I fall pretty strongly on the side of combatting misinformation, but I disagree with outright removal of content. I think it should be flagged as misinformation, but left available. Put another way, I'm a fan of labelling, not censoring.

I want transparency. "Our misinformation bot rated this as a 90% chance of being misinformation because XYZ." I bet the only reason we can't have that is because the ML bots suck so much the tech industry is scared to implement any system that might be open to scrutiny or analysis. It's a bit ironic.

Very much like spam: filters are good but not 100% good, so there must be a way to look at what the filter has rejected, and allow the reader to judge.

I've had to deal with Microsoft outright dropping everything from a domain (not on this server), so I do know it happens, I'm just not convinced it's necessary.

> I'm just not convinced it's necessary.

Well yes in some special cases dropping mails is not necessary. My mistake to assume your case is one of the common cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam#Statistics_and_esti...

Google has some very advanced natural language processing technology. Try this Google search: "What year did Neil Armstrong land on Mars?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28003635 ("Ask HN: Googler/YTer Able to Help with CIDRAP's Dr Osterholm's YT Strike?")

"Portfolio company" has nothing to do with how we moderate HN, except that we moderate less in such cases. Explained many times over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

[0] In this case, both community and moderators.

Imagine the US five years from now, with Team Trump in charge of the censoring.

The clock is ticking on open source, decentralized solutions. Nothing else is relevant.

I also remember experts expecting effective vaccines by the end of 2020 already in January or February 2020. The key scientific challenge in vaccines was never about developing them but about collecting sufficient evidence that the vaccines are effective enough and safe enough in diverse populations. And beyond that, getting the vaccines approved and distributed to billions of people before the pandemic is over were even bigger challenges.

One thing contrarians often miss is that science is fundamentally about building and changing the consensus. It's not about convincing yourself that you have discovered something new, but about trying to convince yourself that you are wrong. And failing to do that, trying to convince the relevant audience that you have in fact discovered something new. Believing in something is a matter of faith. Convincing a skeptical audience that is nonetheless open to new ideas is science.

Or, in other words, those platforms have banned science. It doesn't matter what exactly their dogma is, science can not happen there.

This may not be a problem, we don't need every single platform to support science. But it's not aligned with those platforms PR.

Here's a version with a lot fewer deleted comments. If anyone wants to see what 1984s memory hole looks like this is it. You know what you remember but are told you're insane for remembering.

Thank god for the internet archive, and other archival sites, the retroactive modification of articles on the 'papers of record' have been particularly egregious in the last 6 years.

No, because that never happened. Maybe don’t spread misinformation yourself if you want to make a point.

> "The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you."

> He added: "I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location."

> Fauci has previously been criticized for changing his position on masks. Early on in the pandemic, he advised against wearing face coverings, but that advice evolved over time.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fauci-said-masks-not-reall...

To the second point, if I am recalling correctly this was in part due to the fact that we were undergoing as massive supply shortage. I distinctly remember my roommates (healthcare workers) being told to keep their N-95s in a brown paper bag and to reuse it.

To the third point, everyone is a critic and everyone is bound to make mistakes in a rapidly evolving situation. Given the fact that front-line folks had to re-use (Read: already contaminated and unsafe for use) masks given the supply issues, I'm not so sure he was wrong in advising the general public to hold off.

I think the keyword that, in my mind, justifies the censorship here is "on most major tech platforms". Nobody is banning the discussion of these ideas in academic journals or HN or other places where curious people can go to discuss things - it's just making sure unverified, potentially dangerous theories aren't spreading like wildfire amongst the general population who _aren't_ curious and will assume whatever they're reading is absolute truth.

The general population is not equipped with enough information or enough time to meaningfully distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit. Just yesterday, there was a post about a new long article/paper/publication by Stephen Wolfram, and the comments there made it clear that even among the academic community relevant to what he writes about, there's widespread disagreement about whether he's an egotistical empty vessel or the second coming of Einstein and Newton's lovechild (with a possible bias towards the former).

I'm all for elevating the agency and capabilities of "the general population", but pretending that a random discoverer of a video on self-use of CRISPR is going to be able to sensibly identify what may be of value and what may be dangerous is just incredibly naive.

And note: the problems do not arise with the general member of the public who decides to do their own deep dive after coming across an idea. If that was the universal response to encountering unfamiliar or controversial ideas, we might be in good shape. The problem is that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do this, and so stuff just ends up floating around in their impressions of the world, unresolved, but perhaps casting doubt on stuff that is almost certainly true (or false).

How certain are you that you're not part of that particular subset of the 'general population'?

[EDIT: because of the work I've done, there are a handful of areas where I think my BS detection abilities would exceed those of an average person. But that's likely true for the average person too. Overall though, we're all a lot less able to detect BS than we think. ]

Do any of these facts support your point?

Mixing news into social media, sharing stories to Facebook, turned it from a coffee shop into a town square with a million soap boxes.

Bad actors then seized that format and used it to spread propaganda and disinformation.

That's not to say that the basic forms of social media were perfect, far from it. They're just as susceptible to manipulation. There's just something about Facebook's link to (mostly) real identities that elevates it to a hugely effective propaganda platform.

That only happened after Facebook decided to editorialize everybody's main view. People were not even used to sharing news at that point, but it was the only thing that Facebook allowed to spread.

Anyway, I'm not sure about causality. But claiming that fake news spreading through a heavily editorialized medium is proof that people can not handle self selecting their information is a complete non-sequitur.

That's a great point, I hadn't considered that. Thank you!

I'm saying that bombarding the general population with low-quality, dangerous information from sources that appear authoritative (what the tech giants are suppressing) is a bad idea. People take the information seriously and use it to cause harm to themselves and others.

There are a certain group of people that like to fuck around with conceptual arguments for the fun of it, but the public square is not the place for that kind of play.

>But theories aren't dangerous. Actions are dangerous.

Ideologies absolutely are dangerous. They've started wars, genocides, and cults. When does a theory stop being a theory and become an ideology?

I was banned on HN after questioning of QM and BB theories. 240 downvotes in one day, then ban.

The irony is that many of the people who claim to be free-speech see nothing wrong with this platform blacklisting people who don't share in the groupthink.

However, good discussion ultimately requires respect for one another, and it seems maybe that thinking is not bilateral in your case. I’d encourage you to introspect on why you may be finding resistance wherever you look.

What was read: "I've seen mods censoring stuff because of good discussion".

Sometimes you just want to give up.