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Reddit staff probably aren't sharing porn with each other all day, but their users are, and that's not an issue. If I were CEO of Facebook and a director was playing Farmville all day instead of working, I would fire them, but it wouldn't matter at all if users were doing the same thing. Reddit and Facebook are platforms, not publications. How their customers use their product to talk to others has no relation to how they might run themselves. Additionally, it shouldn't be their job to nanny their users and judge what things they say are true or untrue and remove the untrue things, unless something's both untrue and likely to cause direct and imminent harm (like saying drinking bleach is proven to prevent COVID-19). Allowing third-party fact checkers to add commentary to consequential political posts is a reasonable and balanced compromise on Zuckerberg's part. "Post-truth" is meaningless and completely subjective; impartial analysts should be able to address potentially true or false claims based on the evidence. "Post-truth" is "whatever you claim to be true and I claim to be not true". Truth isn't subjective, but judgment of truth is. One can cherry-pick cases where some surrogate says something clearly false and defends it with "we have a different view of what the facts are", but in the general case, having different views of the facts is the natural state of humanity and discourse. I like Snopes, but I definitely do not want Zuckerberg to start acting like he's Snopes or enforcing what content can exist based on what Snopes says. I think (99.9% of) conspiracy theories are absurd and a scourge of society, but I don't think they should be classified as thoughtcrime or removed. I would fire an employee who was a zealous conspiracy theory proponent, but I would never sanction a user for being one, or for holding any other view I disagreed with or considered ridiculous. Snopes' voice should be given exposure but opposing voices shouldn't be kept from exposure unless there are extreme circumstances. In my opinion, we should be asking ourselves how we could possibly improve the general public's epistemological faculties and approaches, rather than trying to tug-of-war-style yank their epistemological conclusions away from them. The former will help unite the US and the latter will continue to further divide it. Let's work at the meta level instead of the object level. |