Education was part of it but isn't a silver bullet. I had coworkers that espoused both the 9/11 and the Kenya thing, despite it being easy to rebut. Both were highly educated individuals. https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit... makes the case that there is no hard distinction between social problems and tech problems in online communication, the two are intertwined. This medium itself has moderation, if you tried posting either of the above two conspiracies as facts, you would be flagged and downvoted. That is what makes this forum readable instead of a dumpster fire. If Facebook or twitter did the same, I don't see how that would be an open wound. I don't think facebook and twitter owe people the ability to run misinformation campaigns against jewish people, black people, or anyone else. If you want to do that, go post it on your own blog, email someone, or call them.
Countries with poor welfare systems are that way in large part because there is propaganda against them. Welfare in the US is painted as communist. Same thing with education.
I was hoping to be clearer - FAANG absolutely should be tagging misinformation with some label or correction. [x]
Its deleting posts that gets sticky. And yes your point about Twitter et al lending people some of their reputation / Google juice is a very underrated part of the problem. But how do we define content moderation rules online? Who sets those rules, where and when do they apply? These are not things to leave to private companies with ad revenue.
[x] In fact I think this is too important to leave to tech companies. I would like to see some W3C standard for tagging a URI - that is a distributed comments system where the browser / client SHOULD / MUST show that "in the cloud" there are rebuttals to this statement / position. So the rebuttal is seen where the rebutted is shown. The more views a rebuttal gets the more prominent it is in the list of rebuttals.
Yes it will mean everything everywhere has rebuttal but ... that's kind of true anyway. And I like the upthread approach of a common (W3C) distributed moderation (ie a jury of ones randomly selected peers). I think the idea seems workable - but more study is needed :-)
Should HN not define their own content moderation rules? My view is that governments should have some general moderation rules, no death threats, no CP, ect. Sites should be able to have stricter moderation rules, no claiming that Obama was born in Kenya.
I personally prefer smaller communities like forums such as this one, slack groups, or other forums, compared to Facebook or twitter.
I am not sure how a W3C standard for tagging a URI comment would work. Aren't a lot of URIs not even opinion/fact based things? Like if my uri is a product on Amazon or a piece of sheet music there wouldn't be any rebuttals right? But idk seems interesting, would like to see if it worked.
I think there needs to be baseline levels yes - Inwoukd argue that one of these things is that if a platform enables public publishing (still to be defined!) it must have some rebuttal mechanism, and implement some level of censorship (at the criminal level). This means for example I cannot post (in the UK) child porm or threats or hate speech. Dang would have to delete it. But additionally if i post for example that Democrats stole votes from Kent County, HN should have a means for you to flag it, and link that flag to some useful site about how correlations actually work.
It would change the nature of HN slightly yes, but it could be done with little impact - I think. But having some floor level of debate seems like a social necessity.
PS The Indian issue with WhatsApp a couple of years back makes defining "publish" quite difficult if you can manage to create murderous mobs with opt in messaging systems....
Countries with poor welfare systems are that way in large part because there is propaganda against them. Welfare in the US is painted as communist. Same thing with education.