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They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened

• ciarannolan 6y ago
  > Today, we’re announcing a new consumer alert to stand against racism. I read this, laughed, and closed the tab. The world has gone mad.
• lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Wow, I had not seen that from Yelp. That is a horrible idea, and because they control brick and mortar reputation more than anything else, there is nothing that can be done about it. Hopefully they get sued for libel and realize what a dumb approach this is.
• cageface 6y ago
  Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
  • hnracer 6y ago
    Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.
    • cageface 6y ago
      You seriously think the authors of the constitution anticipated Twitter and Facebook?
      • hnracer 6y ago
        Wait... I replied to the wrong comment by accident and can't delete now. Ignore please.
• enumjorge 6y ago
  Understandable. How do you propose we deal with the current wave of propaganda and misinformation that these platforms enable, especially since they’re already having a very real effect on politics all over the world?
  • DethNinja 6y ago
    Add critical thinking and logic lessons to school curriculum. Issue would be solved in about a generation but governments and large companies would hate that.
    • tstrimple 6y ago
      That will never happen in this country. The truth of the situation is, one political party benefits from this ignorance way more than the other, and they are protecting their investment in keeping the electorate ignorant. https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-op... > "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
  • maharashtra 6y ago
    Let's start with domestic journalists who abuse their vastly disproportionate power.
    • scoot_718 6y ago
      So you're part of the "tear down journalism" crowd that are a part of the problem?
      • ForHackernews 6y ago
        The far right have been attacking journalists as "enemies of the people" for a while now. Extreme leftists tend to hate mainstream journalism, too.
• srsQtho00 6y ago
  Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years. James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever. If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.
• tyre 6y ago
  What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns? Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world. No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable. So. What do you propose?
  • RandomTisk 6y ago
    People tend to over-inflate the potential impact of fake information sources. False information tends to hurt people and we're extremely adept at recognizing false agents, whether they be random tweets, facebook posts or media outlets. Some people walk around so afraid of someone spreading a lie that could hurt them that they insist on authoritarian controls on speech but the fear is completely unfounded. For smart intelligent people, false statements create untrustworthy agents. For oppressive despots, false statements are always the most expedient shortcuts to some desired outcome. What countries like China are doing are playing the despot and preventing their people from thinking critically as much as possible, and silicon valley thinks that's a wonderful idea.
  • rndgermandude 6y ago
    We're far from being in a perfect place, but we're in a relatively good place compared to the rest of history. Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think. I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.
  • Karunamon 6y ago
    Having principles hurts sometimes. Sometimes they require you to do things that are painful with the understanding that the alternative is even worse. I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.
• scoot_718 6y ago
  They have to. Doing nothing is so much worse. It won't be an amendment, it'll be the end of the constitution.
• hshs8sis9 6y ago
  The same enlightened people that had negro sex slaves?
• realHistory00 6y ago
  Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years. James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever. If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page. Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years. Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows. It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.
• op03 6y ago
  Temporarily it's fine I think. Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday. There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now. Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.
• raverbashing 6y ago
  > does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices) Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.
• bdamm 6y ago
  They're removing bots. I for one appreciate the lowered noise floor. If a platform (Facebook) is claiming that it's for people, then we should know when a post is from a person or a bot.
• root_axis 6y ago
  > The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Such as?
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Such as, say, Fox News buying Facebook? Or Soros? Or RT buying Twitter? Or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund? Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is?
    • root_axis 6y ago
      > Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is? I don't see how that changes anything except the political leanings of the website operators. Can you explain what the problem is?
      • hnracer 6y ago
        One problem is that the power to vet/censor particular things may be beneficial in a certain pair of hands but disastrous in another, especially when you're dealing with a platform that has extremely powerful network effects and controls so much of the information flow in society. To reiterate the point of the previous comment, would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting? I would not. Naval says that one test of a good system is whether you can hand the keys over to your adversary and things don't go wrong, which applies well in this case. Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting, but I don't trust that any politically tilted group of individuals will engage in unbiased, non-partisan vetting. FB's staff is of a certain political demographic that differs substantially to the country at large and this will likely sway the decision making away from a fair and balanced outcome. If FB or Twitter engages in vetting I would like to see it done in a satellite office set up explicitly for that purpose where great effort is made to select individuals without extreme political leanings.
        • 6y ago
• ben_w 6y ago
  Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The catastrophic failure mode of doing nothing is that democracies vote to stop being democratic, and do so with deafening applause. It has happened before. Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.