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Comment by howunfortunate | Hacker News Reader

That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.

The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.

In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.

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I didn’t propose a standard. I proposed a principle. The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

But since you apparently have a better one, how about you propose a standard?

Is it that anyone can post anything?

Sorry, I'm getting distracted by this:

> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?

I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.

I've just articulated the logic by which that principle can produce the outcome.

If you disagree with the logic, then identify which part you disagree with. Here are your options:

1. Content moderation teams should not have been suspicious of an unsourced, anonymous story on NYPost based on allegedly stolen material

2. Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts

Which is it?

The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.

Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.

Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.

It's a good principle but it's been empirically proven that it doesn't work out that way in reality. Misinformation does not get effectively countered by spreading true information after the misinformation has spread. Even spreading it alongside (like with community notes) gives mixed results.

Certain misinformation "works", but censorship also "works", so unless you can detect false information with 0.0% bias, that puts the platform's finger on the scale.

I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community than information assymetries from whoever happens to have control over the platforms, and is willing to use censorship.

I'd also like to add that a lot of these misinformation studies ironically wound up using information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab) as their "misinformation" - so in a way I'm glad that countering with "true" information didn't unilaterally work.

> I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community

Ah this must be why you're confused. You think the hazard that platforms are trying to manage is from "individuals within the community" and not, for example, foreign intelligence services.

> information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab)

Lmao uh oh. The mark of the terminally-online has been revealed! Hilarious how many Twitterites have come to simply believe that COVID originated from a lab over the last year or two despite zero new evidence emerging in favor of that theory, and actually tons of evidence against it emerging since then. It's almost like if read false information enough times, you'll just presume it to be true... Curious ain't it?

Ironically, the "new evidence" that emerged was in fact "old evidence" that was suppressed.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/new-doc-drop-slack-m...

https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...

Try re-reading the above comment.

You are (mistakenly) substantiating it though: there has not been new evidence in favor of the lab leak in several years! You're right!

Meanwhile, evidence in favor of a natural origin has continued to pile up.

So that would be option (2), correct? Is there a reason why you didn't just say "Option 2: Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts"

It's been a long time that I've had an engagement with someone with such bad faith. It's really disappointing to see it on Hacker News.

Ah yes, mister 50 day old account, carry on with your evasiveness.

It's telling that you refuse to just follow your own logic and rationale even just a single step further.

> Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

This is provably false, as in this is not how speech online functions.

The whole system of suppression today, is built around the idea of flooding the channels with more content than can be assessed and analyzed. A room full of people shouting and no one having the time to understand.

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