| > because the perpetrators point out "they wouldn't censor us if it wasn't true!" Where did they point that out, if they were censored? Seems like (and this is not nearly as ironic as it sounds) we need better/smarter censorship, not less. The fundamental disease here isn't the propagation of incorrect facts, it's the evolution of communities where alternative facts become accepted canon. Once you have everyone's eyeballs on the same stories that they share again and again, then it doesn't really matter whether they're true or not. So the same people that believe that covid-19 started in a lab believe that masks don't work, and climate science is bunk, and the election was stolen, and that Mueller is secretly working with Q, etc... And that really does strike me as a cycle that can be broken. But yes, it requires control way up at the platform level to decide what can be shared. Real truth is real. Experts exist. And those experts should, yes, decide what gets published on mass forums. And in the world of just a few decades back that wasn't a controversial idea. But ultimately it's all about norms. Because if there are entities (like a lot of folks here, sadly) who for cynical reasons really want some of that garbage to be shared, they'll always be able to break this by screaming "censorship". Which is what's happening now. At the end of the day we have a group of people who came to power based on lies, trying to retain that power by suppressing all attempts to control those lies. |