Thank goodness Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Pichai and the Democrat party are here to save us from brainwashing and partisanship

Would you have considered book publishers as "gate keepers" of information before the internet? What has changed?

I'd like to think the current situation is (at least partially) a byproduct of people creating their own echo chambers then never leaving them - before the internet, national communication was very limited since it required a lot of resources, so your local newspaper and library would need to cover news and topics without partisanship in order to sell to everyone in town. Now, you can specifically look for sources (even outside of actual news companies) and other people that have your same political views and limit communication to them, only looking at other circles and opposing viewpoints in order to criticize them out of context.

That makes sense and you make some really good points.

I have one idea (usually these ideas are fragile and blow up in my own mind, but bear with me).

What if anyone that posts something on social media requires x ratio of likes/dislikes (before spreading) from anonymous users from a truly random selection of people. What would the information landscape look like?

What if we self-censor through some small but liberal consensus - the ratio threshold is up for debate.

Book publishers are.... publishers. Youtube is not a publisher, at least they claim they aren't. Rules apply differently to publishers.

They are in an abstract sense, publishers. Whether they're legally or not, doesn't take away from the fact that they take information from an individual and broadcast it (print it on computer monitors) for public to consume. Just that the editorialization piece is missing.

Yeah, good thing the noble gentlemen in charge of our social media are committed and powerful enough to save us from that dark future. That makes me feel so much safer.

I hear you. What do you suggest otherwise? The society will crumble with volume of misinformation and lies cranked to 11. Truth would drown, by a long shot because even if data is presented, people are brainwashed to ignore it because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Can you talk about the alternative? I hear you but I feel like there is no choice. We're in a shitty situation and it is natural to feel fear and have a knee-jerk reaction at any solution (not just the one Google proposed).

I'm not convinced the misinformation thing is as big of a factor as many people believe. I think it's just a symptom of the real problem: echo chambers.

Every contentious issue in US politics gets divided into two major camps, each championed by one of the major political parties. Those parties use their resources to plant the seeds of powerful echo chambers, which eventually become self-perpetuating thanks to our natural tendencies for group preferences and confirmation bias. The misinformation crisis is just a result of an echo chamber throwing crap at the wall to avoid questioning itself.

The problem of echo chambers is a hard one to solve, especially when it comes to politics. However, I think an improved voting system would actually do a lot to help in the long term. By introducing a transferable vote, citizens could vote for third-party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Over time, that should hopefully empower more moderate political groups and make the middle ground between echo chambers more accessible.

A more accessible middle ground should result in fewer echo chambers. Fewer echo chambers should result in less incentive to create and circulate misinformation. At least, that's my two cents.

Agreed about echo chambers, I posted a similar comment along what you're saying here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25364097

Curious of your thoughts there.

I think you make an excellent point. When it comes to echo chambers, social media platforms like YouTube exacerbate the problem with algorithms designed to keep users "engaged" by feeding them whatever the platform thinks they'll watch ads on next.

Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.

Any time I watch a video from CNN, Fox, or NBC, YouTube suggests political crap for weeks afterwards. I bet political content is one of their most "engaging" subjects, so I doubt Google would ever do the responsible thing and put a stop to that.

Modifying the algorithm to show "both sides" instead might help, but I don't think that would do much to encourage a middle ground. I'm worried both sides would just get more and more extreme.

> Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.

Yeah, that ain't happening. We need some FCC laws around targeted content to audience (spawning echo chambers) to optimize engagement.