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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Fact checking is imperfect, but what's the alternative? Social media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people firmly in control of Democrat party" type articles, and various and sundry other garbage. Combine that with Brandolini's law, and the whole thing is just a sewer. As we've seen during the pandemic with anti-vaccine nonsense, this has cost people their lives.

It's easy to point out flaws, but like anything, it's trickier to build something better.

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> Social media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people firmly in control of Democrat party" type articles, and various and sundry other garbage.

How do you feel about telephones, public spaces, or even private spaces that allow information like this to be spread? What about books?

It's a lot easier to just go along with things that nobody asked you permission to do anyway than to point out flaws. Also, by "flaws," are you including the opinion that "fact-checking" as practiced is bad and shouldn't be done? That rings strangely; you wouldn't say that somebody telling you not to eat cyanide is pointing out a flaw in your eating of cyanide.

You're arguing in bad faith if you think that books or telephones have the same kinds of dynamics that social media does. And if you want to pick examples from those, no one forces local book stores to carry some racist screed calling for the extermination of a group of people. They can choose to not do that, the same as Facebook can choose to not publish something. The problem is that there are multiple, competing bookstores, so while it's unlikely that most of them are going to publish the racist screed, there certainly exist stores that will carry books with varying points of view. Facebook, on the other hand, benefits from positive network externalities to the point where for some people it becomes 'the internet'.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-... - this stuff has real world consequences. What's the best way to deal with that? I think we all agree that "quash all debate and dissent" is not good. But "just let people post whatever, wherever with no consequences" is not great either. I don't have all the answers.

Back in the olden days, they were looked at as weirdos and ignored.

Right, back in the olden days, you'd have a couple of drunk guys at the end of the bar ranting about their BS, and at most, you'd just kind of give them some room. Maybe people might start avoiding the bar if it regularly filled up with angry loons. Now their rants get spread far and wide across the internet.

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