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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

It's not a strawman, because you said it yourself:

> Why would we not want to know how that misinformation spreads, and how best to combat it?

You don't get to suppress ideas in a free society, no matter how much you may disagree with them. You can discuss them and even try to win people over to your viewpoint through debate, but at the end of the day you can't force people to believe something without violating the social contract.

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It absolutely is a straw man. There are many ways to combat something without resorting to —as you strawmanned their comment with–“authoritarian means.”

We combatted the ridiculous notion when masses of people thought they could cure diseases by burying a rotten fig under a dogwood tree on the 13th tuesday of the year if it was raining, and we did this by teaching people why that is ridiculous.

Understanding how and which absurd ideas enter people’s heads is incredibly important. And for many reasons that have nothing to do with “authoritarianism.”

The researchers we're talking about are in a spat with Facebook over the notion that Facebook isn't doing enough to censor ideas they disagree with. You're projecting your own bad faith arguments onto other people: we're not talking about burying figs under trees. We're talking about the kind of "misinformation" that includes the covid-19 lab leak or the current predident's son moonlighting for oil and gas companies in eastern Europe. You can't have institutions deliberately trying to narrow the window of acceptable discourse in a free society because there is nobody who will be able to watch the watchers make sure that they're not abusing their authority.

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