[cle]

Indeed, I don't know what the right answer is here. As a civilization, we're struggling to adapt to the sudden fundamental shift in how information flows. I see these things as experiments in ways to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the changes, which to me is a good thing. We should be trying stuff out to see what works. I just fear that we won't be able to understand the blast radius of these experiments and may end up causing something dreadful to happen.

[nightski]

I'm going to be honest I wonder if the censorship and content policing isn't having a worse effect than allowing the content in the first place. Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily). However by removing/censoring content they are actually legitimizing it because people don't see these companies as a neutral third party but rather a biased dictator of information.

I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.

When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.

[chillwaves]

Trump got under 47% of the votes on Nov 3.

As for the rest, I would think that channeling more people into conspiracy theories (which was the previous status quo) is more harmful.

A woman died yesterday for QAnon.

[SR2Z]

> Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily).

The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.

Given how difficult it is to build trust in democracy and how easy it is to collapse it, I think that these companies would be irresponsible to continue providing a megaphone for these claims.

Alternative sites dedicated to the people who feel like they are "under attack" fail to launch because it turns out that catering to these people leads to nothing but misinformation, racism, and content that is either borderline or outright child pornography.

My 2c on this issue is that we will not resolve this situation by accommodating conspiracy theories and racism. Instead, the only way that we can reconcile these two groups of people is by ensuring that everyone sees the same news - recommenders that have partitioned the world in half need to be done away with, even if it reduces user engagement.

[nickpp]

That "one man" still has access to the nuclear launch codes. But he can’t tweet anymore.

[kortilla]

> The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.

Yes, and because of the partisanship it’s mainly liberals that don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.

When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.

[chillwaves]

> don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.

There has been no evidence to support any of the claims being made about systemic election fraud.

Zero. What is there to take seriously?

> When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.

I don't think those ideas were mainstream at all on the left, and even if they were, they weren't being made by people in positions of power. There's a difference between someone anon on the internet claiming fraud (because that's meaningless) vs the sitting president doing so.

I don't call Barack Obama spending the time between Nov and Jan drumming up support for an insurrection against the government. Can you show me where that happened?

I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever making the claim of election fraud, or any elected official saying those things.

Right now you have the majority of Republicans in the House making those kind of claims, in addition to the President and several Senators. The fact you would equate the two shows you are too deeply biased to talk neutrally on this subject.

[danaris]

To coin a popular phrase, "reality has a liberal bias."

When one side of the partisan divide has willfully abandoned all pretense at adherence to facts, to protest that people call them out for this, while not calling the other side out for something they're not doing in any meaningful sense is...well, it's frankly absurd, and smacks of the same kind of party-over-reality logic that the aforementioned side is operating on.

It doesn't matter if 9%, 49%, or 99% of the people choose to follow someone who spits on facts when they don't get him everything he wants: the people asserting that reality is still reality are just as much in the right, no matter who or how many dislike it.