Are you making the argument that only people deemed credible should be able to discuss matters of science and the arbiters of credibility should be content moderators of a private company or worse the programmer of an algorithm? Respectfully, that sounds terrifying.
It’s a balance, but I personally do think so. You ever work for a boss who has no clue what they are doing but insist on micromanaging you, the person who is the subject matter expert?
What the web and social media has done is normalized everyone’s voice to 1. This is great for some things but not so great for issues where you truly need a subject matter expert. When an SME can be “refuted” by someone who not only knows less but also has incorrect and incomplete knowledge that’s a recipe for a dangerous situation.
Example: I don’t know nearly anything about water treatment plants. But literally nothing prevents me from starting a YouTube channel about how water treatment plans are insufficient and giving people recipes on how to use lead to kill bacteria in their drinking water. And let’s assume for the sake of the argument that I can sound quite convincing to those who don’t know me. Terrifying prospect, no?
I’m the before times the cost of publishing content was high and as a result only those who had something worthwhile to say were able to get their ideas out there. This all changed in the 1990s once the web “democratized” publication. But prior to that we somehow survived for millennia without everyone being able to express their uninformed or under informed opinion on technical matters.
I think having laypeople who don't understand what they are actually debating on engage in these unhelpful debates, rather than seek information from people who have put in the time required to be a domain expert, does a lot more net harm to society than good.
Imagine if people were so passionate about aircraft designs as they are vaccine delivery platforms. It's ridiculous when you lay it bare like this and replace vaccine with some other piece of uncontroversial technology. "I'm not flying in an airbus. I don't trust those engineers, and my cousin says there is weird radio signals that manipulate your mind and I trust that man with my life. Those engineers voted for Clinton" Nothing about the modern world would get done if we extended this unhelpful debateism to every piece of everything that requires a lot of hours of study to fully understand. We would be stuck in our tracks citing the same talking points everyone else in our cult of ignorance chants while bridges fail and crops go barren.
Yeah, and I think those threads are ridiculous personally, with all these people playing armchair engineer without access to any of boeing's data that an actual engineer would need to refer to in order to critically analyze a process.
It has been and should be by a proven record on the topic. Which is usually implicit with a employment with a company in that field or a university.
at least that is my opinion, which has no credibility, because it's just from a random hacker news account.