It's time to get back to our roots around free expression | Hacker News Reader

It's time to get back to our roots around free expression

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68 pointsmrtksn126 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...

The issue is not necessarily the policy changes by themselves but rather the context in which they are occuring, the very suspicious timing, which makes it look like Zuck is simply catering to the newly elected President. That's the opposite of "free speech" and eliminating bias.

And the notion suggested by Zuck that Texas is somehow less biased than California is ridiculous. Perhaps if he had suggested a swing state like Wisconsin, for example (which happens to have some empty space available where a Foxconn factory was never built).

Indeed. This is corporate America’s version of bending the knee.

Yes, corporate America is bending the knee and paying for the coronation of Trump and/or Musk.

Another reminder that we may end up, occasionally, on the same side as corporate America, but that their reason to be is profit, not some moral cause, no matter how they're painting it.

That being said, if I were Zuck or Dorsey, I'd hate to have been involuntarily made arbiter of proper communication, and I'd jump on the first opportunity to pass the responsibility to whoever is willing to take it.

Exactly, thank you. Between this "getting back to our roots thing" and this[0] development this week, it's obvious what this actually is.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...

A very smart business plan from a businessman

Which reveals the lie that business serves people. Competition, free markets, best product wins, blah, blah, blah. It's all nonsense.

He isnt saying texas is less bias, but from public perception perspective, california is biased.

He is literally saying that Texas is less biased:

"Fifth, we're going to move out trust and safety and account moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we're going to work with President Trump..."

In your quote he says there's less concern about bias, not that there is less bias. That's an important distinction imho

Less concern from whom?

The people who will soon be waving big, scary, regulatory sticks in his direction, presumably.

> but from public perception perspective, california is biased

The public perception pushed by whom, specifically?

every place is biased, everyone has biases... the question is whether the biases have anything to do with reality

Dana White is joining Meta’s board of directors:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337670/meta-board-of-dir...

Haven't they noticed what a complete cluster fuck "Community Notes" are on Twitter? Just way to easy to game and just way, waay to easy for hordes of trolls to "Community note" real accounts into oblivion. For example, a note on a story may read: "This image is likely AI-generated. Source: Some Random Post". Except Some Random Post is written by an idiot who is completely wrong. Doesn't matter one bit because the troll hordes can generate more clicks on the up button than the honest users can generate on the down button.

You're assuming Meta's goal is to prevent misinformation and disinformation.

Community Notes aren't simply voted on by counting clicks on an up button, it's more sophisticated than that. Go sign up and do some rating yourself to see how it works.

CNs are vastly superior to the NGO swamp Facebook have been funding for the past decade:

1. The CN community focus on the ordinary boring stuff that NGOs ignore. A huge number of community notes are highlighting financial scams, obfuscated adverts, stuff faked for viral engagement and so on. They aren't political but this is the bulk of what needs fact checking on social networks. Because they're crowd sourced, CN posters are incredibly good at this and easily identify obscure videos or pictures that have been taken out of context (or indeed AI generated). In contrast the ecosystem that FB funded seemed to focus primarily on contentious political claims.

2. To go live a CN needs agreement from people across the political spectrum. The algorithm behind this decision is quite smart. It's reminiscent of the old Slashdot meta-moderation system, for instance you are asked to rate notes across multiple different criteria that come with objective definitions. The result is that CNs are almost always written in a neutral style that just briefly presents facts with sources, and the extremely biased "fact checks" of the sort that have been embarrassing Facebook for years are basically absent. By the nature of the system sometimes bad CNs appear briefly, but they get fixed quickly.

3. Because it's algorithmic and anyone can write notes, it doesn't discriminate in favour of the rich and powerful. Elon Musk gets community noted, he even sometimes just posts stuff and then asks CN specifically to check it. Facebook's "fact checks" were written by the sort of people who simply assume academics, civil servants and activists are always right, with the result that they never fact checked such people even when they were saying things that were completely wrong.

4. They are much more concise.

5. Even the name is better. They don't claim to be final judgements of truth, just notes created and voted on by an amorphous community. This is a much more defensible claim: much of the scorn towards fact checkers acknowledged by Zuck is because they claim to be "checking facts" but often just pick fights or try to block true facts they don't like.

Agree with all that, but would counter for Musk's CN's specifically there is definitely monkey business going on. Most of the CNs never show up for his disinfo, so either he's manually removing them or they are getting brigaded to hell.

Sometimes Musk does post a factual claim that's wrong in some way, specifically asks for a fact check, or posts something misleading, and then a CN does appear. Examples:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876435054622388257 (from yesterday)

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876554867785007175

But why not sign up for a CN account like I did and go look. Last time I did this almost every tweet he posted had a gazillion proposed CNs but one of the rules that the community is good at enforcing is that a CN is not meant for just arguing with someone. Many of the proposed CNs on Musk's posts didn't meet the criteria to be a note and so they get meta-moderated out on the grounds of "no note needed" (NNN), which is the reason people pick when a tweet isn't making a factual claim to begin with.

Most of what Musk posts are either opinions or just retweets, and arguing with an opinion is always supposed to be marked as NNN. And CNs go on the original tweet not retweets.

There is no note on the first one.

I’m agreeing with you.

Twitter used to have a problem with retaliation if you dared talk back or correct the “wrong person” (mass reporting, suspending, taking down anyone who bruises an influencers massive ego - which still works unfortunately and is still a problem under Musk. But CN made sure this wouldn’t happen to you for telling the truth.)

Or a minor nitpicking comment or correction becomes a flame war and now someone’s digging up your high school year book photo or your DUI mugshot from 20 years ago. (Root cause being, again, twitters retaliatory culture) CN just kinda stops people from shooting the messenger.

And sometimes the messenger sucks but still has a point.

CN is a twitter-specific solution to Twitter-specific problems.

It would have also been good if they’d stop suspending people with no human review just because an influencers army of flying monkeys reported them. It “only” takes about 50 and then you’re done forever and all appeals denied. This is one of several reasons I don’t use Twitter, none of which are political or about it’s supposed “owner.”

You can’t block these guys, god forbid you reply to one- no thanks

> Community Notes aren't simply voted on by counting clicks on an up button, it's more sophisticated than that. Go sign up and do some rating yourself to see how it works.

I did. I was almost immediately locked out since too many people disagreed with me. And no, it is not more sophisticated than that. Users have become very good at exploiting the system resulting in only clicks counting.

> To go live a CN needs agreement from people across the political spectrum.

This is false and is not the "security hatch" you think it is. Rather than arguing these points, just look at a few suggested CNs:

Tweet: "A white grooming gang caught abusing 30 girls. The youngest was 5. Why did this not receive as much attention?" CN: "It did get attention which is demonstrated from the screen grab attached to the post which is from the BBC website."

The CN is not correcting misinformation. It attempts to argue with the twitterer because, apparently, replying is not good enough. Another one:

Tweet: "Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent" CN: "The full article says Israel admitted to harvesting organs from deceased IDF soldiers. Israel denies the claims of harvesting organs from Palestinians, which originated from a Swedish news outlet. No evidence exists that Israel harvested organs from Palestinians at this time."

Except the CN is wrong and Israel indeed harvested organs from slain Palestinians: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24590832 Another one:

Tweet: "Rennes are completing Brice Samba deal from RC Lennes as planned, it’s all set to be sealed." CN: "The team is called RC Lens, not Lennes."

The CN author is collecting points here. Correcting a misspelled name of a football team doesn't add much, but by doing so the author can farm karma for use on more impactful notes. Another:

Tweet: "Shut up, Elon Musk! We don‘t want your fascism in Europe!" CN: "Elons actions don‘t seem to support the claim of fascism according to the defining 14 Points of fascism of Umberto Eco:"

Again someone who prefers the CN feature over replying. Yet another, from the former president:

Tweet: "Four years ago, violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials, and assaulted brave law enforcement officers." CN: "Neither Trump, or any of the January 6th defendants, were indicted, charged or convicted of "insurrection" as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot. Calling the rioters "violent insurrectionists" does not accurately reflect any of the charges filed. "

Yeah, that just, uh, your opinion, man.

These examples are all from English Twitter, where the huge number of users balance the situation out somewhat. On Swedish Twitter, where a famous left-wing politician might collect 20 likes for a tweet if they are lucky (drawback of being only 10M people), the right-wing trolls utterly dominate. If one politicians complains about high electricity prices the trolls will be there with a CN about how "they destroyed nuclear power" (utterly false BS) or if it's about crime the CN will be about how "you let the immigrants in".

> Because it's algorithmic and anyone can write notes, it doesn't discriminate in favour of the rich and powerful.

Uhu. They said the same thing about Wikipedia, didn't they? In reality, fanatics with a lot of free time on their hand and those who can pay for meat puppets will decide what the truth is.

I believe he is being honest. I remember him making similar remarks in the past, saying they don't want to be the arbiters of truth. Most tech companies were like this before, but they were pressured by some other force to censor. Glad to see that's changing.

It’s bad for society that peddlers of stupidity can do so at scale and for little cost. We now have millions of people doubting the benefits of the polio vaccine. This disinformation is spread primarily through a few websites. It seems to me that they ought to have some responsibility to restrict destructive disinformation.

Free speech should not include disinformation, which is an attack on society.

Of course, the devil is in the details of enforcement: who watches the watchmen?

When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people. There is a problem with bad ideas spreading quickly on the internet, but censorship hasn't helped with this imo.

> When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people.

That sounds superficially reasonable, but I don't think that it's true.

Turn the sentence around: "when you spread ideas more widely, they become more attractive to a large number of people". Repetition works. It's why trillions gets spent on advertising each year.

Anti-vaccine sentiment didn’t arise due to suppression. It arose due to the ease of cheaply spreading a message on social media. We ran the experiment and see the results.

Websites like this? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1383764/

and why shouldn't they be forced to censor?

they are regarded by society as the arbiters of truth, regardless if they wish to be or not.

not that i'm a fan of censorship, but if a foreign power's strategy is to sow mass disinformation, it's up to the corporation to stop it.

don't like it, Mark? you don't have to have $100 billion either, you could willingly give all of it up.

No they aren’t, most people know Facebook is mostly filled with bullshit.

I have heard this argument directly from Zuck once on a Friday long ago, but a few things:

1. Since then the rise of LLMS has made it easy to accomplish censorship without preventing anyone from speaking. Just drown out voices of moderation with endless engagement bait, or create a network of bots to make it seem like tons of people are reporting a particular community note as inappropriate.

2. The second half of Zuck's thought at the time was that moderation should be more community-oriented -- that communities around the world should have more freedom to make their own decisions around what kind of content was appropriate speech. Unfortunately while I see a gesture in this direction with community notes, it doesn't appear that the community has been given any power to stop a hateful message from being amplified.

Getting your community to fact-check is certainly cheaper.

Back to our roots of free work, sorry, expression.

Also it opens a new field of commercialization in the social media space, in a time where troll farms seem like a legitimate business.

This isn't about saving money on tooling or reviewers. This is about the incoming Trump administration and not wanting to have him decide to point his administration at Facebook because he is pissed at them.

This is exactly right. All hail Trump. All bow and worship Trump. We’re watching in real time a phenomena that I think is not new to the world, but new to America.

Once they go after somebody like Mark Cuban and Khodorkovsky him, it’ll all make sense.

Or rather, the anonymous hive-mind is now deciding if something is factually correct. Completely unaccountable, perfect for social media.

So, just like normal then?

I don't disagree with being cynical about social media, but community belief is the overwhelming mechanism by which fact is decided throughout history, including now.

A community can certainly have beliefs, doesn't make them true in a factual sense. Some things are "decided" by the majority opinion, like how we think of gender. Others have an objective truth, whether the majority likes it or not.

"Community belief", or the appearance of it, can be engineered by a bad actor with sufficient resources: an authoritarian state, a think-tank with sufficiently rich sponsors, or the platform itself.

Honestly one thing that works well on Twitter is community notes (and better than "fact checking")

The technology now exists that allows the company to offload the ugly business of "fact checking" onto users. It's a pretty clever algorithm, and if they implement it transparently like on X, then it means they can avoid a whole class of criticisms and accusations. This is a no brainer for Meta.

This is interesting. I welcome it.

The cynical side of me knows that the content review humans are expensive. “Community Notes” is (I assume) volunteer. So it may also be a bit of a cost-cutting measure.

Maybe also a keeping Trump happy measure, given that he's been threatening Zuckerberg.

Which is sad.

All these centibillionaires kissing the ring is just sad.

They have the money, economic might, and social capital to not have to engage with Trump.

Instead, they kiss his ass. Why?

* hectobillionaire

A centibillionaire is worth ten million.

Because they tacitly acknowledge that Trump is an authoritarian who will come after them, if they dont kiss the ring. They would rather keep their wealth and freedom than do battle with an authoritarian.

Yes, and they willingly served him all the ability to become an authoritarian and handed him power.

Mark could EASILY turn around and say to Trump "you know what, motherfucker? I got you in power, I looked the other way in '16, in '20, and I willingly allowed foreign actors to amplify you and your messaging. I own you. You want to play hardball with me? I'll release EVERYTHING. Watch me".

Trump has a history of wanting to be a dictator, but he also has a history of backing down when people more powerful or wealthier than him have the ability to prove his ass is nothing but a fraud. He once tried to sue his biographer when his biographer claimed he wasn't a billionaire. When the biographer wouldn't back down, Trump was the one to back down when it became clear he would be subject to discovery. Turns out "I'm really a billionaire, believe me!" doesn't really work in a court of law if you can't prove it. Especially when several decades of your taxes won't be released because it would prove what we've known all along - Donald Trump actually sucks at business.

It's the same reason that companies within Nazi Germany had to make nice with Hitler.

There's an authoritarian in charge who will use all capabilities of the government to harass his opponents. The Supreme Court said that Trump can do whatever he wants, so you can kiss the ring or watch him seize or shut down your business.

I mean, arguably, the installation of a lot of these processes were also driven by the government (and whoever was president at the time.)

I think the pressure to keep it family friendly, and not be an anything-goes shitshow, is more from advertisers who don't want their ads to appear beside anything objectionable. I don't known how that works with FaceBook or Twitter (who are bleeding advertisers), but with print media advertisers apparently get to specify lists of words (pertaining to objectionable subject matter) that disqualify articles from appearing alongside their ad.

The majority of FaceBook's business is advertising, so that is presumably their primary concern (or at least was, until Trump's threats have become an issue).

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

So say X, FB and the company they keep.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627

Roots? FB's roots are frat boy pranks and backstabbing your actual friends. Better headline: Billionaire backtracks on freespeech after a private meeting with a much more powerful billionaire to discuss ways of making amends for his pesky commitment to a well-informed society.

> his pesky commitment to a well-informed society.

You shouldn’t get high this early.

Does "suddenly politically inexpedient performative pandering program he calls a fact-checking" solution work better? I didn't want to go in for the edit.

I understand that fact checkers and moderators can have biases but surely this new direction needs to be coupled with some more robust bot detection and abuse systems to stop people gaming things like “community notes”

Did they make any distinction between allowing hate and lies and giving them the full force of viral engagement-baiting?

Sounds like lots of ideas and principles copied over from the much-maligned X?!

It doesn’t mean it’s good. I’m happy to malign Facebook too.

The "X" that shuts down speech its owner doesn't like, and that openly said they were going to "change the algorithm to promote positivity" now that the president he helped elect stepped up? Jesus

X is far less censored than any other social media platform of comparable size.

The billionaires are all kneeling to kiss the Trump/Musk rings, yes.

All the companies announcing they're ditching diversity programs, WaPo and LA Times refusing to endorse candidates, Tim Cook donating to inauguration. It'll keep coming.

Ahh isn't it great when a fraction of a percent at the top wield such immense power over the lives of everyone else?

Varoufakis is right, we live in a feudalism of sorts, and the fief lords have to swear fealty to their liege.

The ideas are from the Bill of Rights.

Which are that the government can't censor speech. Forcing a private entity to support any form of speech is actually against the first amendment, it is compelled speech.

Who's forcing what? They are just inspired by it, at least that's what the comment you are replying to is saying. If a private corporation wants to support or enable free speech, they are allowed to, just like you said. This is literally from Facebook itself so I'm not sure who is compelling who.

Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything.

Meta, as a large and powerful entity with the ability to censor as much or more than many governments, is opting to allow free speech on its platforms. So is X. That spirit is inspired by the Bill of Rights, not Elon Musk.

Which bit of "Congress shall make no law" did you interpret to state "Congress (and Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, etc.) shall not..."?

If you’re going to attempt to be pedantic, can you at least work on basic reading comprehension?

The concept of a large and powerful entity allowing free speech is in the spirit of the Bill of Rights, whether the large and powerful entity is government or not.

The parent poster was taking the position that allowing speech is somehow a Musk-derived idea, which is absurd.

The spirit of the Bill of Rights is to restrict primarily the Federal government. The First Amendment didn't even apply to states (let alone businesses) until after we had a civil war, the Fourteenth Amendment, and a SCOTUS case in 1925 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v._New_York / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...).

They had no intention of broadly protecting free speech in general. They just didn't want Congress specifically messing with it.

> The parent poster was taking the position that allowing speech is somehow a Musk-derived idea, which is absurd.

On that we can agree.

"Our content moderation team in California was too liberal, so we are replacing all of them with Texans, who will have zero bias of their own of course."

Cozying up to Trump and gang and making it easier to add AI features that hallucinate nonsense.

They all kiss the ring of Trump now. With success: Trump already betrayed his MAGA and sides with Musk over H1B visas:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/politics/trump-musk-h1b-v...

Further expected betrayals:

- Trump will not release the JFK files, which he unambiguously promised during the election campaign while standing next to RFK junior.

- Trump will not finish the wall, because Republican farmers need their slave labor.

There is still some hope that in foreign policy Trump will deliver. It is bad for Europe though, since Trump will perpetuate the LNG grift and the destruction of Europe's economy.

>Trump will not finish the wall, because Republican farmers need their slave labor.

True, which is why he built a few miles of the wall for like $20 billion (and destroyed some protected wildlife lands in the process) and claimed it was a job done, while leaving literally thousands of miles of his wall unbuilt. And then had the nerve to campaign on immigration.

Truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes.

He said he's going to work with Trump to fight against foreign countries censoring American social media companies?

Are foreign countries not allowed self-determination?

EU citizen here, what in heck is happening right now?

>EU citizen here, what in hell is happening right now?

The EU chose themselves to be US vassals, to be technologically outdated and to move from GDP parity in 2008 to being half the US economy 15 years later. Every problem that we face can be traced to the technocrat idiots in Brussels.

And this relates to Trump, Musk, and Zuck shoving their politics down our throats how?

Their GDP is bigger, so we just give up self-determination? Maybe in your country the people who fought for freedom are all dead now, not here. F all that. We are barely 2 generations free here. Not going back.

Their GDP is bigger, their army protects us - so at any point in time Trump can say "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further" and we have to suck it up.

Do you really think that Europe cannot defend itself against Russia, a country with a GDP less than that of only Italy, whose military is currently so destroyed that it relies on North Korea to defend its own borders?

Under Trump, I believe it is already priced-in that he would do nothing to uphold his NATO obligations. That ship has already sailed in sober-minded circles.

>Do you really think that Europe cannot defend itself against Russia, a country with a GDP less than that of only Italy, whose military is currently so destroyed that it relies on North Korea to defend its own borders?

Doesn't matter what i think. This what all of western european leaders say. Do you say that our governments would lie to us?

Can you share a link of Western European leaders saying that they are not able to defend ourselves without the USA? I am honestly unaware of any such public statement. This smells a lot like RU propaganda.

However, it would be cool if even more countries started to spend their NATO required GDP on defense.

Those numbers seem quite exaggerated, I think since 2008 the US economy has grown around 40 percent, EU around 25? So definitely more growth but hardly a ratio of 2, or where do you get your numbers?

The US is succumbing its deep desire to be a fascist state with trappings of deep south slave culture.

That sounds very inflammatory, however, if it looks like a duck... it sure as hell swims like duck...

Fight means here: Influence the political landscape in Europe how Musk is already starting. So not lobbying but spreading opinion/propaganda etc like Russia and China are doing to change the election outcomes.

We are allowed to self-determine us. But that would mean kick out X, Youtube, FB, Instagram, etc. Good luck explaining that your social media addicted relatives.

Tarifs etc, will just backfire into the revenues of the US economics.

> But that would mean kick out X...

See what happened in Brazil, and we are a 2x larger market just in population, 8x in GDP. That is the entire point of the EU. We are too big to ignore together. 345M in the US vs. 449M in the EU.

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

... blowing in the wind, the times they are a changin' ... (on January 20th)

No coincidence this was announced a day after Trump's election victory was certified, methinks.

More like everyone under the age of 50 is abandoning Facebook and boomers are all they have left.

“We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.”

Some of the things said by Congress members are wildly bigoted, Mark must really want to suck up to Trump.

This applies to Threads and Instagram, too, I guess?

Threads is pretty much a flop compared to bluesky. A lot of people really don't trust facebook/meta.

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in the world. Sadly people don't care.

> Threads is pretty much a flop compared to bluesky.

By what metric, exactly?

That's silly. The Constitution says "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."

For example, House Rule XVII ("DECORUM AND DEBATE") says "Remarks in debate (which may include references to the Senate or its Members) shall be confined to the question under debate, avoiding personality."

If Congress is the reference, then Facebook gets to define what "disorderly Behaviour" is, just like the House and Senate get to define for themselves what "disorderly Behavior" means.

If the House is the ideal for how to have debate, then Facebook debate must also avoid personality.

Facebook can do whatever they want, I’m just not going to be on a platform where I see a bunch of misinformation or blatant racist content like X.

I agree they can do whatever they want (so long as it's legal).

What's silly is comparing themselves to Congressional floor debates as if that's at all relevant.

That’s from the post from Mark. You should read it.

Yes, I know it is, I'm saying his argument is silly. Would you prefer 'disingenuous' or 'irrelevant' or 'meaningless'?

I'd prefer they got back to their roots of having a simple, time-ordered wall of posts from only your friends.

There was a way to make a custom feed, I forgot what tab its under, but I would group friends and it was always chronological. The Facebook site is a massive beast of so many experiments. Kind of like Google products.

It's there, you just can't make it your default view.

Don't you think that the heat-based walls are good too? I'm big fan of HN because of it. The /new tab is available and I sometimes checking it but I love the home page of HN and I love that it's (mostly) what everyone sees at the same time.

They are also good, but outside a more or less homogeneous bubble with no incentive for monetization it quickly becomes a cesspool dictated by "the algorithm".

HN doesnt have sponsored content that can be heated up via monetization.

Turns out you can train the algorithm to go back to "just posts from friends" by clicking the little X top right corner of the posts you don't want.

I had almost given up on the feed, it was turning into a bunch of posts from groups that I wasn't really interested in. I did a little searching, found this suggestion, and after a bit of clicking it seems to work. Now it's just friend posts (and ads, but I assume that's the inevitable price).

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr will give you just your friends posts (and ads, of course).

https://socialfixer.com/ is a browser extension that can clean up your home feed, but only on the desktop.

Anything that moves us in the direction of free speech and free expression is ultimately better in the long term even if it means a rise in some misinformation and undesirable topics in the short term. No tyranny can ever truly take hold in societies where information flows freely and generously.

Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes, but I wish people would engage instead of just bury this post, unless of course you’re an advocate for censorship.

Outdated view, I'm afraid.

I might agree with you regarding free speech and free expression if it wasn't, as is increasingly happening, shaped and manipulated either by algorithms or basic, out-in-the-open policy.

For example, I took a look at X for the first time in ages the other day via xcancel ... it was even more of a cesspit than it has been where horrible voices were shown first because they had a blue tick (which is not a signifier of any form of quality) and many reasonable voices are drowned out.

If this is the trend for all networks (and we see here Zuckerberg capitulating here unsurprisingly), then a time will quickly come where these billionaires will shape narrative quickly and easily.

And, of course, that time is already here, "just not evenly distributed".

Well it’s not enough to simply remove censorship, platforms must also not promote any one opinion over the other. So no more blue ticks getting priority.

It's funny that you should bemoan no engagement when the engagement I gave you was so much rage-bait that it was downvoted and censored, because um, we still have ways of moderating speech in this forum

Information is now relegated by the anointed as a weapon us peons are too stupid or naive to weild.

You are correct, but that just means your opinion offends the anointed, and thus is similarly buried.

> No tyranny can ever truly take hold in societies where information flows freely and generously.

Plenty of tyranny can take hold in societies which can no longer distinguish between information and effluent.

Here is a an article about the announcement, including the video transcript: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-replace-...

Overall, IMHO, it is great news. Opinions should be faced with opinions, lies should be faced with exposes as it has been done since the beginning of humanity. I am sure that many people will see this in different light(like this Daily Mail article titled "Mark Zuckerberg's stunning censorship admission as he seeks to suck-up to Trump") but I think this is the only way to counter the rise of fascism. Why? Because when censors and fact checkers are wrong crooks become freedom fighters and truth seekers.

What should be regulated, I think, is frauds like pretending to be multiple people to sway opinions, bots pretending to be people to give impression that something is popular or using algorithms to distribute opinions and content that favors a particular side without being explicit about it or falsifying data to give impression that something receives support. Humans are used to lying or horrible people and we have social mechanisms to deal with these. What we can't deal with is fakery.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14258989/mark-zucke...

> Opinions should be faced with opinions, lies should be faced with exposes as it has been done since the beginning of humanity

Yes they should be, but this is actually a fairly new invention. A fantastic one.

Explained extremely well in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth Hardcover by Jonathan Rauch.

https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch...

Not affiliated, just a happy and now more-informed reader.

It feels like everything is up for debate now, yet it has never been less productive to debate anyone on anything. Truth is gone, conceptually superseded.

I agree but I blame it on the structure. People are at different stages of understanding something and on the social media everyone at every stage debates at the same time. In real life, we we progress through a path and when someone who is just starting comes up with the same questions we debated some time ago we don't simply go back and do it again. That newbie is handled by appropriate group until they catch up.

I don't think it's a matter of experience, it's a matter of belief. I just engaged someone who was adamant that someone who said "Q is legit" and "It's okay to be white" doesn't have necessarily have a right wing drift because if you take the reasonable out of reasonable doubt, you can always doubt something.

Yes, truth is gone. But, we should never lose hope that things will straighten out again eventually.

It should not be possible to blindly push clearly idiotic and false information through a system without saveguards.

I can have a conversation with my friends without fact checking every single word they say.

And no we as humans had and still have a system of trust and respect. Respect has to be earned but when you got it, people trust you more. We did this because its more energy efficient to be able to trust others and not getting scamed left and right.

Your argument "Because when censors and fact checkers are wrong crooks become freedom fighters and truth seekers." is a 1000x times less important than not sharing all the garbage first and we never had a system like social media before.

Did you forget that Elon Musk just bought himself his position?

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