Comment by sfjailbird
10 hours ago
The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
Making things up is inherently vastly cheaper than flighting misinformation.
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
I'm not arguing against incorrect information being spread, I'm arguing against the existence of platforms that are specifically designed to drip feed people information that, true or not, changes their minds about something with a high degree of predictability.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
The problem is Brandolini's law - “it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than that needed to produce it”. So allowing widely disseminated bullshit effectively opens our society up to a denial-of-service attack.
> The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...
And how well did kicking them out of the mainstream social platforms to hide them under the rug do? Rumble, Truth Social, Kick, and how many more echo chambers?
You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.
Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.
EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.
Because none of them really were kicked out, or silenced, or banned.
Though I do agree, it's an insanely slippery slope: where do you draw the line.