I find the notion of allowing an organization with zero reputation to censor a peer reviewed medical journal that has been continuously published since 1840 to be particularly ridiculous.
That may be a charitable assessment.
> censor a peer reviewed medical journal
Is Facebook's content moderation actually censorship? Certainly the BMJ is still free to publish whatever it wants, as it always has.
What obligation (legal or otherwise) does Facebook have to permit content it doesn't approve of (for whatever reason) to be published on its platform?
Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see. The downside is that takes work; many people seem content to be spoon fed as to what to believe/not believe or can't be bothered to get informed on their own so I get why some people seem to think the solution is "better" fact checkers - when that will NEVER be a solution since everyone has biases. Especially the people screeching the loudest that they don't - ha! They are the worst of all. If they can't even be honest with themselves why should I expect them to be honest with me?
The most valuable service these "fact checkers" provide is plausible deniability for their pet censorship decisions. If you think these fact checkers have your interests at heart - I have a really nice bridge in the desert I'll let go for cheap too!
Sunlight requires you to see the stuff you think is inaccurate, and for you to put work into criticising that content. Not only that, but you have to do it unpaid, and it feeds Facebook's bottom line.
> "But I have yet to see a better alternative."
> Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see.
Except that is literally the kind of thing the GP described as "clearly worse and not working." I think the error you're making is applying individualist thinking to social problems, which has led you to come up with a "solution" that's actually fuel for the problem (e.g. someone getting exposed to QAnon, making their own decision to believe, then filtering out the content that contradicts the lie).
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," is a slogan. It's pretty clear it's not a very good general purpose solution, at least.
That's very reductive. There are many laws limiting how companies can behave, especially once they exceed a certain size, because a laissez-faire approach has been shown to be harmful to society. Workplace safety, food safety, building codes, anti-trust, etc.
Such laws do not yet exist for social media activities, but that's not an argument that they shouldn't, or that these companies shouldn't try to behave better even absent such laws compelling them.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't fact check, or censor according to their whims. I am saying that you can't dismiss it as "they're a private company they can do what they want".
It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth.
At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.