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I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the offic

• emn13 5y ago
  That's not fair. But excesses like that are related to the same underlying problem, which is lack of nuance, trust, and honesty in public debate. Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire. But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion. Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers. Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions. ...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.
  • marvin 5y ago
    I agree that there's merit to some of your points. But at the same time, some of this borders on the tautological when it comes to the challenges of our time. On a personal level, I find this story to be more of a funny (tragic?) anecdote than a degrading violation of rights. What does it say about the direction our society is headed? Facebook is the only public forum where I (or any of most people) could have significant reach in this discussion. Letter to the editor? Couldn't have gotten it published at the time. My Slack groups of highly-educated, economically powerful friends and acquaintances? Sure, and through those channels we all had access to much better curated information than any official channel. Friends and family? You bet. Local Reddit groups? Sure, all of the 30 people who read it. This isn't only an issue regarding times of crisis. Access to precise information in matters big and small is increasingly filtered through similar mechanisms. Economic decisions, career advice, knowledge of how to best position oneself in the world and so on. All trends channel these advantages to a smaller and smaller elite that is capable of making sense of the world, where finding the useful truths in a sea of uncertain signals is increasingly difficult. I'm not really suggesting a solution, rather pointing out that this is an insidious challenge with great potential to cause strife if we can't figure out a way to properly democratize it. It works well if you're really smart or well-connected. Not so much otherwise.