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Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by glenstein on Thursday April 14, 2022 @08:41AM (#31026139)
Completely agree. People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.

No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before.

Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble."

I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."

Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by ss108 on Thursday April 14, 2022 @09:07AM (#31026458)
I don't think we will get to that level of maturity, and part of the problem is unbridled free speech itself lol

In contemporary society, it seems that the kind of free speech we have seems only to lead to greater stupidity by helping bad ideas propagate.

> People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.

They don't look two steps behind either. All their historical analogies, for example, are sophomoric crap.