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> What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines? My opinion is a very sarcastic "oh no, someone's
by core-questions 6y ago
> What's your opinion on the massive wave of disinformation and blatant lies regarding elections and vaccines?
My opinion is a very sarcastic "oh no, someone's wrong on the internet!!" followed by moving on with my life.
Guess what: when I want reliable factual information, I don't go to Twitter. I can't imagine doing that. If someone is getting their information from their, their process is broken; if they drifted into doing that, they probably _never_ had a process of getting valid information. They probably believed the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News.
Perhaps it shouldn't actually matter what they think; when something is important enough, it becomes an order, no?
Really, under the current liberal world order, there's no strict requirement that anybody has to know anything, or that anyone is united in belief about anything. I don't know if it matters to me personally any more if people are "wrong". Maybe this is because I see intelligent, otherwise-well-informed people being wrong about plenty of things on a regular basis? I can't go around correcting everyone, especially since it really doesn't even work anyway. You must have noticed this yourself by now; perhaps 0.01% of the time an online discussion actually results in someone else changing their mind.
Either way I can't imagine these twitter precautions helping anyone to change their opinion; it's just extremely patronizing, at the very least, and has the very real risk of damaging free speech online, which is already suffering slings and arrows enough.
> Should some people be allowed to blatantly lie and deceive and manipulate the public
Look, there's information about COVID that is absolutely true and absolutely false, and there's information that is up in the air; we have to be able to question things in order to advance; and people in general deserve the right to discuss their fears and frustrations with their peer group. If you think a little nanny-state advisory button is going to really stop that need, or do _anything_ to bring people back into the fold who have gone seeking alternative explanations, you'd kidding yourself. It's absolutely a valid thing to ask whether the cure is worse than the disease, in this case and in the case of many other societal problems, and if we deny people the opportunity to have honest conversations about this, we are curtailing one of their most important freedoms.
Like I said, when it becomes important, it becomes orders. It doesn't matter what you think about masks, you put one on or you can't ride the bus....
As far as your election is concerned, as a Canadian, I just endured four years of your media (the trusted sources! not randos on twitter!) complaining the 2016 Trump election was rigged and hacked, only for it to eventually come out that no, nothing Cambridge Analytica did mattered at all - https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ico_cambridge_seo/ , no, it wasn't hacked by the Russians, it was all just a big bunch of crap. Whether this was to distract Democrats from the fact that the real steal that year was Bernie's chance at the primary, or for some other end, we'll never be sure....
Four years of it, bleeding over the border, removed a lot of the legitimacy your media used to have to put itself in any kind of position as an arbiter of facts. Now, the Republicans have lost their election, and are doing their damndnest to try to find examples of voter fraud etc. as well, can you not suck up a couple months of that? Can Twitter not just deal with it for a little bit until at least say, after the inauguration, when any chance in hell that these annoying Stop the Steal people are still grifting their fanbase on is finally gone?
> without even having the faintest fact-check or verification?
It doesn't take a genius to see that implementing a Ministry of Truth is not going to bode well for a free society.
(I have some vague ideas about blockchain-powered distributed reputation metrics, free-floating on an exchange, so that I can choose my weighting of truthiness relative to the authorities I respect, which might be different from yours... but that's not on the table here, only entirely-corporate profit-motivated schemes of control are.)