Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

> we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide.

Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

But no, of course, you're right, taking any action at all is akin to fascism. Totally.

It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom.

My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over nazi germany. My other grandfather served in Europe after that whole debacle. I feel I have as much right as anyone to say that it's bullshit going on Reddit and running into the same hateful misinformation on every thread, of "arguing" with holocaust deniers on conspiracy that think Sly Stallone kisses dolphins, use the same canards they've been suing for 2k years, and I can promise you were the first to notice my crypto-Jewishness. These same dummies love Q and have never found covid information that fit their narrative that they didn't love.

We really gonna relitigate (and lose) historical issues like the Holocaust for the next 10,000 years? We gonna sit by and whine about "principles" as people are murdered on a daily basis because of misinformation like that? That's not good enough.

What marketplace of ideas? How many serious challenges have there been to big tech by any company in the last decade? What freedom is there if you can't walk out your front door without being directly impacted by disinformation of various kinds on a daily basis?

I feel as though this may more reflect your fears than the state of the site, and I feel as though so reflexively writing off a population that already largely agree with you illumines the opposite argument--that reaction to speech is largely an overreaction, and we will, without careful consideration, largely consider any bloc to be constituted of what we fear.

I didn't call it a stronghold. There are certain subreddits that were aligned. The donald before it moved, conspiracy, conservative, etc. You ever see the greatawakening subreddit where they were acting like Trump was giving secret messages in speeches and calling for executions?

If that exists on a site with leftism as a major demographic, what does it look like elsewhere? You're making my point for me.

BTW, one of the longest-running mods of conspiracy that finally got banned has admitted that they are a Russian national. Not that this means anything, but it's interesting that a subreddit could be dominated by an individual with such strong beliefs about politics in another country.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/r-conspiracy-axolotl-peyotl-b...

To give context, I'm very much what some people would mock as an "enlightened centrist" (I felt so sad when I realized this is bad?). I think much of the "hateful mistinformation" is actually more aligned torwards the left. I can't read a thread about pitbulls or my home state without people frothing at the mouth and acting like my dog should be put down today or that my state is an ISIS stronghold.

But consitutionally? If someone is being an asshole on your property, it's your right to kick them off.

Any platform harboring content will, as a matter of course, simply through the caprice of a moderator, let slip by insane opinions--but opining that these are some growing tide and, more dangerously, representative of their moderate counterparts (a la the r/Conservative subreddit, which seems constituted of largely by-the-numbers right of centers,) seems disrespectful to all parties involved and serves only to distract from your central assertion that communicating these ideas will in some way seed wanton chaos. (Comparing the ideas directly to those that precipitated the tragedy of the Holocaust.)

Edit, as I'd written my reply to a previous version of your own: I am sympathetic to the idea that seeing these more fringe ideals is unfortunate--but the argument which I believe bears greater importance is that acting in this manner against them, striking them from the whole of our public discourse and pre-empting any who could, in some way, divine inspiration from the muck is far more deleterious to discourse. It serves all too easily as a means to silence disquiet and cast a veneer of unanimity.

However, if allowing certain discussions means also allowing other discussions, I'm not broken up if sites like reddit were to ban a subreddit like conspiracy or at least try to reshape it to something much more objective.

If the owners a property decide certain views are abhorrent, that's their right, I can't think of a valid moral or legal complaint against that - it is their property. If we lack competition that is an issue of market competitiveness more than propaganda.

So we can't really treat these two as completely separate right now. Indeed, if those schemes are allowed to go forward, the next thing you'll hear is that we can't break Facebook etc up, because doing so will limit how effectively some information can be suppressed. The more power is concentrated, the more it seeks to sustain that state of affairs, and the better it is at that - so why would we hand those companies so much power when they already are a major problem?

Thanks a ton for providing the opportunity for some discussion on this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jersey_City_shooting

Every day? No. But when it's 2021 and you gotta worry about getting gunned down for being a Jew?

Putin loves to use anti-Semitic rhetoric when convenient. Which is the big part of this...the stand pat and do nothing approach doesn't work when the resources of nation states can (logically) and have been behind harnessing disinformation.

The Jewish issue isn't the only issue, better examples might be the Christchurch shooting where the gunman was livestreaming on and because of 4chan.

If you get a chance check out HBO's doc about Jim Watkins and Q.

And they did - to the point where a bunch of websites with forums were blocked outright because of their hands-off policy wrt comments (usually in some particular subforum; it's a fairly common way to keep it civil elsewhere) meant that there were a bunch of posts with links to the document.

The end result is that a bunch of completely unrelated stuff was blocked in Australia outright for a while, by private companies in charge of communications acting in unison - effectively, a censorship cartel - with no political or judicial recourse, since the government was not involved in it, and the ISPs were in their right, legally speaking.

That's another part of this...you can't just say whatever you want and expect there not to be consequences.

The option that is actually better than all the proposals on the table is what we have right now. I'm not claiming it's perfect, or even good - merely better.

Aye. This would improve so many things. Critical thinking is, in fact, not an instinctual ability. It's perfectly okay to talk mathematics illiteracy, but propaganda literacy? "No, no, we can't imply that people aren't capable of thinking for themselves." We have multiple historical instances of extremely successful disinformation campaigns, and people fell for it en-masse.

These "let people decide" trolls are effectively correlating critical thinking skills with intelligence, and it's patently absurd. Philosophers, some of the greatest thinkers there are/were, have spent years of their lives pondering the art of critical thinking.

Mandating data interoperability between platforms seems like a good middle ground that allows diversity of moderation while reducing the monopoloatic power of large platforms.

I would say you did:

> And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

You asked the right question (who are you to determine the truth?) but then you didn't answer it. You continued on to imply that, in fact, you are in a position to sort out what's true unlike those other, inferior people who fall for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

> Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

"Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship. As far as I'm concerned, all of these "problems" are not problems, they're justifications for controlling other people and expressions of impotent rage at the failure to control those people. I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated or voted for the other guy. Part of freedom is the freedom to be wrong.

I think these are not new problems. Democracy, pluralism, free speech, trial by jury, etc are our solutions to these problems. They aren't particularly satisfying solutions because, as you said in your first post, the truth doesn't always win. Rather they're tragic compromises. But I don't see any serious suggestions about how we should improve them.

You missed that I was drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the market place of ideas - in which rational discourse and honest debate enables people to learn, compare, agree and disagree, find greater truths, learn, etc etc - and the spread of misinformation based on falsehood, often perpetuated for profit.

We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate. We can debate until the cows come home about what it means, whether any opinions should be drawn or any action taken, but motivated lies are just not on the same footing as factual information.

> "Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship.

You assume bad faith here, again. I think there’s a lot can be done by way of giving access to scientific information in accessible ways.

> I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated

Well firstly Because that decision affects more than just those individuals, and puts others (including the already vaccinated and those who cannot be vaccinated) at risk. And secondly because some of those making the decision not to vaccinate, and putting themselves at risk, have done so armed with bad information.

The nature of the problems may not be new, but the scale and severity seem to be.

Who decides what that is? Plenty of actual scientists publish papers in actual science journals that conflict with each other and with official public health advice. The whole vaccines cause autism idea came from what looked like actual vaccine science.

Knowledge isn't actually that sure. Sometimes the authorities are wrong. Remember when bread was at the bottom of the food pyramid?

> but the scale and severity seem to be.

Seem to be or actually are? Are you using "facts" or media sensationalization to form your opinion?

We truly are swimming in a world in which nothing is true. Or you are anyway.

The bizarre thing with this hoax, is that it looks like the mRNA vaccine increases swimmer motility.[1] Vaccinated folks should have no issues having babies if, for example, they need to improve their 5G reception at home.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781360

Anyway, if you think it's so easy to do a good job censoring information, why don't you point to a single example where that worked out? Just one is sufficient. It's okay, I'll wait.

The OP never claimed to have an appropriate solution so I don't know what you are talking about regarding them thinking censorship is easy.

Just because it's wrong, doesn't mean nobody should believe it or be exposed to it.

But I agree with the point you are trying to make, that many people have false beliefs crucial to a societal institutions that cannot realistically be suppressed by heavy-handed censorship without also destroying meaning and satisfaction for many people, and also the society itself. And of course, holy texts often contradict themselves, yet some consider all of it true.

However, you are arguing against a strawman, since OP never claimed to have a solution, nor even that censorship was the appropriate response, not do I claim that either.

OP strongly implied that it's easy to distinguish which claims should be censored and which claims should not be censored. This is complete fantasy.

Disagree. This is what OP said, among other things: "We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate."

> Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

> make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

Gullible people exist. I mean, it's such a well-known phenomenon that the term "gullible" exists to describe people who fall for what should be obviously false information and lies. We all have our instances of gullibility, and we all have domains that we know nothing about, and there are countless people who prey on people with lack of knowledge in some area.

If people go around in real life deceiving people, someone might step in and tell them to watch out for the scam. There'll be signs in tourist areas where scammers frequent. Banks will send out notices on how to help their customers avoid financial traps. Schools teach kids to look out for bad information and misleading conclusions. Signs are posted in parks warning people not to venture out to certain areas because they're likely unprepared and could die (and people still die anyways).

This is all generally accepted as good.

But flag a post on some social networking site with a "This might be fake. Be careful", and people go wild saying the elite are trying to police us and they're destroying our freedoms.

This is a false dichotomy and a rather romantic notion. Independent adults rarely, if ever, make their minds from first principles. They do already cluster around people who think/convince others that they know better. So few of what we’re talking here is original thought, we are mostly riffing on what we’ve read elsewhere. And that’s OK. That how distributed cognition saves us a lot of time, when working correctly.

But distributed cognition of independent adults get to super irrational conclusions too, I don’t need to list past atrocities based on ridiculous ideas.

So while the failures and wins of distributed cognition is yet to be understood properly, it alone is not the culprit nor can be corrected via the virtues of atomized individualized cognition.

One thing is clear, ideas distributed over ad fueled companies’ screen estates conform to a particular topology and a particular objective function. The normativity of engagement is not that of reality. And the irrationality of those systems effect us even from afar, permeates into our culture and even into non-ad based forums like this.

I find this idea abhorrent as well, but I’m curious if you find it abhorrent because you think the claim is false and/or unsubstantiated, or if you find it abhorrent because even if it’s true it ought to be rejected due to some moral principle.

But even if it was shown to be beneficial, I would still be against it on moral grounds I suppose (but I'm not sure since that might depend on how "beneficial" it is).

Maybe a weird answer, I'm not a philosopher, I just don't think there is a scale of rights that people have, or in the idea of an elite that has special decision making power because it is enlightened.

This is the basic hierarchical nature of any complex society. In a well functioning society those people, called elites (today already considered a derogatory term), are being funneled to the top where they're put into positions of power.

I don't really know why that's in itself supposed to be abhorrent, because it's how any functional organisation is structured. The problems start when institutions break down and the quality of your elites is reduced, but the solution is not some sort of choose your own adventure story where you let the inmates run the asylum. There's no organisation on earth that survives like that.

The entire notion that the vast majority of adults 'make their own choices' is a complete fiction to begin with. Choices exist downstream from culture and culture itself is produced by elites and consumed by 'adults', and so the choice you have to ponder is which people you want to be in charge of producing your culture. Might be Harvard, Zuckerberg, Tucker, or the Pope, but the people have nothing to do with it.

So the idea that some people are better at some things than other people is indeed true, but the idea that we can reliably measure that without the metric being gamed and corrupted is false.

You have it backwards. People who produce or shape culture become elites, it's not that people who are already elites are the only ones producing culture (or rather, influencing it). That has very different implications from what you're describing.

In fact, elites who intentionally try to shape culture often get laughed at (cue the "Imagine" video).

In such an environment, the better ideas often do rise up to the top. Twitter and Facebook are not such environments.

"We" shield ourselves from bad ideas because this forum would be overrun if we didn't.

One of the problems is that we don't all get the same information.

> or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Issac Asimov

It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations.

It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And their creation (the Internet) led to historic amounts of wealth creation in a stupendously short amount of time.

I also wonder where Britain would be without the numerous professors at elite colleges whose research in physics, mathematics, and chemistry made the Industrial Revolution possible.

There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

This is not a knock on academic elites in general. I want them sitting around and building the Internet! But I want a farmer actually running the country.

The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldiering. What things were like 200+ years ago has no bearing on how they should be today.

> Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building? Marx wasn't even in charge of any of those countries. Other people (such as Lenin, a lawyer, and Trotsky, born to a farmer) read his work, went "this shit sounds dope", and tragedy ensued.

I can point you to any number of countries run by "farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers" that weren't as successful as the US. As I already mentioned, Lenin was a lawyer. So was Fidel Castro. I hope I don't need to go through a list various military dictators.

> But I want a farmer actually running the country.

I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country. You can find people like that in every field. I couldn't care less what their background is.

The US succeeded (in part) because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity. George Washington stepped down voluntarily from the presidency after two terms. It seems normal to us but it was unthinkable back then. Everyone just assumed he'd stay in charge until he died.

No, that’s just the most egregious example. Circling back to my original point: I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes countries rich and how do you turn poor countries into rich ones. Academicians spend tons of time studying psychology, culture, politics can etc. But I can’t think of any of those theories that has ever been implemented in the real world to help a poor society develop into a rich one. When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.

> I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country.

No. Ideas don’t make countries successful. Integrity, yes, but academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard. And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.

> I couldn't care less what their background is. The US succeeded because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity.

The US succeeded because they were English by culture and departed little from the Anglo system of government and society, which was not created but evolved organically over centuries.

Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.” It ended in disaster and bloodshed.

He (and most national leaders, elected or otherwise) works at too high a level to talk about academic theories in general conversation. You don't think he and the people working in his government studied economics, history, and politics? They just made Singapore prosperous by getting everyone to work harder and study more?

> academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard

Neither do "farmers".

> And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.

That's just broad stereotyping. We can do that for any of the professions you think should be in charge. "Military officers are rigid, hawkish, and overly inclined to action". "Businessmen are short-sighted and focus on the bottom line above all" and so on.

> Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.”

Not really.

There is a difference between people with judgment governing with the advice of academics, and putting academic theories directly into action. A good example during pandemic were governors who listened to doctors but applied their own judgment after listening to other stakeholders, and those who outsourced decision making to credentialed experts.

We went from "academics can't build nations" to "academics can't lead nations". Then to "America became great because farmers, lawyers, and soldiers were in charge" (while ignoring failed nations that also had farmers, lawyers, and soldiers in charge). Finally landing upon Lee Kuan Yew and national character building (no idea how that's related).

There were no actual examples of an academic taking charge of a country and that country failing due to them being an academic (vs just being corrupt, despotic, insane, or plain incompetent). On the other hand, I provided lots of examples that showed academics have made modern society and the economy possible.

I'd argue that most academics don't have any interest in politics or leadership, which causes them to be relatively underrepresented in the arena. Regardless, I'm not biased against people due to their profession, as you appear to be.

You mean all by themselves? Well neither have plumbers, but I'm not about to disparage them over it, either.

This would set up a likely conflict, such as what we got a hint of when the masses elected Trump as a big middle finger.

Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. It got us an egomaniacal dotard, drunk on power, who shifted his politics when the opportunism suited him. His TV show got him just enough notoriety to move the needle among the masses. When he found that his toxic personality, based on name-calling and blustery bufoonery found a reception from Right-wing voters, there was nothing that could stop him from winning their side. But this was a man who could work with no one who wasn't willing to serve him without question, be they judges or legislators, and certainly a deal-breaker for our allies.

His world-view was an American centric one entirely, at a time when China had earned and demanded a role he couldn't conceive of or negotiate. Behind the scenes, he ruled a chaotic White House that was fortunately tested little. Still, the stories that escaped from this White House show that he was not to be contained by any legal constraints, and that he fostered an atmosphere where staff worked at cross-purposes to one another. Their singular focus was on the media, yet they couldn't even manage this successfully, despite the allegiance and sycophancy from Fox.

Finally, COVID-19 was the test they would not pass. Although Trump was due to receive some sympathy from his two impeachments, once America saw the reckless way he managed this pandemic and the huge toll it bore on us, there was little chance he could win the 2020 election. What we saw after the election was an unheard of nothing-to-lose strategy of trying to steal the election by any falsehood necessary, whether within the courts or in the streets. The books are coming out on the market now, but they show that our wildest dreams of what could have been happening in that White House paled when compared to horrid reality of what did.

We likely have to thank a mere few individuals such as Gen. Mark Milley, Mike Pence and such for holding together our country in the moments when it was the most vulnerable to those whose only concern was for power.

Your??

Second, what does it say about the desirability of what’s being sold by the technocratic elite that half the country voted for a second term for the egomaniacal dotard (for he surely was that), and most of the other half of the country got behind Joe Biden, a man from a working class background, a graduate of a second tier university known for his popular appeal rather than his intelligence?

You point to Trump, but I’d note that not even Democrats like the academic social engineers. On Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren (a Harvard professor) had an embarrassing performance. Even in NYC, home of the country’s technocratic elite, voters passed over the technocrat in favor of someone who promised to carry a gun to church as mayor.

Regardless, nobody is advocating having clergy run the country. (And no, listening to clergy as stakeholders in society and responding to voters’ whose beliefs might be rooted in religion is not the same thing as what the left seeks to do with academics. Putting a clerical “czar” in place to “nudge” people to desirable behaviors would be wild even for the Bush administration.)

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

Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing is strong controls on the power they wield, to that "short sighted masses" cannot take over. This idea underpins liberal democracy.

In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.

My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.

I agree that we need norms that limit any concentration of power. We've had anti-monopoly laws on the books for 130 years that serve a valid purpose. We may need to look at more laws to deal with recent constructs, I.e. platforms. I can see a superficial contradiction between not wanting government power, and giving government the power to break up monopolies or platforms. But if the overall goal is a restriction on how power can be concentrated, it's still in keeping with the idea of limiting what "those in power" can do.

I'm sure I've missed something. I definitely take your point.

(I mean those first two sentences non-ironically.)

An elite in practice means that we're stuck with irrational beliefs such as Lysenkoism. Democracy allows beliefs to compete and often correct ideas win. It's far from perfect but still has a better track record than self-styled rational elites.

The following quote is from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

> But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

I couldn't agree more. While no-one can deny that we are all born with different capacities (intellectual or otherwise), the argument that some people are essentially incapable of taking care of their own lives is a very slippery slope and a cynical one at that, viewing humans as incapable of learning or improving. I find it truly repulsive.

A central premise of Doctorow's argument is the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. Proceeding from that framing, he proposes that the ACCESS Act as an important middle ground that could, among other things, help stave off the death of Section 230. OP points out that our better angels don't always win in that marketplace.

Let's get less abstract. The article envisions a market-based approach toward online censorship. The idea that a "marketplace of filters" would create a "live and let live" scenario seems extraordinarily naive to me. It seems much more likely that making it easier to choose filter bubbles -- and introducing a profit motive into the construction of such filters -- would just escalate the appetite to censor, on both sides.

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us

You seem to be confusing critique with a proposal of some alternative. Just because OP believes that the "marketplace of ideas" thesis is a farce and that the ACCESS Act is probably a non-solution to the wrong problem, doesn't mean OP wants to censor people.

It's possible to both believe that Doctorow's argument is wrong and also not be a full-throated supporter of aggressive censorship.

In fact...

> The most abhorrent idea...

You take rather flagrant liberties when interpreting parent's post, constructing an unrecognizable strawman out of a post that contains phrases like "Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not." and "And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody".

> The strawman of...

Those in glass houses...

What you just described is called a representative democracy and was essentially created because a direct democracy didn't work, for exactly those reasons you mention (many people can't actually think for themselves - at the political level).

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice

You're completely ignoring the crux here - it's about both access to information and algorithms that present signals vs noise. Pretending that my 95 year old grandma can reliably decide that a fox news segment isn't sensationalized drivel after being primed for 30+ years that its "news" and not entertainment, is just as silly as you thinking this whole suggestion is ridiculous.

The amount of bad information, random conjuncture and conspiratorial thinking is pretty shocking.

This is ridiculous.