I'm not even opposed to flagging posts as “fake, false or misleading” because abusing those flags will cause them to be ignored, but removing content is a problem. State censorship is a much bigger threat to Democracy than false or misleading tweets and facebook posts.
I find it fascinating that people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information.
If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
> If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
I'm afraid that people are looking around, asking themselves that same question, and concluding that democracy has failed.
The problem is that democracy depends on an educated populace and there have been active efforts to dumb people down so that they can be more easily lied to and manipulated. The American people, on average, have the math skills of a 6th grader and their reading skills are worse (https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/). They lack the critical thinking skills to compete with sophisticated disinformation campaigns. The solution requires education, training, and time. Until the population catches up, we're going to continue to see some very bad choices made by voters while scammers and charlatans will continue to be very successful.
I don't blame people for losing some faith in the American people, but I hope we don't lose faith in democracy because clawing it back after we've given up what few freedoms we still have will not be easy. As long as we have democracy we can still make things better.
> I find it fascinating that people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information. If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
In the early 2010s there was a rash of "pranks" in India where people would forward accusations accusing men pictured with children of pedophilia to rile up mobs to assault and kill them. These accusations were basically always false and done to settle scores, basically as a form of stochastic murder. It was bad enough that WhatsApp had to introduce some UX patterns to slow down forwards of accusations and put warning disclaimers on things forwarded too often. (And I'm sure there were other measures around moderation put in on the back end, including collaboration with state law enforcement entities).
Democracy generally operates through a series of institutions that are held accountable to the public, but doesn't directly fly according to every passing whim of the public.
Short, glib comments get dunked on here, but you've got a point. As the saying goes, “The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The judgement of the common folk is not unassailable, and is frequently wrong, which is why Democracy needs numerous checks and balances.
Democracy is a hedge against worse outcomes, not a guarantor of future outcomes. You might get your heart’s desires in the service of a King, but he’ll still be King and you’ll now be his subject.
> If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
The fact that people are irrational is why we do not have a direct democracy. Representative democracy, and the existence of constraints in the form of constitution-type documents and term limits, are designed to limit the impact of temporal individual stupidity and crowd stupidity on global outcomes, by constraining the scope of immediate democracy.
> people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information.
This is overly flippant and strawman-like (conflating government censorship with private company moderation, for example) to what is a massive problem in the age of social media. Vaccine hesitancy, leading to hundreds of thousands of additional dead people, is due to misinformation. There are literal dead people as the end result of this misinformation. Now I for one would prefer that private companies do not censor misinformation, and instead focused on altering the viral dynamics. But this is not a topic to brush under the rug with denialism that misinformation is an actual thing.
Today? I'm not sure you're right about which is the greater threat.
Yes, state censorship can be abused. But promoting misinformation is a known threat to Democracy today. Right now.
I'm not sure what the real answer should be. If "the market" manages to get the propaganda farms' misinformation under control, then great. If they don't, the only answer I can see is for government to step in.
As they say, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Dying to protect absolute freedom of speech when bad actors are abusing it to destroy the country is not wise.
How do you reconcile the premise of democracy (that the general public will be able to discern and organize for good) with calls to supervise what opinions they can be exposed to?
Democracy is about the people being able to participate in government. That's it. In order for that to be a good thing, the people need to be informed about the decisions they're making.
If the people are completely brainwashed by lies that are completely contrary to the truth--like nearly a quarter of our population seems to be at the moment--then they will vote for those with the most convincing lies.
If someone who gets their information from Fox "News"--which has been shown to be less reliable than not watching any news at all--is given an equal vote to those who actually know what's going on, Democracy is subverted. At that point you actually have a "fake Democracy", where the country is actually guided by the propagandists and not the people.
The US is one of a very few Democracies with this absolutist attitude about freedom of speech. It's not a required component of Democracy, and it's ultimately self-destructive, but it's clearly (based on the downvotes and responses to my comment) deeply ingrained.
As an example, Trump should have gotten barely any votes in the last election. He accomplished almost nothing besides stacking the supreme court and passing a deeply unpopular tax cut. Yes, we beat him, but 74M people voted for Trump. And those 74M people, nearly 47% of the voting public, were manipulated by blatantly false Russian and Republican propaganda.
To my mind, the "free speech as a religion" POV is looking like it will be the death of our democracy. If we can't fight misinformation, it may bury the country.
And clearly those on HN disagree. I won't argue with you further. But as things stand, we're circling the drain.
> Democracy is about the people being able to participate in government. That's it.
But why is that a good thing? We don't have to have everyone participate. You don't seem to believe in democracy yourself here.
> were manipulated by blatantly false Russian and Republican propaganda.
I think we should be extremely cautious about views that suggest cross sections of the population are not capable agents. Either you're right, 47% of people are manipulated idiots, and the other half are enlightened, or they hold grievances and values you just don't understand.
> I think we should be extremely cautious about views that suggest cross sections of the population are not capable agents.
I'm calling it as I see it. "Being cautious" and trying to be "fair" to the other side has been increasingly destroying the country.
47% of the voters in last election, which is just under 25% of the US population, were in fact manipulated, and are really, in this respect, not capable agents as a result of that manipulation. At the very least they're demonstrably not capable of critical thinking.
I've looked carefully at many explanations as to why MAGAts vote the way they do. It's blatantly obvious that there are a small number of primary motivations.
Aside from "sociopathic self-interest" of some of the 0.1% who simply want lower taxes, everyone else be damned, and a big chunk who reflexively vote Republican as if it's their home team and aren't really paying attention, the main motivator seems to be hate of "the liberals." And no, I don't accept that "hurting more than half of the country" is a reasonable motivation for someone under normal circumstances.
Where did that extreme level of hate come from? Manipulation. Sure there was an underlying anger that the propaganda stoked. People in rural America have it hard and they see all of these rich people in urban areas doing well. But that anger has been fanned to the point where kids knocking on the wrong doors are being shot. And the anger is fundamentally misdirected; these blue-collar folks could tremendously benefit from a higher minimum wage, for instance, and it's not like the Republicans would ever voluntarily vote for a minimum wage increase at this point.
> But why is that a good thing? We don't have to have everyone participate. You don't seem to believe in democracy yourself here.
It's the worst form of government around...aside from all the others that have been tried. (paraphrased Churchill).
I don't know of another form of government that has better results. Neither did Churchill. If we could enforce better national education standards, we'd end up with a better result. But in short term I don't know how to fix the problem other than taking the worst liars off the air.
"We don't have to have everyone participate" -- that sounds too much like a support for voter suppression, which is not what I'm talking about.
I can confirm, you cannot articulate what rural voters are concerned about.
> voter suppression
It sounds like your motivation for democracy is that you "owe people" a vote, not that it's actually better to give them it. If education is the factor, what if we gate it by high school, land ownership, or college graduation?
I guess to get back to my original point. You suggested that free information (and misinformation) was a threat to democracy, but I see little indication you believe democracy is important. It's hard to see calls like this as anything other than being upset that the majority is not voting the way you want, and wanting to reign them in.
> I can confirm, you cannot articulate what rural voters are concerned about.
I never claimed that I was giving the entire picture.
Given that there is ZERO positive that Trump accomplished for rural voters aside from "owning the libs," and many things that were actively negative like starting a trade war that may see rural soy farms permanently out of business, no, I don't think that rural voters are motivated by anything aside from "voting their team" and "trolling the libs."
> I see little indication you believe democracy is important
...trouble with reading comprehension there? I'll simply repeat:
> It's the worst form of government around...aside from all the others that have been tried. (paraphrased Churchill).
> I don't know of another form of government that has better results. Neither did Churchill. If we could enforce better national education standards, we'd end up with a better result. But in short term I don't know how to fix the problem other than taking the worst liars off the air.
But you don't actually care what I'm saying if you follow up with:
> It's hard to see calls like this as anything other than being upset that the majority is not voting the way you want, and wanting to reign them in.
Umm... It wasn't a majority. It was barely 25% of the country. The majority of active voters did in fact vote for Biden.
>Yes, state censorship can be abused. But promoting misinformation is a known threat to Democracy today. Right now.
State Censorship is being abused today right now. State Censorship is also a threat to Democracy. It's giving the most powerful institutions the tools to attack Democracy.
Who gets to decide what is mis/mal/dis information? The government? We as human beings are constantly weighing up information and evaluating details to inform our actions. Why do you think they have better tools to decide this for you?
Who are these individuals in Government that have worked out all the truths of the world and why do you buy into them deciding this? Has anyone here worked for Government?
All the worlds information isn't easily summed up into Scientific truths that can be instantly fact checked by Government and everything else. This power your giving the government to decide what information you can see and not. Doesn't empower you the citizen to make good decisions. It allows government to sway your information to guide the outcome they want. Which is known as Public Policy, and they have decided that Public Policy is no longer up for debate for the plebs.
I agree with mst of your post, but there is no scientific truths, just a method to search knowledge that suck less.
Also, there are a lot of good informed guess by scientifics that are reported as Scientific truths. Last month there was a new study that showed that it's good to give peanut butter to children to avoid allergy later, that is the oposite of the standard recommendation during the last decade(s).
the real answer is full transparency. Someone posting a lie is only a problem when no one is allowed to challenge it, and when you allow censorship you are giving someone the authority to prevent challenges to both truth and lies at the same time.
The Constitution has problems and I've love to see some changes to it, but freedom of speech is not something we should abandon. I don't think I've ever met anyone who wants "absolute freedom of speech". Everyone, even our government and courts agree that there are limits, but censorship is not the solution to lies, it is their most efficient breeding ground and it removes our only defense.
We must be able to point out lies and falsehoods no matter where they come from or who is inconvenienced by the truth.
The problem we have now is a populace that is largely uneducated and incapable of telling the truth from a lie or knowing when a source is untrustworthy. We can help to solve that with education and training in basic critical thinking skills. In the meantime we should be exposing and correcting lies publicly and transparently and holding people accountable for knowingly spreading dangerous falsehoods (free to speak still does not mean free from consequences).
> the real answer is full transparency. Someone posting a lie is only a problem when no one is allowed to challenge it, and when you allow censorship you are giving someone the authority to prevent challenges to both truth and lies at the same time.
It's always easier to simply state something is true than it is to prove it, or disprove it. That's a lot less of a problem when people aren't receptive to believing everything they see without question in the first place. Brandolini's law doesn't mean that it is impossible or undesirable to correct misinformation. It just says that spewing lies takes less effort. It demonstrates why it's important to give people critical thinking skills in the first place, so that you don't have to spend as much effort chasing and cleaning up after bullshit because that would mean fewer people are accepting it and forwarding it along.
The alternative being proposed here is to accept censorship which allows lies to go unchallenged entirely and makes it impossible to ever correct them.
This kind of thinking of yours is far a bigger threat, among other things because it means goverment have the very strong incentive for social media to NOT get the propaganda farms under control because that way it has a public excuse to step in and abuse that position with totalitarian censorchip; a big red flag that points this to be the case is how this censorship is planed, is not in the slightest a democratical censorship that includes the input of local and international journalists or opposition leaders.
The government will just infiltrate and control that third party by funding it. "You want us to raise your rates the next round of appropriations, here is what we expect to get 'fact checked'".
> Why is the government well suited to declare what it and isn't misinformation though?
Presumably because much of the lies and disinformation going around involves them to start with. When some nutjob starts posting about something like millions of American citizens being locked up in FEMA camps, or claiming that a proposed healthcare bill calls for the formation of a government death panel any respectable fact checking org is going to end up asking the lawmakers and FEMA about it anyway so government certainly has a role here.
Ideally, each social media platform would have their own people catching and flagging the worst examples of disinformation and that might also involve enlisting the services of both governments and vetted independent third parties.
In my limited experience on social media where I don't see any official flags for misinformation I've seen plenty of cases where it's other users stepping in and correcting outright lies and common misconceptions complete with sources. That probably works better in some spaces than others though.
That doesn't really work, though. You picked some examples of obviously-false things that someone might say about the US government (one would hope, at least), and, sure, the US government is in a decent position to refute those claims.
But let's take something we now know to be true: the NSA collecting data on US citizens. Pre-Snowden, someone could post something asserting that the NSA is spying on us. The government, being the hypothetical arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation, would of course immediately label that as misinformation.
You can't trust the government to be honest here. Sometimes they will even lie for fairly good reasons. But I don't want them marking things as misinformation (or, worse, suppressing such information) when it's true. And they certainly will do that, sometimes.
That's why misinformation labels aren't really a problem. If Snowden posts that they NSA is spying the government could flag the claim as misinformation, but flagging Snowden's post doesn't make it go away and Snowden came with evidence which the public could review. Once the public saw that spying was happening, they'd know the government lied and the next time they saw something flagged by the government as misinformation they'd be less willing to assume that to be accurate, and eventually might even start to assume that things flagged as "disinformation" by the government we're more likely to be true than not.
As long as the fact checking is transparent, there will be an incentive for the fact checker to stay honest and when they fail we should adjust our understanding of what the flag actually means.
I've gone through that already with popular fact checkers like snopes. I still consider it to be a valuable resource, but I've become aware that they allow bias to influence their findings and that they can't be trusted blindly. Really no one source should be blindly trusted and that's something we should be trying to let people know, but warning labels can still be helpful and also revealing about how adversarial our government has become. A government that can't be trusted not to repeatedly mislead the public is one that should be voted out and replaced.
Correction, state censorship will be abused. What happens when India elects their version of Trump? Suddenly, what might seem like half-decent system under better leadership becomes a weapon to completely obliterate the news media and target individuals to pursue personal vendettas.
EDIT: If you don't like my comparison, choose any other politician who has documented history of threatening suppression and violence against the free press.
Their current leader, Modi, is extremely divisive and has been accused of very actively fanning the long-running ethnic/religious conflict in the country. The BBC documentary on him is not unbiased but still very revealing.
So you should view this action using the same lens you would as any other divisive leader, eg Trump.
Is this the documentary where he attacks the journalist who was calmly interviewing him about his political record and changes the subject and blames the media for his own shortcomings? I don’t frighten easily, but that was truly scary.
Democracy is not going to die because people spread false information.
Newspapers have had the monopoly on spreading whatever information they deemed correct (whether it turned out to be or not) for decades and have now lost that and they are pissed.
This is why there is a rise in apparent outcry that all of a sudden anyone and everyone can spread their message broadly where only a handful of organizations could do it before.
There's is no crisis in democracy. As long as the same tools are free to be used to counter whatever fact you think is false then you are free to have an open debate and correct the record.
The government having the power to decide who can say what and what is "true" or "false"... That's the real risk of bringing death to democracy.
> People do not have the tools to discern truth given plausible misinformation.
Then give them the tools.
> Indeed, that is a risk, but not the only risk.
It's not really a risk, it's a fact. Governments routinely lie about plenty of things, and deny things that we later find out to be true.
I would much rather have a bunch of people believe the wrong thing, than have true things labeled as misinformation, or worse, censored.
The onus is on us, as citizens of a free society, to set the record straight, and constantly work to educate people. That's just the responsibility we have to accept. "Freedom isn't free" and all that.
"Truth" is not something that can be discerned even in the absence of misinformation. It is a constantly evolving and negotiated equilibrium between the individual and their environment through the imperfect filter of perception. To put the reins of "fact-checking" in government control is simply a shortcut to tyranny, and not something that can stifle the death of democracy.
How do you know they aren’t making decisions based on falsehood right now? You have to get information out there and only then can you evaluate whether it is true or false (or practical or inconvenient which is arguably more important in politics.). All democracy means is that we trust the citizens to evaluate truth for themselves. Not everyone believes this. India, for instance, has from its founding has taken the paternalistic position that the wise philosopher princes of New Delhi know better than you or me. I don’t agree but most people over there don’t seem to mind. (And I bet 90% of the ones who claim to be upset about it are only upset because it is the wrong set of philosopher princes.) This unfortunately is also democracy. So what are you going to do?
One powerful way to insulate against this is to instill critical thinking skills: "don't believe everything you read or think" as a tenet of public life.
