There's a simple solution: Filter out what you (or your community) don't want to see, but don't force your sensibilities on everyone else.

The solution that, in my opinion, works better for society is not surrounding yourself in a nice cushy filterbubble where your views are never challenged, but instead becoming more tolerant of contrarian opinions.

That doesn't work when you (or your small community) face thousands or millions of spammers or abusive users. People will just turn to centralised censorship/filtering authorities as they do with e-mail (even if you install SA on your own server, you will use blacklists maintained by others).

I think the cream here is if the underlying network is decentralized and I disagree with my centralized provider, then I have the power to change providers. Its comparing email to facebook, if my email provider does something I disagree with I'm free t take my data to a another provider without losing all my connections.

The same for open currencies. The promise of open currencies with decentralized exchanges is I can now hold my value in a currency I trust a long a there is a path of exchange between my value and the value of the party I'm paying for or recieving from. And now its my decision which currency I hold and I'm free to change.

yeah, and if you don't like the law [1], you can leave the country, except that there's no where to go. People are basically telling each other to kill themselves. It's really sad. Oh what's that, you can just try to change the law? What if laws concerning access to law making are concerned, for example? Right back to begging "your local congress man", which is a joke in my opinion, because there's no accountability. That's not just an analogy, there might be laws concerning your provider. For some, there is just one provider available and the law might enable its monopolistic position.

>That doesn't work when you (or your small community) face thousands or millions of spammers or abusive users.

Umm... yes it does. That's precisely the role of a whitelist.

Last time I checked whitelists don't work in permissionless networks (and no real identity).

Do you have a fix to that?

I'm not sure what you mean. Why do you say whitelists don't work in a decentralized context?

I see maybe, I misunderstood. So do you mean whitelisting messages (tweets, posts, any other atomic units) based on content? I think white listing based on content may be hard, especially say images or videos, in a decentralized network. So I thought you mean whitelisting based on identity/id which is useless in mostly-anonymous permissionless network.

(But actually content-based filtering may not be too impossible now that I think..)

That's what I thought: in a world with decentralized markets, people will probably spend more on the (software) clients or filtering services.

Are you sure it's a simple solution? If it's so simple, why fake news is a problem with social media right now?

(And what about revenge porn, child pornography, etc.? Merely you not seeing it through your filters, it doesn't mean the world won't. It's equivalent of the guy closing his eyes to make sure all outside threats disappear.)

Fake news has to be solved through a mechanism other than censorship. Censorship is much more dangerous than ignorance. As long as we have the freedom of speech, all forms of ignorance can be solved. Once we give that up, we lose the mechanism through which society finds solutions to complex multi-factor problems, and disseminates those solutions.