| I was surprised to see this at the top of HN, but at least your response is at the top of the comments. His points about censorship were as flawed as those about privacy...
The YouTube video he mentioned was blatant misinformation which compared incompatible numbers to create the illusion of a valid point (for example case fatality rate of the flu versus an extrapolated estimation of what the population wide fatality rate would be for COVID-19). It was essentially another "COVID is just another flu" conspiracy theory dressed up with convincing sounding numbers. And people bought it. I was forwarded that video more than once. The protests that Facebook banned were found (thanks to the work of both homebound Redditors and various reporters) to have been funded by commercial astroturfing companies and run through gun rights groups. It was an orchestrated misinformation campaign that was putting public health at risk. Again, people bought it, thousands of them. I agree with the author that the open internet should be sacred and consolidation by a few large players is bad. I agree that privacy and free speech are important. I dislike government intervention that threatens those principles. But the examples he picked are, ironically, the perfect counters to his premise: Contact tracing that doesn't actually threaten privacy. Companies shutting down undeniable misinformation in an age of Russian troll farms. If social media companies aren't proactive about tamping down verifiably false information then at some point governments are going to do it, and they'll make a huge mess of it, as they have with most tech regulation in recent years. The author seems to be unwittingly arguing for the latter outcome. |