I think I've gotten a lot from spending time online... often in situations where there was a moderation system in place.

I would suggest that most of the time, the likely answer is "little to no different". In light of that, how many hours of one's life should be devoted to it? Almost none, probably. If improving the world is the goal, arguing on forums or Twitter is surely a terrible use of time and energy for most people (those with a massive audience, lots of money, fame, or any combination of those things, may be exceptions).

It's similar to keeping up with day-to-day national news. How often is there something actually important and actionable that one learns only by closely following non-local news, that wouldn't have made its way through the grapevine (or down to local news) fast enough anyway? Barring people who need to trade on that information or otherwise need to be very plugged-in for their job, or what have you. Yet some people try to paint following such news closely as necessary for being a good citizen. Is it, though? If I look at it honestly, the difference between checking in on what's happening nationally (or internationally) every day, and checking in once a quarter, is practically indistinguishable, in terms of what I do and what I can realistically affect. Even once a quarter is probably more frequent than necessary to achieve approximately the maximum actual real-world benefit it is likely to provide to me.

Yet people follow pundits on Twitter or read news sites daily or watch 24/7 cable news and seem to genuinely think they're a better citizen for it, rather than that they're engaging in a low-value hobby like watching daytime soap operas or following e-sports as a spectator (which are fine diversions and people should absolutely do those things if they enjoy them, but practically no-one's under the illusion that those are laudible or improving activities)

A rough list of voting one can do, in order of likelihood of it affecting anything in the real world, most-to-least:

1. Voting in local party elections/primaries/et c.

2. Voting in local elections.

3. Voting in state-level party primaries.

4. Voting in state-level elections.

5. Voting in national-level primaries (that is, conducted at the state level but for national offices)

6. Voting in national elections.

7. (Largely as an effect of how US Presidential elections work) Voting for president, specifically.

Note that this is damn near perfectly the inverse of participation rates in and media attention given to these activities, and that people will shit all over you for failing to do #7 while they themselves mostly ignore the lower numbers. Meanwhile an hour a year working with/for your preferred local party may very well be more effective than all of that voting. But "you didn't vote for President, so you don't get to complain and are a bad citizen". Horse-shit.

I don't think that makes any sense.

Moderation on say twitter /= free speech violations

I'm assuming your comments are just random from here on out. Sorry if they're not but I"m really not following what you're saying.

... But it's difficult to get a person to care about a subject that they believe themselves to be capable of buying their way out of/ignoring the consequences of. Nothing matters to a nihilist, and they will smugly point out that we're all wasting our breath over nothing.

Our healthcare system, for the population as a whole, was awful before COVID. Hospitals that weren't at peak operating (read financial) capacity were shut down all over the country, which forced their patients to go to already overcrowded hospitals. The costs are/were off the charts. I don't think misinformation was the cause of it.

We've been dealing with this for over two years now, yet our healthcare system hasn't increased even temporary capacity in a meaningful way to account for it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/06/texas-butter...

These seem to have real results.

It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few areas:

> Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”.

What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.

>In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.

This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl clutching before?

In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving into this old news story. I guess my point is that there is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a good justification for policing misinformation as strongly as some people want.

That part of the story is comparatively easy to check - the audio is available if you follow the link in the article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes. The quote is “I’m sorry you’re ok with children being raped.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/pblodlr/status/148758898845411328...

That’s not a rhetorical trick. It’s an attempt to smear a person or organization by slinging dirt that has no grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless lines of reasoning is part of the problem.

Honestly your first line kinda describes your theory here...

I don't have much reason to think that story is fake, but if a few sentences are enough for you to just write it off I'm not sure it matters what I say. There are other stories on that issue.

One of the reasons why I say this is because there absolutely was a coordinated effort to stymie the construction of the border wall and one of the proposed tactics was to use the EPA and threatened species as a foil to prevent it's construction. Cards Against Humanity employed a similar strategy: "It was revealed that the creators had purchased vacant land along the wall and "retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built." So in that sense, this isn't some unique stochastic attack on the noble butterfly center. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_Against_Humanity)

But going back to my sense that something isn't quite right, the laundry list of associations is what stood out: Bringing up QAnon, bringing up Pizzagate, bringing up Steve Bannon, and bringing up anti-maskers. If I was a propagandist, I would end up writing a story just like this. Especially because you can report that wonderful institutions like National Butterfly Center and The Children’s Museum of Denver are victims of all of the above groups. Again, not to dismiss the story entirely, but it seems to hit all the right notes.

I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual consequences of misinformation.

>Bringing up QAnon....

That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted.

How so? I am skeptical, but what actual negative consequences have resulted from this?

>"That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted."

Do you likewise feel the urge discount any story that brings up Antifa? I do. It is because in the minds of most partisans they loom larger than their real life impact. While QAnons and Antifa are completely different, they are utilized as boogeymen by ideologically motivated reporters. Still, the mention of these two groups only serve to raise my skepticism level rather than make me outright deny everything around their mention.

Funny how that keeps happening! I keep getting news stories that confirm my per-existing biases that the world is mean and we need internet moderators to make it all better again.

If someone is making an argument from bad faith, that's intentional and it's a waste of time to correct them or engage them at all.

All the "fact checking" links that are displayed now when you post about controversial subjects on social media platforms do very little to change minds and only reinforce the idea that there's some global narrative that's controlled by a cabal. They merely only serve to make people who already agree with the positions that are being linked to as fact checks better about spending time online.

where's the ego stroking in that solution?

- by understanding more and more deeply, instead of possibly less.

- by having a jumpboard to learn more.

- by seeing where you stand compared to the larger picture. Understanding the opposite side instead of just seeing them as enemy of ones' own opinion.

- by seeing more people that argue similar to you. Requires categorization and grouping of votes.

- by being able to share discussions more easily and not to be bound by a single group for answers.

Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the "Gish Gallop".

In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong, wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're wrong!

Simple Sealioning example:

Sealioner: "Do you have anything to back up those figures for holocaust deaths? I see that thrown around a lot and I'm just not sure" (absolutely being a disengenuous piece of shit who's trying to slyly push holocaust denial, but indistinguishable from someone who is in fact curious, aside from that actually-curious people don't end up in these kinds of exchanges half as often as lying assholes do)

Other person who knows exactly where this is going: "Fuck off out of here with that shit."

Sealioner: "Oh my, I was just trying to ask a question. Now I'm really not sure about your position. You seem very touchy about it for someone who has the truth on their side. Can anyone help me?"

A Gish Gallop of the same thing would be throwing out "references" to holocaust denial stuff faster than they can be debunked (and dutifully ignoring the debunking).

For instance this subject got nonstop coverage on CNN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

until Donald Trump came along and was better for ratings. Look at the subjects that constantly get flagged on Hacker News, such as:

   women just can't get ahead

   it's so awful that young people this day don't believe in free speech

The problem isn't with the facts of a particular incident but rather with the emotions that these topics evoke: in either case we all have our frustrations about the barriers we encounter in life and the ways we feel unheard and unsafe.

Conversations like that rapidly deteriorate into people talking about their own personal pain and suffering but with the identifying information (usually) deleted so anything valuable is gone, you might feel compelled to get involved but any of the power that comes out of groundedness is gone when people are talking in generalities, about principles, either from the "liberal" viewpoint of "this situation is fundamentally unfair" or the "conservative" viewpoint that the moral accounting has to be done accurately down to three decimal places.

Why do you care to police speech? Is it ego? It's a fool's errand.

https://twitter.com/JermaineLong93/status/149108386670644838...

Then you can ask, "Of the qualified people, what were they saying at the time?" And if you care to dive deeper, "What evidence were they using to support their opinion?" and "What is the earliest that credible information arrived that should have changed their position?" and "Did their position change, when enough new evidence came in?"

Is there some better set of questions you can think of than mine?

Fast forward to today. The general consensus is the vaccine typically prevents serious illness and death in most cases for the common variants. It doesn't do a great job preventing infection.

One of the mistakes those in charge made was never admitting something like the following when new, solid information was understood:

1) We were wrong. 2) This is something we've never seen. 3) We're learning as we go. 4) It doesn't do what we said or thought it would do, but it does this.

No one in real power ever says anything remotely like it. They speak in absolutes and it has gotten so bad they are choosing to misrepresent studies to suggest following a path they think is best versus admitting the studies just suck.

Misinformation flagging for something like covid was never going to be practical to implement as there was so much changing on a such a limited timeframe. Toss in politics and the governing structure of the USA and it was never going to work.

And therein lies the problem. They presented it as absolute undeniable fact, but there were no definitive studies to back up their claims at the time.

Okay. How did they come to this conclusion? We'll never know, because we're in this asymmetric war about information, where dunking on your political enemies is more important than just being transparent. Showing us how they came to that conclusion, and then going through your points 1-4 would go a long way to restoring that trust (partially), but alas they won't do it.

Some of that's excusable by "the best information at the time was wrong" and some of it's not even wrong but the usual thing I've seen a lot of the last couple years, where some people take a limited statement as absolute or saying more than it is and then claim the original was wrong (when it wasn't) but a good deal of that compilation appears to be indefensible.