in the past few years (let's say, especially since 2015 or so), massive corporations that have control over the vast majority of online discourse have decided t

in the past few years (let's say, especially since 2015 or so), massive corporations that have control over the vast majority of online discourse have decided that they should be our intellectual, moral, and societal safeguards against the amorphous concept of "disinformation." you'd think people would've seen this happening and said, "well now hold on just a minute"—but, through nonstop media cycles spreading propaganda that evokes the primal emotion of fear in a first-world society where we generally don't experience it all that much compared to our ancestors, a large part of the population is fully in favor of these gigantic global corporations each becoming Ministries of Truth, that just so happen to act in lockstep. through conditioning, most people don't see a problem with these websites using their UI to assert supposedly factual truths about the world, with the general idea being, well, if we don't do this, then we're all going to drown in a sea of disinformation, or something. but really, I don't need YouTube asserting to me that the earth is not, in fact, flat, and such a model has in fact been roundly debunked, right there in the UI on the web page for some dumb video I clicked on from Twitter, and I don't need Twitter to do the same, either. I don't need to outsource my critical thinking skills to huge international for-profit corporations, and nobody else should, either. YouTube in particular used to have an amazing solution to this problem: video responses. I would much rather see a list of video responses to a flat-earth video breaking it down and explaining why each part of that video was incorrect (and then a list of flat-earther counter-responses to the responses, etc. etc.), than have YouTube just tell me "these are The Facts, this is Reality, this is The Truth... and yes, we are qualified to determine such things." this just comes naturally to me, and I'm pretty sure it came naturally to lots of people just a few short years ago, but, again, through nonstop media fear porn conditioning, plenty of people feel vulnerable, unsafe, worried, anxious, and they want something they can turn to to tell them what The Truth is. (we used to have it, but then nearly everyone stopped going to church (and then we had coming up on a couple of years of lockdowns, where nearly everyone else, believers included, stopped going to church as well).)