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Comment by gremloni | Hacker News Reader

Classifying reigning in massive disinformation campaigns and divisive propaganda as censorship is disingenuous at best.

The idea of viral news, where the masses somehow take the place of editorial control, is bananas. The average Jane simply has no mental energy to do it properly. No amount of algorithms and bureaucracy can paper over this fundamental reality.

We need 5000 professional news outlets competing for the public's trust, not Facebook with a bureaucratic brain eating parasite.

I agree with you. We need gatekeepers, not unsubstantiated nonsense from the lowest common denominator.

If democracy is a system where the average citizen controls the government through voting, how will we "protect democracy" by intentionally trying to control the opinions and actions of voters, with the implication that their current opinions are wrong? That kind of electorate shaping seems akin to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where everyone still votes, but it's always influenced to be in favor of the Kim regime.

It’s a fine balance that doesn’t work well with hyperbolic extremes like you’re painting. We don’t let people buy materials to make bombs but we don’t prevent farmers from buying fertilizer either. The answer is somewhere in between.

Where are the checks and balances to prevent that from happening? The public discourse is the system of checks and balances in a democracy that prevents that kind of authoritarian subversion. If you prevent people from speaking out and shape their opinions, who is able to say something when it goes too far? This is not an effort to aid democracy, it's a direct attack against it.

Facebook isn't a public discourse, more of an algorithmically curated news feed. How it curates it's news feed is a business practice, and unethical business practices should be curtailed by regulation.

We don't use democracy in the correct way. The true form of democracy does not use voting to determine the leaders, but a raffle. The voting was added some time around the french revolution, when people learned that having power is great and they wanted to increase their probability to not lose it.

Facebook is the one doing the controlling. You don't see the majority in the newsfeed. They pick the extreme and pump that to you so it looks like all your friends agree with you and all your enemies are awful people. This promotes engagement and silos.

It's an inadvertent global re-education scheme on a massive scale whose results we see every day. There was political collaboration and discussion in the past. Facebook essentially made that a non-starter. If the news feed was closer to what people said or even like reddit where the majority vote goes up then there wouldn't be a problem.

Gatekeepers are corruptable usual by money. The web was great previously because we lost the gatekeepers. Now we have 3-5 gatekeepers..facebook, twitter, google..

This.

A tiny group of powerful gatekeepers will have a tendency to slide towards clique. That is just human nature, and that is why we used to have anti-trust legislation with teeth.

They're not gatekeepers, they're amplifiers. You can still make your own website and post whatever you want. The problem is what the amplifiers are amplifying.

We need gatekeepers… just not a handful of them. Thousands of gatekeepers, not millions of sources for chaff

> We need healthy journalism

Fixed that for you. Healthy as in: well supported and properly diversified. It's hard to run an editorialized outlet if you don't retain enough paying subscribers, or - yes - advertising. Good, critical, well-thought journalism can't happen for free.

As news outlets moved to the Web in a bid to reach larger audiences, they stumbled across three major roadblocks. The first is cost structure, where building and maintaining a digital infrastructure to gather news, manage the editorial process and publish turns out to be quite expensive. The second is that most people expect the Web to provide / share information for free. While that's an original core philosophy that pushed the Web during it's infancy, it falls flat in today's commercialized context.

Both problems are within control of a news outlet. With proper strategic planning, it's not impossible to build a flourishing news outlet.

And third / most important: discovery on the Web isn't equitable. Facebook, Google et al don't write / make the news. They make it discoverable. And no matter how you do it, which criteria and which methods are used, making content discoverable is at heart a process of curation.

Discovery is everything. And the basis for that is the hyperlink. If others don't link to your news outlet, well, then you might as well not exist. You might be yelling into the void as you keep on churning out articles on your website. The act of creating a hyperlink between two websites isn't neutral: it conveys intent, endorsement, recognition of authority and so on. "Sharing", "Posting a link" or "liking a post" aren't neutral actions in that regard, there's multi-layered human complexity that explains why a link got posted.

The cardinal sin committed by social media is choosing to strip away that complexity and replace it with overly simple, yet utterly empty metrics such as "engagement" which have steered the design of functionality, affordances and behavior of "news walls" and "timelines".

As a result, journalism has suffered for without the ability to be discovered by potential audiences, you can't survive. Many small outlets have disappeared over the past years. And many others of changed the tune of their content just to ensure their articles generate enough hyperlinks on social media to drive potential readership.

Democracy suffers without good and diverse journalism. The "marketplace of ideas" ought to be a shared place build on common understanding. Not walled gardens fostering the emergence of echo chambers as an externalized cost due to their drive for more "engagement".

You don't actually believe in democracy if you think that regular people shouldn't get to talk to each other to make political decisions and that some central committee gets to decide which ideas become popular.

Regular people should talk to each other. But that is different than clicking 'like' button on a deluge of information nobody has the time to validate for accuracy or relevance. Worse, what actually gets propagated is not decided by regular people, rather by opaque algorithms controlled by a handful of mega-entities, Facebook / Twitter / Youtube; clicking the 'like' button is merely a loose signal.

Democracy needs healthy competition in the news space.

> But that is different than clicking 'like' button on a deluge of information nobody has the time to validate for accuracy or relevance.

This is exhausting. Over and over again in this thread, I see people use dramatic rhetoric to describe in sweeping terms what Facebook should or should not be allowed to do, but there's seldom any discussion of actual concrete and specific rules.

You say people shouldn't have like buttons? Well, what about HN? Why should't I be able to upvote a comment? Why shouldn't I be able to like a tweet? Is it okay if I have to type out "I like this" instead of clicking a like button?

I get that you're dissatisfied with the current social media environment, but expressions of vague dissatisfaction combined with angry rhetoric don't move us forward. We need to put specific proposals on the table, not just rail against "opaque algorithms" generally.

(Also, the algorithms being "opaque" isn't the problem. I'm sure that people would still have a problem with FB feed ranking even if the code were open source.)

> We need 5000 professional news outlets competing for the public's trust.

The target has been stated. Are you in or are you happy with the social-media era status quo? If you are in, at least in principle, then constructive comments help. If you are out, and happy with FB+Twt+YtB running the show, perhaps with a politically appointed bureaucratic hypercentralized 'oversight board' on top, then enjoy the brave new world. No amount of specific proposals are going to change your mind.

Who gets to decide what's a professional news outlet? In our new world, everyone is a news outlet, and that's a good thing. If there's one thing that the last decade should have taught us, it's that a professional information gatekeeping class will withhold and distort information to drive its own agenda. Information access needs to be broadly distributed and permissionless, with no line drawn between a "news outlet" and a regular person.

Deep down, what proponents of FB regulation are terrified of the this disintermediated model, and it's repulsive to me to imagine that there's some committee that decides who gets an audience and who doesn't.

Who decides what's a professional painter? Car builder? Software engineer? The market. A healthy market needs a ton of providers and a ton of consumers. The news market in the social media era is not healthy.

Historical precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...

I agree that the social media monopolies need to be busted. All I'm saying is that I don't believe in privileging a credentialed journalist class.

Fair enough. I don't believe that either.

>>Classifying reigning in massive disinformation campaigns and divisive propaganda as censorship is disingenuous at best.

This is the kind censorship I've personally been subjected to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734

Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:

https://i.ibb.co/N7XYpkH/Screenshot-20211005-081040-Facebook...

Like Greenwald said, it's a giant scam, with the "fact-checkers" amongst the most egregious purveyors of disinformation.

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