So, in order to avoid repeating myself, I believe I addressed that notion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063309
In short, I am not saying that the truth will necessarily "win out" over the false. Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.
So, my personal belief system - and I know how unpopular this viewpoint is, especially in current times - is just let them have at it. Remove blatant calls for violence, and nothing more. ("nothing more" should include racism and other unpopular beliefs, by the way, in case my viewpoint isn't controversial enough thus far).
So, saying "We should go out and attack $GROUP" should be removed. But saying "I think $GROUP is inferior due to highly discredited scientific-seeming reasons" should not be removed, because however wrong or distasteful it is, it's not directly advocating for violence. Similarly, something like holocaust denial or anti-vax beliefs, etc should similarly not be suppressed.
Again, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I hope that helps you understand my thoughts on these issues.
Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic (whether it's that it is a hoax, that it is not transmissible, or that you can cure it by drinking bleach) is okay?
It seems to me that, if you're saying calls to violence can be censored because they will inspire people to act badly, then you've crossed the line into saying people can't be trusted to act appropriately.
Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?
Wearing Mask a few months ago was misinformation by many. Which most of the world finally revert course later but still not agreed by WHO.
So who is to define what is "misinformation"?
For every single downvote I got on HN for stating Hong Kong got it right with mask in March, do I get a brownie point for every single US citizen that is wearing a mask now?
I dont have an answer, but I am leaning towards the same thinking as OP. Because everything I said right now is considered as misinformation by the Hong Kong government. Personally I think "misinformation" is a pandora box that should never be opened / used.
How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.
The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.
The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...
1) 5G causes COVID-19 2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax 3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID
I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.
Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.
Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.
But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).
As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion. It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.
Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.
But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.
WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.
CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.
Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".
The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.
Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.
Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.
Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.
Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.
All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.
From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html
But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.
> A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas.
But at least some of them were joking, right?
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory
EDIT: Typos
Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.
So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.
That causes genocides to happen though -- are you okay with that or did you not know
To disagree is to argue that human beings are nothing but programmable devices. If that's your position, fine, but we'll have to disagree.
In other words I think that's very much a red herring.
Not ok to kill people via violence, but ok to do the same by (contributing to) spreading a pandemic?
Honestly I don’t have any solutions. I don’t like either option.
Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.
What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?
What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?
It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".
For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.
As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.
Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)
This issue will pass but now they have a precedent.
> The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, ..., as amended, created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system. It provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. Even in cases in which such a finding is not made, petitioners may receive compensation through a settlement.
> The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates. The Program began accepting petitions (also called claims) in 1988.
The current anti-vaccination movement began largely over concern that thiomersal preservative in many childhood vaccines was causing autism. Although multiple epidemiological studies indicated that there was no appreciable risk, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked vaccine makers to remove thiomersal from vaccines as quickly as possible as a precautionary measure", and it was ~gone by 2001.[1]
0) https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html
Also, calling stuff "FUD" is a classic strategy to escape responsibility. For example, the tobacco industry claimed that lung cancer risk was FUD for decades. Other examples include groundwater pollution, asbestos, and lead paint.
Not to mention human overpopulation. Which is arguably the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with HIV and Ebola, and likely more to come. And of course global climate change, which may well kick serious ass in coming decades.
Maybe the solution is a law that if someone posts/airs clearly wrong facts. Or if someone's theories/facts... Get later disproven they need to post/air a correction at the same time at least as long (maybe better twice as long) and give it as much prominence. Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
I am aware that the ad agency behind the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" campaign got into the "lead paint is safe" and other pro-industry campaigns, including the climate change contrarians. And the Tea Party. Funded by folks like the Koch brothers.
> Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
That's a very slippery slope. As I've said before, you may be surprised when you become the pariah.
The law didn't get enacted just to prevent lawsuits, but also to compensate those who were injured.
> The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.
That way lies totalitarianism.
For example, there's considerable pressure in many countries to outlaw secure end-to-end encryption. To protect against terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.
So how would we feel if support for secure end-to-end encryption were censored in social media?
The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, but which serve to advance dubious claims accepted by a small but growing and very vocal group of antivaxxers that have had a clear negative impact on our society.
If you have some new evidence or analysis to add, please add it. If all you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, please don't throw gasoline on this fire.
> The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, ...
That's exactly what attorneys for polluters always say. There's this thing called the precautionary principle. So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
Edit: If you like, I can probably find defendants' briefs and expert reports from landmark cases, asserting that plaintiffs have provided insufficient evidence of causation to support their claims.
Yes, it's important to consider the risks of any medical treatment. Your comments make it seem like that hasn't been done, as if doctors and public health officials are just pretending that side effects don't exist. That's simply untrue -- rigorous clinical trials and careful reporting mean that modern vaccines are really quite safe. When you lucidly compare the incidence of side effects against the impact of contracting illnesses that vaccines prevent, there is only one reasonable position to take.
Your initial comments about thiomersal are pure FUD. You acknowledge that there's not real medical concern there, but choose to bring it up anyway? What could your motivation possibly be? If you'd like to discuss it objectively, here's how to do it: Someone with a financial interest who is no longer allowed to practice medicine falsified data in an effort to mislead the public about a supposed danger of a preservative in vaccines. Many people siezed onto that lie, despite the clear evidence that it was flawed, and continue to espouse it, causing lasting damage to society.
> So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
The damage that's real here is the damage caused by anti-vaxxers. That's actual damage that's caused harm to real people in the real world. Your comments help advance that agenda, which is why they are harmful.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/parents-beliefs-about...
Anti-vaxing is not an organized religion but I could see organized religions adopting anti-vaxing beliefs.
So you are in favor of censorship, just with different parameters.
I Think this should apply to functional social monopolys as well. YouTube/facebook/instagram etc shouldn't be allowed to remove content they deem untrue.
15 years ago the idea of an internet video monopoly didn't even exist and if it did no one would have cared.
What you are suggesting is impossible to enforce or even reason about.
I don't follow how this would be impossible to enforce. The person whose content on youtube is removed for example is going to complain. It's dead simple to slap youtube with a couple million dollar fine for such things.
This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem.
> We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong.
This is exactly what the censorship makes worse. You say "not here, go somewhere else" to anyone who disagrees and everyone who disagrees is separated, so that each camp has no exposure to the other side's arguments and whoever is wrong will remain so.
> We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
The world is complicated. Not everybody is going to understand everything. That isn't possible, but it isn't required. What you need are two things.
One is free and open debate, so that the people who choose to allocate their time to a given specific topic enough to come to an accurate conclusion on that topic are free to do so.
And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.
But you either do the research yourself (which nobody has time to do for everything) or you trust somebody else to do it for you. So now people need to figure out who they can trust to distill the informed consensus. But you don't do that by censoring the debate, you do it by being so consistently right that people begin to trust you over the lies of the blaring partisans. That doesn't come from force, it comes from hard work, which nobody seems willing to do anymore, which is why everything is messed up.
I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action
Both can be true. The large national news outlets can be faltering AND someone could find a partisan advantage by making hay out of that fact.
As an example, major news networks blatantly lied about the Covington kid because it fit their ideology.
Major news networks are untrustworthy, you just happen to support the narrative some of them are selling.
And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
Meh. Money buys speech has been a thing since day zero. If anything the internet has made this problem smaller because you don't have to buy a TV station to publish video anymore. Then the corporate propaganda isn't the only thing people see, which allows them to see it for what it is, which makes them think this is some kind of novel problem never previously encountered, when it's really a novel solution that makes the old and pervasive problem much more conspicuous through contrast.
You also have to see the irony in suggesting that corporations decide what people can see in order to protect us from corporations influencing the public debate.
> And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
That would be really convenient, but it's still as complicated as anything. There is a truth but it isn't a simple truth and that means getting it right is hard work.
Uncle Google doesn't have a magic wand of righteousness that lets them tell right from wrong over everybody else in the world.
Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it doesn't need fact checks, it doesn't need to be based on research. As long as you can get enough spread, you can get a large number of people to believe anything, simply because they heard it from someone. People are not rational actors.
Witness the demonization of pipeline protestors, people who protest the clear-cutting of forests, people who argue for trans rights. They upset the corporate-run status quo, so they are suppressed by the authorities, who act on the whims of the rich and powerful.
Witness the rise of the alt-right, the so-called "intellectual dark web" and the influence of sites like 4chan and 8chan.
Armed people barging into governmental buildings, and basically being allowed to do so almost unimpeded by police, photo ops for the media, a show of force for their allies. I've seen them ridiculed as yokels, but it didn't matter. What matters is visibility and the "look at what we can do without being stopped" factor.
Imagine what would have happened if BLM, a group of Muslims or any left-wing group had tried to do the same thing. Think Kent State and the National Guard.
The message is clear: Act against capitalism and the powers that be and you will be suppressed, by unlimited force if necessary
Sure, astroturfing and other misinformation campaigns can happen if speech is truly free, but the alternative is far worse. With free speech, if your ideas have merit then at least there is a chance they will be recognized and your audience can grow. With complete censorship, you have no chance at all. Free speech is the least bad of these two options.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. No ifs or buts about that.
In the same breath, it is very important to realize that your freedom of speech does not absolve you from responsibility for what you say. It does not obligate others to facilitate your speech, it does not entitle you to any platform you wish, and it does not obligate anyone to listen to you.
Similarly to the second amendment, which enshrines your right to own weapons (being the foundation of a well-regulated militia and so on) does not obligate anyone to provide you with weapons, nor the facilities to train with and maintain weapons, and it certainly doesn't require anyone to admit your onto their property if you are currently holding any weapons.
There is no legal obligation for YouTube to listen to us, but there is no reason we can't ask for less censorship. If they say no, then they are well within their rights, but we don't have to be happy about it either. Just because we can't legally force change doesn't mean we must abandon the cause. The most optimistic scenario would be if public sentiment changes enough such that YouTube feels they are being seen as unfair and it is damaging to their reputation/bottom line, perhaps we may see a change in their censorship policies. This is an ideal to strive for, and uses social/economic pressure as opposed to legal pressure. It is like your obligation to be a helpful neighbor or to be a caring friend. It's not by force of law, but people are expected to do it because it's "the right thing to do." In the same way, when you're the predominant video platform on the internet, the right thing to do is not to censor opinions you disagree with.
Does that apply to astroturfed reddit comments etc? I don't see why it shouldn't. Of course it's a bit harder to prove, but it's not always impossible.
If you're thinking that 'society used to be able to tell what was a lie from the truth' I'm sorry to say but that was never close to being true.
Newspapers were a pretty strong filter of information and therefore could have some kind of 'rough' credibility, biases notwithstanding obviously.
But with 'every Instagram a source of news' ... we have an existential truthiness problem that we're only beginning to learn to deal with.
Then techsupporter said something like "actually, booting them off does work".
Finally, paraphrasing your comment, "so you're saying you should let private companies decide?" No, that is clearly not what techsupporter's comment meant.
It's ok to disagree with the second half of that first comment ("booting them off doesn't work") without expressing an opinion on the first half. In fact the way the original comment ties together those two things has has led to the quagmire of crossed arguments you're seeing in these comments, so untying them is quite important.
If someone wanted to post about how much they hate a certain race, do you believe the moderators here have an obligation to allow that post to remain?
So given HN's expansive reach, why do you think it deserves to be excluded from the concept of being a provider? Why shouldn't it be forced to house all content?
The problem is you’ve just said you won’t address the primary, most compelling reason to take these actions.
Assuming that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true. We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics. We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong. We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
Your theory of how the world should work is very, almost simplistically, seductive. Woe but for the world to be like that, like the “perfectly rational actor” assumed in economic textbooks or the “perfectly smooth sphere on a frictionless plane” in physics.