whether they do so fairly. The best journalists put truth first. These virtual bulletin boards are, as a matter of fact, massive platforms where any small amount of gamesmanship can lead to the very quick spread of information, good-faith or not. To think they should sit and do nothing is folly.

>Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us.

What

>Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year.

What

Your entire post is filled with so much unsubstantiated statement-as-fact I don't know where to begin.

I'm sure that they have some internal logic behind the scenes, of course. But it is effectively arbitrary, since their process is completely opaque to us and subject to 'arbitrary' change on their part.

Even if they were completely transparent though, would that even be any better? They exercise absolute control with no accountability, over a platform that is ubiquitous and essential.

> I straight up think that's bullshit. I would want evidence of that occurring or evidence that that was ever laid out as policy.

Their policy is unchanged since then, and is quite explicit. Facebook defers 100% to the WHO. And the WHO defers to China.

Maybe I can't prove to your satisfaction that the WHO is compromised. It is possible that the WHO is just really incompetent. But it doesn't matter, they were deeply ineffective.

And anecdotally, I know people who fled China in December and January. You could leave China if you left via Wuhan airport.

We tried warning people. I tried warning people. I was banned in February for "fake news". There was a preponderance of evidence of what was happening.

Video after video of Chinese solders wearing hazmat suits rounding people up. But according to Facebook, all of it was completely fake, and we should't panic or talk about it.

And I assume you are going to disregard everything I've said, unless I reconstruct timeline of everything I've said, and spoonfeed it to you.

> "Private networks" do it all the time. Newspapers decide what to print, and whether they print lies or truths, and whether they do so fairly. The best journalists put truth first.

Let me be very clear about something: corporations exist at the pleasure of the public. In theory anyway. You have no right to incorporate, and you have to be accountable to the people in exchange the privileges that you enjoy. And most any company their size, especially a provider of infrastructure, is in bed with the government. They did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They massively benefit from government subsidy, and they suppress any competitors. They are not a private network.

> These virtual bulletin boards are, as a matter of fact, massive platforms where any small amount of gamesmanship can lead to the very quick spread of information, good-faith or not. To think they should sit and do nothing is folly.

OK, so if disinformation is such a problem, then why should we allow one billionaire creep to be our information policeman?

I should do it. I should be your information police officer. Why not? I've done less creepy things than Mark Zuckerberg.

> What > What

Improve your informational diet first by consciously discounting whatever you read on Facebook, and second by spending less time on Facebook.

> Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation?

There's no need for snark.

The issue being discussed is particular to these sorts of platforms. Reputable news sources still exist.

The people who are most likely to take that advice are the ones least in need of it.

I am glad Facebook and Twitter are taking what must be very careful, researched actions against clear evidence of powerful forces using social media as a tool against reality.

Sorry but are we talking about the same companies? What track record do they have that helps you to believe this?

My point is, they clearly aren't removing the majority of disinformed and disinforming nonsense. And I don't think every human at the two orgs are evil. If they say "Look, we found these patterns, these correlations, this forensic data that points at coordinated disinformation", my intuition is that they have done just that.

The core problem is that they have two conflicting incentives. They don’t want to look bad for spreading misinformation so they try to restrict it. But, they are incentivized to make money, and posts spreading disinformation are lucrative because they appeal to eyeballs. I am extremely, extremely skeptical that this is a resolvable problem for them.

Your original point, and my response, were both on how an individual can escape the misinformation cesspools of Facebook and Twitter.

Of course I agree it's much harder to solve the problem at the societal scale.

Thank goodness someone is calling this out other than me. Sites like these are filled with people who think they are smart don't need any help, and worse, expect everyone else in the world to be at their level.

I too am glad social media companies are finally waking up and taking action against this stuff.

Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial?

https://www.sovereignman.com/finance/how-isaac-newton-went-f...

Note the graph there showing his purchasing events.

Newton himself was well aware of his folly afterwards. He was able to admit that he was irrational and learn form the experience.

Many people that consider themselves smart would be well improved to learn the same lesson Sir Isaac did.

Absolutely. Another solution would simply fill in the vacuum. Google—-Alphabet, rather—-is a for-profit corporation. Their initial success was the result of outperforming other services in a field so nascent that no one really knew exactly what it was. Google is no one’s friend; they’re not subject to anything except clear demarcations of legal statue and the court system.

It’s important to realize “this stuff” may, someday, very well become your stuff, my stuff and our stuff.

That’s the threat, in my opinion. Information is not harmful. Information we can each investigate and self-audit within our own brains. Google we cannot investigate, and it will never experience anything close to a public-facing audit.

Don’t capitulate your God given power away. The power to think. To question. To be wrong. To change your mind. To grow.

One man’s opinion.

It would be like email: you can run an email client with a spam filter. If you don't like how it's filtering, you can configure it or even download a different client without abandoning your email address.

Things get a bit too Hail Corporate, especially with specific brands.

Its time for another amendment.

EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline

https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21

Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world.

No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable.

So. What do you propose?

Not GP, but I propose doing absolutely nothing.

There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.

The internet is just a new medium that’s joining the club.

There is no substitute for critical thinking. There are always going to be people who will hold opinions that are anathema to your beliefs. Often, those opinions will be the majority and you will be in the minority.

You learn early in life to ignore the crazy people on the sidewalk holding up signs and screaming about lizard-men running the government. You also learn early in life that politeness and civility will carry you a long way towards being respected in your community.

The internet is no different.

If you can’t function without a school teacher in the room, you aren’t ready for the adult world. We don’t need facebook or twitter or anyone else babysitting us as we go about our lives.

There are multiple places on the internet where you can access completely unmoderated content. 4chan and 8chan are two popular forums, and yet they are far from mainstream.

The fact is that moderation is a feature which people want. People don't want to go through 200 spam e-mails everyday. People don't want to spend tons of time going through bullshit.

Facebook and Twitter has never been about getting "unfiltered" news. Facebook became useful because your friends was there. Twitter became useful because you could read content from famous and skilled people.

> There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.

And these will continue to exist on the internet. The only thing that's happening here is that Facebook and Twitter is taking a stance that they don't want to become part of this group. Is that so bad?

I agree that the ideal of every adult is being educated, taking time to check facts, having a critical mind.

But that’s not realistic. It’s not where we are. And the facts of democracy are that uneducated people vote. People unprepared for the internet crazies. They’re not handling Fox News as entertainment or tabloids. They think it’s real.

So, again, we can pretend that’s not happening. We can say, “well they shouldn’t be like that.” But that’s not reality.

The first amendment and the resulting USA would be my prime counter example. The US wasn't an accident, freedom of speech is a hard requirement for free people and letting companies censor people "for our good" is antithetical to the nth degree.

It's a commonly spread fallacy that only "publishers" are allowed to moderate content, and "platforms" not. The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate user-submitted content without facing legal liability for doing so. Social media platforms have always been allowed to do exactly what they're doing.

Or: Have a counter-disinformation group that responds to political disinformation by creating more disinformation that points in the opposite direction.

To some extent all of the above is done already, organically. In fact, to the extent that Facebook et al. manage to hide the stupidest crap, that would tend to make people believe that what does stay up must be true (or, at least, must have passed Facebook's fact-checkers).

Edit: Just noticed you said lizard and I said lizard. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. I meant something about the basal ganglia or limbic system, whereas yours is an exotic & fantastical sci-fi scenario. Although interestingly if you consider all the venality and viciousness in national politics, and the fact that every politician has that same part of the brain, it's actually kind of true that lizard-men are running the government!

"In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.

In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews."

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2015/war-free-exp...

I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.

We already have that - and have had for centuries - the people who control the press control what gets presented as "truth". Look at Fox or any other Murdoch property for a perfect example.

(cf "History is written by the winners" for another angle.)

There is competition in establishing the truth. Not as much as I'd like, but a decent amount. Reducing that competition would be bad.

The Downside of the common man having too little oversight is more people believe things that aren't true (Flat Earth), and the downside to too much oversite is people believe different things that aren't true (PRISM, Nayirah testimony, Tuskegee Syphilis Study). The trade off of which is worse varies, but generally most individuals are fairly powerless but there are many of them, and organizations are few but wield much more influence.

They're bad we get it, Id rather be able to hear how bad they are in the light. Who was accountable when we spread lies about WMDs in Iraq? That caused magnitudes of more damage than these groups, yet no one is held accountable even with Public figures. Do you want everyone accountable for misinformation silenced or just those you disagree with?

We see a problem, we try to fix it.

They’re not unaccountable. This whole thing is about holding them accountable!

If they were completely unaccountable then they wouldn’t do any of this. Why is Facebook taking action against QAnon now when it hasn’t in the past year? Do you think they haven’t seen the polling data for the president, house, and senate races? They’re preparing to fight for their life as a conglomerated monopoly.

What does holding them accountable look like to you?

I get that, now, they've hoisted themselves by their own petard after years of inconsistent policies and enforcement, but I mean in a general sense.

>What does holding them accountable look like to you?

The opening paragraph of section 230 of the CDA, to wit:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

There be far worse dragons than disinformation down the other roads. Let's take this to its logical conclusion - you've got people on the left upset about "conspiracy theories" (which is, itself, a pejorative term with problematic origins rooted in thought control), you've got people on the right upset about "bias" against their stances.

When both sides of the political aisle are demanding tighter control over speech for any reason, the intended result should terrify the hell out of you.

The problem you speak of is not "people say false things" (which is not solvable), the problem should rather be seen as "people demand the ability to censor people they disagree with". The solution to that problem is telling both sides to pound sand and take responsibility for their own beliefs, not foisting that responsibility off onto third parties in a way that necessarily restricts freedom of speech.

For smart intelligent people, false statements create untrustworthy agents. For oppressive despots, false statements are always the most expedient shortcuts to some desired outcome. What countries like China are doing are playing the despot and preventing their people from thinking critically as much as possible, and silicon valley thinks that's a wonderful idea.

In the long term, as has happened before, people adapt to the new reality. Marketing has to change all the time because people wise up to manipulative strategies.

The long term solution is a more intelligent public, not censorship.

Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think.

I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.

James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.

If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-op...

> "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.

If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page.

Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years.

Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows.

It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.

Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.

Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices)

Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.

Such as?

I don't see how that changes anything except the political leanings of the website operators. Can you explain what the problem is?

What's the disaster exactly? I keep seeing allusions to catastrophe and disaster but I am not seeing any specifics about the material effects of this catastrophe.

> would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting

Why would that make me uncomfortable? Like what are the Saudis going to do with Facebook that would be so terrible compared to what Facebook is already doing under current ownership? The Saudis in particular seem like a weird example considering the already prolific influence of SoftBank in U.S. tech firms.

> Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting

I don't have a "side" with respect to what Facebook removes from its platform, I can't fathom a scenario where something being removed from Facebook can be accurately described as a catastrophe or a disaster regardless of who is doing the removing.

It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this. They seem like a remarkably high leverage attack vector for cynical political operatives. I probably have to do some more digging about who these fact checking orgs are before I come to a concrete opinion, however.

I will however admit that the alternative is also fraught with the exact same risk. Allowing various actors to actively spread misinformation can itself sway an election. Perhaps the best solution is to have vetting that only targets the most egregious, obviously false information, where the information that was censored (unless it is violent/pornographic/criminal), especially that which is relevant to upcoming elections, is catalogued and available for viewing by the public, simultaneously for accountability, public trust and to assuage conspiracy theorists that the vetting is political.

That ship has already sailed. The problem of politically biased vetting is a universal fact of life on literally every media platform in existence; people just need to be judicial in their consumption of media.

> It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this.

I am sure they will be quite flawed, but I don't see the problem with that, of course they will be flawed, why is that such a problem?

It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation. Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays. It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse. There's also a distinct difference between legacy media bias, which is worn on the sleeve, and the shadowy undocumented impact of vettors whose bias can't be scrutinized by the public.

Any power they have is given freely of their own volition, nobody is compelled to use Facebook. People who rely on Facebook to stay informed about the world are responsible for their own choices, the same way someone who chooses to rely on Fox News or MSNBC is freely making their own choices.

> It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation

Yes it is. The issue in question is an organization's power to influence elections by controlling information that consumer's receive, in this respect, legacy media curation is identical to social media curation.

> Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays

Privately owned websites aren't a public commons, the internet is a public commons and citizens have total freedom to come and go as they please or even carve out their own slice of the commons for whatever purpose they desire. There is no reason to wrest control of business prerogatives from private website owners just because lots of people share political memes on a website. If this issue is a real concern then the government should provide a 1st amendment protected platform for citizens not arbitrarily violate the free-speech rights of private companies.

> It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse

Totally false. There are hundreds of different platforms to choose from to participate in public discourse online and its very cheap and quite common to self-host one's own blog or platform to that end.

Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday.

There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now.

Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.

Debatable, but even if it is, you still shouldn't waste your time worrying about it.

Anything that collects a mass number of likely untrained/uneducated people in a common space, where they can create a post record of anything with no restriction of content to the world at large, will never be a serious source of news or foundational information. You may sift through this and get something useful or interesting once in a while, but it is simply incapable of as a whole of being anything great.

The fact that these networks exist as primarily ad businesses is probably the best thing that can become of them.

The most useful/meaningful thing totally free/open social networks can do in a general sense is provide a venue for people to post raw media of events, such as crimes, etc. which can be useful if you are near that locality, but the comments and subsequent discussion have a very low chance of being anything but emotional expressions.

I am fine with whatever actions Facebook or Twitter take to do this if they feel the need. Facebook and Twitter are not government agencies. People choose to use them. People whine and bitch about how everyone they know are on Facebook and Twitter, but alternatives do exist and it is possible to use them. You can also just text/SMS your friends and family.

The evidence is that your FB messenger inbox is not filled with porn spam 400 times per second.

This is all fine and good until these centralized, sometimes-censored systems are commandeered by the state to censor person-to-person communications (whether it be on a certain topic, using certain keywords, or all messages to/from users in a certain geofence).

This is turnkey tyranny, and you wouldn't even know it had happened. The command to the service providers would be gag ordered, it wouldn't be visible, it wouldn't be reproducible, and it wouldn't make the news.

I am convinced that this represents one of the greatest threats to our society: the danger is imminent. If it hasn't happened already, it will soon.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24630900

It's true that absolute truths are hard to find. But absolute bullshit is much much easier to identify, and should be curtailed when it's doing harm.

This and several posts on this thread seem to think it’s impossible to discern fact from fiction, that every opinion, even if false and presented as factual, deserves equal time.

I fear that if we cannot have factual, cogent policy debates, our democracies are doomed.

The fact-checking organizations have themselves been independently vouched for by several highly trusted organizations. They are as close to perfect as we can possibly get.

Unfortunately there are too many bad actors in this country who are hell-bent on destroying our democracy. Huge segments of the population are actively engaged in the misinformation campaign so that's why radical steps need to be taken.

We cannot let people with ill intent ruin the country by misleading the public and stirring up controversies and conspiracy theories.

Clearly, everything is fine. The economic recovery has been very quick; everyone made a lot of profit recently and it's all going great now (stocks prices have been soaring in fact) - But you wouldn't know it from reading all these fake news on Facebook. These social manipulators need to be stopped.

Something that is grounded in reality is being able to pay down your home loan. Now that mortgage forbearance is expiring in the United States we in the mortgage industry are seeing a trend where pre-pandemic mortgage delinquency rates will not return to pre-pandemic levels for 24 months since the first wave of COVID. Compare this to 11 months of recovery after both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. 24 months is the best case scenario right now. 2021 will be a slow and painful year for economic recovery. We still don't know if we will endure another shock.

For example, Twitter could easily and automatically remove a ton of white supremacist accounts using machine learning but haven't. Many of these accounts follow obvious patterns that ML can easily detect. Why don't they do it?

That department doesn't realize they were told to do this by a director who knows the true purpose is propaganda.