Our fellow citizens elected a reality TV star as president of a country with nuclear weapons.

People are passing judgment for, I think, fully rational reasons.

The Atlantic has had several good articles on how fundamental societal trust is dissociating in America. The election of Trump isn't the only aspect of it, but it did scare about half the country into thinking the other half isn't rational in the same way they are. And the feeling is mutual.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing...

> Our fellow citizens elected a reality TV star as president of a country with nuclear weapons.

But not the majority of our fellow citizens (by popular vote).

Though you could argue that a large % of democratic voter base (voters looking for handouts) is also uneducated.

The size of the electing body is a little irrelevant. People trusted the system to disallow someone as unqualified as Trump, and it does not. Disillusion with that system runs high.

If anything, it probably runs higher than it would have if he had been elected by a majority. People feel let down not only by their fellow citizens, but by the laws that govern who is president.

What are your opinions of fake Yelp! or Amazon reviews being removed?

If a review is found to state injurious lies or false statements about a business, that'd constitute removable libel or fraud. YouTube should similarly remove review videos from people whom they have string reason to believe never used a product or service.

Well yeah, that just about sums it up for me. There’s a subtle myth in absolutist free speech circles (to which I used to belong, and which I still think envision a society worth working towards) - that people are rational. In a world of rational actors, the solution to bad speech is good speech.

Humans, on the other hand, have proven themselves largely unprepared for the modern media environment. We have consumer protection laws about what can be put in our food, and I think it’s worth exploring what that would look like for media.

Personally, I come down on a power*responsibility compromise. Individual people should have the broadest possible freedoms, but:

1. Wealthy and powerful people have an unchecked ability to amplify their voices, and we should think carefully about how to manage that. Returning to a sane world of campaign finance law would be one example.

2. Media corporations have a lot of power, and many have abdicated the corresponding responsibility. I think we should work towards editorial standards, mandatory complaint resolution and correction at least for those masquerading as news.

3. Platforms like FB and YT have shown themselves capable of algorithmically maximizing engagement, and it seems that for a subset of their users the effect is radicalization and conspiratorial nonsense (Qanon, anti-vax, climate deniers, holocaust deniers etc.) I don’t have the solution, but a bit more gatekeeping against misinformation would probably help.

I've not been an absolutist free-speech person but what you've arrived at works equally well for me.

It seems obvious to me that humans… and I am one!… are not able to handle things that well. Often we have to look at outcomes to populations to really get a sense of what's going on, as we view things in this blindered way and are deeply persuadable in known, exploitable ways. And that becomes a meta-game: become immune to a particular crude argument, fall to a more multilayered argument, and so on.

A key factor here is this (in my opinion): conspiratorial nonsense is not nonsense. Even if it seems bonkers and useless, there's something about it that is serving a purpose, but it's very likely not the purpose that it 'says on the tin'. For instance, there is a great deal of 'nonsense' that exists for the purpose of goading humans on to acts of random terrorism, and for grooming humans to be an extension of an army from somewhere else. Building an army to destroy a country is a VERY high-value activity, but it's not done by showing up and going, HI! I represent the army of Kazakhstan! Please acquire a weapon and shoot your countrymen for me for the glory of country that is not you!

So it's done, by quite a few state and non-state actors, in different ways. And when you've got a global pandemic and the ability to propagandize your country's enemy and get 'em to normalize licking each others' nostrils… well, you do what you can.

Hence 'conspiratorial nonsense' toward nonsensical or nonexistent ends, that happens to fulfill a purpose other than what's argued by the conspiratorial nonsense. The key concept here is that it's possible to misinform on purpose towards a defined goal that's orthogonal to the apparent misinformation.

One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of this, as Facebook and Google have learned, is that if you're doing that and you have access to big data to inspect how your misinformation is affecting POPULATIONS where you can't directly get response data back from the targets, you can use the big data to ask questions like

"Which of these two arguments for hunting lizard aliens that are also pedophiles, most inclines the target towards murdering black people? Which accusation towards this political figure most inclines the target towards inciting civil war and overthrowing the government of the target's host country?"

And that's how it's done. Given sophisticated enough ability to interpret data, you can direct 'nonsense' VERY effectively towards explicit other goals which aren't hard to work out if you're not the target. You need the data, though, otherwise you're fumbling in the dark. Google and Facebook are complicit in this to the extent that they go, 'you gots the money, we gots the honey' and place themselves at the disposal of anybody wishing these services.