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Comment by Solvitieg | Hacker News Reader

How did we get to the point where what we say needs to be factual?

Factually correct speech has its place. But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends, you don't need to be factual. That's not a necessary ingredient to a good conversation.

I have a Youtube channel where I sometimes talk about Space and Biology. I'm not educated in these subjects. No doubt a lot of what I say is factually incorrect. That doesn't mean my speech is misinformation, deceitful, or dangerous.

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It's even worse than you describe. Hyperbole is being flagged as "disinformation" or "lies". All the nuance of human communication is being squeezed into a lowest-common-denominator straight-jacket, based on what's easiest to censor. And the "progressives" are the cheerleaders this time. It's depressing.

> But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends

These things are not the same. When you talk with friends or when you write a comment, you have a limited audience and counter viewpoints are readily available. When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.

>When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.

Here's a comment snippet you wrote 3 days ago: "Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies.

Are you really doing your 'best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements'? Because I'm sure you have no evidential basis for that statement and therefore promulgating misinformation. Alternatively, we can have YouTube Interns decide what you can and cannot say online.

Regardless, perhaps you should take your own advice?

It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints, such as your comment.

And it's also fun that you took a comment that basically said "channels with big audiences should care about not saying wrong things" and took it as a support of censorship.

Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!

- Facebook wanted to create a digital currency, and wanted it to be used by as much people as possible.

- Monetary sovereignty is the capacity of a state to control what currency is used as legal payment, how much of it is issued and how much of is it retired.

- If Libra became widespread in a country under the conditions that Facebook wanted (i.e., the Libra association controlling issuance and retirement), it would complete and (partially or completely) replace the state's currency and therefore the state would not have power to control its own currency, therefore losing monetary sovereignty to the Libra association.

- The Libra association was an association of private companies, QED.

And all of this brings me again to the point of how comments and videos are different. I made a comment, you made a comment, I made another one, and most people reading will watch the different viewpoints. If this was instead YouTube videos with millions of views, a lot of people would see the video title and take it as fact, another group would watch it and wouldn't care or wouldn't have the capacity to search for the opposing viewpoints, and only a minority (I think) would actually see the full debate. That's why I say that the standards should be different if your potential audience is bigger and they're less exposed to other viewpoints.

>It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints

What is happening with YouTube, is happening with Twitter and Facebook, so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning. Twitter was built for off-the-cuff comment-type communication and Facebook was built for sharing posts and content with close relations. And yet the exact same 'curation' is being done there as well. So no, I don't agree there is some magic difference between video and text.

>Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!

NO it's not. You saying it doesn't make it so. You're impugning a motive on Facebook that you have no evidential support for. But that's not the salient point in this discussion, because your opinion about the level of evidence that you feel you bring to the argument is immaterial to social media 'curation'. What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.

> so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning.

I did not make a distinction between video and text, I made a distinction based on audiences and availability of counterpoints. I used those examples because they were the ones that the parent comment used. I do not know why you're talking about video and text.

> What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.

And at what point did I say I was in favor of social media curation? I said people should try to avoid saying wrong things in their own content when that content has a large audience with counterpoints not readily visible.

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