[jackfoxy]

Q: What's the difference between fake news / conspiracy theories and the real news?

A: About 8 months.

Sure this joke is an exaggeration, but occurrences like this seem to be getting more common. Sometimes it's much longer than 8 months. The informed reader can fill in the blanks.

One very big problem is YT and other content providers intentionally provide recommendations to reinforce confirmation biases of the viewer. If you click a few wacky conspiracy videos you will start seeing more in your feed. If you click fact and logic based alternate videos, you will start seeing confirmations of this particular view point, but no factual/logical discussions from opposing viewpoints. What's worse, inevitably you will start seeing references to censorship in your favorite topics. This feels very much like a political agenda on the part of big tech content providers.

In any event it is clear the algorithm is not interested in healthy reasonable discussion and debate to further democracy.

[treeman79]

It’s past reinforcement bias and moved into picking winners.

[roenxi]

It's the fact that the censors are there to step in for things that are plausibly true. There isn't any need to censor flat-earth theories. Nobody cares, it doesn't have any implications and it easy to disprove (eg, the fact that the horizon dips away).

The censors only get really active for things that could plausibly be true or things that are absolutely true but inconvenient to the people who control the censorship office.

[treeman79]

Not talking about flat earters. I’m taking about tech companies picking election winners by “fact checking”/suppressing stories that make their chosen guy look bad.