[krapp]

> This "feature" I see it in the same way as warning labels - "Caution: Hot" - treats people as if they can't practice critical thinking and common sense.

History demonstrates that, for the most part, people can't.

Even Hacker News - a community of people who should "know better" - is infested with conspiracy theories, disinformation and bullshit. And the general public trusts Facebook memes more than the mainstream media. The meme is that the people who were saying never to trust anything you read on the internet in the 90s are now saying Biden is three lizards in a trenchcoat. So here we are.

[MichaelCollins]

Growing up I knew a kid who's leg had been run over by a lawn mower. He still had it, but half his calf was missing and he had horrific scaring. I never saw the lawn mower that chewed his leg up, but I'd bet it had warning stickers on it like all mowers do. Don't stick your fingers in the blades, and certainly don't run over your younger brother with it..

The warning stickers won't fix stupid, but everything dangerous gets warning stickers anyway because lawyers make bank throwing lawsuits around whenever stupid people do stupid things to themselves. The stickers exist for liability reasons, not to protect people. The stickers are magical wards meant to keep the lawyers away.

[ThatGeoGuy]

This points to a larger discussion about systems thinking. Specifically that warning labels put responsibility on the individual to correctly read, interpret, and act on information in the label. Alternatively, consider not using a label and fixing the underlying systemic problem so that there is no danger in the first place. In the case of a lawn mower, this is designing it such that it doesn't require a human to operate it correctly. It fails to operate if used incorrectly.

Given this is HN, the equivalent in software is: fix the code on your side; don't try to train your users. We don't add warning labels telling users to not do SQL injection, we solve it systematically by making sure our backend isn't using untrusted user inputs directly in queries!

You're right in that warning stickers won't fix stupid, and that we need more systemic action in order to treat the cause and not the symptom. I'll be honest: I don't even know what that systemic action would be in the case of misinformation on Twitter, but I know that warning labels are just a way to shunt responsibility away from Twitter and onto individual users.

[MichaelCollins]

> I don't even know what that systemic action would be in the case of misinformation on Twitter

The whole premise of twitter is rotten, to fix it you would need to cut out vitality and the dopamine reward mechanisms. As long as twitter exists in the present form, it will have these problems.

Trying to fix twitter is like trying to fix a lawn mower; the machine is fundamentally dangerous to fools and you can't fix that without radically changing what the machine is. Deadman switch? They'll ziptie it. Warning labels? Unheeded. Paternalistic AI watching everything you do/read and trying to intervene when it thinks you're doing something stupid? Equal parts pipe dream and dystopian nightmare. Crowdsourcing fact checks? Proven a farce years ago.

[krapp]

These fact checks and warning labels are semantically different enough that arguments from equivalence only work to a point. We know that people can be influenced by what they read on social media, and social media platforms aren't (currently) legally liable for misinformation spread by their users.

[MichaelCollins]

> social media platforms aren't (currently) legally liable for misinformation spread by their users.

They're politically liable for it. The misinformation warnings on social media aren't there to protect dumb people from misinformation; those people won't heed the warnings. The misinformation warnings are there to keep political heat off the company.

Do you think any would-be flat earther has ever been saved by a warning "Fact check: the earth is actually round"? If somebody was going to fall for a flat earther video, a content warning from youtube won't change their mind. I don't believe that.

[krapp]

would be? yes.

I do think there is a point where the effects of radicalization and indoctrination can be mediated by exposure to facts. I seem to differ from most people in that I don't believe that the effect of "sunlight as a disinfectant" is constant, rather I think it's far more effective early on than after someone has already built a bubble of normalized hyperreality around themselves, and is subject to a law of diminishing returns.

To this end, I think fact-checking and deplatforming can be effective tools against the already unbalanced bias towards disinformation provided by social media platforms. At least more effective than simply letting it spread unchecked and hoping things just sort themselves out.

[MichaelCollins]

The radicalization is driven by the recommendation engines that are the central premise of these platforms. Every would-be flat earther already knows that the roundness of earth is the officially designated truth, putting that warning label on flat earth videos isn't going to change a thing. The only purpose of that label is to take political heat off the platform that is recommending flat earth videos.

These warnings are ass covering, plain and simple. They aren't a service to idiots, they exist to excuse the platform from being fundamentally hazardous.