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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not.

Because (a) most people simply don't have the time or skills to fact check every single piece of information and (b) even if they did it assumes that they have the awareness to do so. Both assumptions have been proven wrong again and again.

What we can do instead as a society is force the the billion-dollar social media companies to take responsibility for the content that they chose to display and the ads they chose to serve. Same as newspapers do, television stations do, and every other media format do every single day.

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What I see in your comment: people are too stupid to understand what's right for them, so we "as a society" should make commercial entities to censor their platforms to pre-filter information available to general public.

Few questions arise: If you believe that people can't be trusted to decide if not guarded against unwanted information, do you really believe in democracy? Who are "we as a society"? Apparently, you are not talking about all people, or even majority.

Yes societies has been doing this for generations.

News organisations self-censor to ensure what they are posting is mostly factual, adheres to journalistic traditions and avoids slanderous and libellous content. We have laws that make it illegal to post certain content.

You can disagree with it but it is the status quo in most countries and I see no reason why social media should be any different.

I don't think we are talking about libellous content: as you noted yourself it is already covered by existing laws, and there's no need to invent additional regulations for that.

As for thing you call "self-censorship" there are two very different parts: pursuing correctness is not, actually, self-censorship, it's building reputation, and a long-term trust with an audience - and done essentially for commercial success. But there's self-censorship in media, of course, it exists because if political pressure, sponsors' influence, and last, but not least because most of journalists are not magical creatures, they are humans too, and naturally biased as all of us are. And I never heard anyone claiming this self-censorship to be good for society, and worth expanding.

> Same as newspapers do, television stations do, and every other media format do every single day.

But newspapers, tv stations etc. are centralized hierarchical structures that can afford to have editorial policies. They have such thing as reputation to think about. Social media, on the other hand, at least how I envision them, are open platforms for anyone to find topics that interest them and express whichever ideas they want. Social media are amorphous, are different for every user, and should not have any agenda to push. They are a delivery mechanism, not an instrument for selectively amplifying some voices and selectively suppressing others.

How is social media not centralised ? Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram etc.

There are only like a dozen major companies involved here and they are not just a delivery mechanism since they already filter what content gets displayed.

> How is social media not centralised ?

They may be centralized in the sense of them being specific companies or hosting their data on specific servers, but at the same time they are not centralized in the sense that they have an editorial staff that chooses which content to publish / air (as the traditioinal media are). Social media are entirely or mostly user-generated. That’s what I meant.

Newspapers don't have much reputation anymore:

https://www.impress.press/news/yougov-poll.html

In practice reputational value doesn't seem to be sufficient to stop newspapers routinely publishing false stories and people know it. Social media is not even a publisher and thus doesn't have the same issues.

But I don't think it's that hard or time consuming to fact check the news you read. Some people don't have the skills, yeah, which is why we should focus on teaching them critical thinking. That's not an argument for not trying to teach them.

I never argued that we shouldn't teach them.

I argued that it doesn't work. And that it's better to focus on regulating social media companies.

It really depends on the article. Throw enough specialist jargon in the article and it will take hours to really understand 2 paragraphs. And fact checking may not be enough anyway. You can selectively report facts which seem to tell any story you want - everything will be correct, but could miss the bigger context, so what you learn is opposite to what you should learn from reality.

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