20 ms·

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banni

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banning of the Wuhan lab leak theory prior to it becoming mainstream. But more broadly, there is a stark imbalance between the resources of the fact-checker (a few minutes or hours to decide) and the author who (e.g. in this case) conducted a month-long, in-depth investigation. The same is true for the author who can be highly specialized in a given topic and the fact-checker who necessarily has to check a wide range of content. Given that, "fact-checking" necessarily has to be overly broad and erring on the side of censorship.

jakobnissen 5y ago
Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.
- logifail 5y ago
  When Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet letter which was published in February 2020 it pretty much shut down any open discussion of origins. "It's of natural origin, or you're a conspiracy theorist". It took the Lancet 16 months(!) to publish a conflict of interest statement revealing that Daszak was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance.
  - ErrolMusk 5y ago
    Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' and allowed him to REMOVE anything that suggested the virus came from a lab. As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime. Facebook ENABLED this coverup
    - bipson 5y ago
      > As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime. > Facebook ENABLED this coverup. Wat? How is this not considered a conspiracy theory? 5 comments down an article that discusses fact checking... Hm, maybe my sarcasm-meter is off by a notch again. dunno.
      - cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
        It hasn't been considered a conspiracy theory since the CSPAN video from 2016 surfaced showing him talking about paying someone in China to make killer viruses. It's at the following link, at about the 1 hour 17 minute mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y
    - logifail 5y ago
      > Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' [..] Worse, Daszak was also part of WHO-led international mission[0] to investigate the origins of the pandemic(!!) in early 2021, though he eventually recused himself in June 2021[1] [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00295-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/uk-scientist-centre-pandemic-origins-debate-removed-inquiry/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
    - nradov 5y ago
      Did Facebook ever actually hire Peter Daszak? My understanding is that Facebook censored posts which contradicted his infamous Lancet letter (and that's bad enough) but I haven't seen evidence of Facebook paying him or giving him editorial control. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9655057/Facebook-fact-checkers-cited-Lancet-letter-Wuhan-lab-funder-Peter-Daszak-debunk-lab-leak.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9655057/Facebook-fa...
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-stop-labeling-posts-questioning-covid-19s-1846979092 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-stop-labeling-posts-questi... Arguable whether adding a ‘fake news’ label is censorship.
  - apatters 5y ago
    This is an important distinction. Claiming someone else's statements are false in fact is not censorship. What it is though is confirmation that Facebook is a publisher which publishes editorial opinions about things. (It's incidental that they claim their opinions are facts, publishers have been doing that since the beginning of time.) The only real question is why the government exempts this particular corporation from following the usual rules that publishers have to follow.
    - AvocadoPanic 5y ago
      Look over here and watch me wave my hand while I say 'platform' over and over.
    - EricE 5y ago
      >Claiming someone else's statements are false in fact is not censorship. It's worse - it's poisoning the well, which can be far more effective than outright censorship.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    It is more of a soft censorship.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  They not only censored in individual instances, it was literally part of a written policy of Facebook (that was even public) that asking if Covid was man-made was an illegal thought and to be censored and it got some press coverage when they finally got rid of it: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/facebook-covid-man-made-lab-theory/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/facebook-covid-man-made-la...
- mandmandam 5y ago
  First of all, those warning significantly reduced user interaction. The chilling effect is nothing to write off, when we're talking about hundreds of millions of posts. Second, Facebook has removed, completely memory-holed, twenty million posts relating to Covid "misinformation" without any accountability. I can't find how many of those related to the lab leak theory (a significant fact itself), but I think it's pretty safe to say that many of those 20 million removed posts related to the novel coronavirus lab situated a few miles from the novel coronavirus outbreak. To this day the lab leak theory is seen by many as unscientific or a conspiracy theory, and that's in no small part entirely due to FB and Twitter deciding that they had the right to tag and remove information on a question that was very, very clearly not actually settled by science. [0] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-removes-20m-pieces-of-covid-misinformation-content-1.4650340 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-remo...
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    With main stream organizations stealth editing the past, we almost need new language to describe this or else the argument around ‘that is not censorship!’ instead of the issue at hand. https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994?...
- tomp 5y ago
  The “lab leak” theory, “gain-of-function” and “manufactured virus” theory were deliberately conflated by mainstream media to suppress the former two.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In their defense, most members of the mainstream media are so scientifically ignorant that they probably don't even understand the difference between those theories.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      Perhaps they should have somebody on their team who isn't scientifically ignorant explain things to them before they start spewing crap to millions of people?
      - 8note 5y ago
        As long as advertisers will pay to show up between segments, there's no real incentive to. News exists to make money, and a faster but less accurate story is more profitable
    - EricE 5y ago
      lol - you think the mainstream media cares one whit about reporting facts? I guess you are in the 20% that still trust them?
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    No, it was preventative to hinder people to jump to false conclusions while there cannot be definite certainty about it. I do condemn this lie and believe people had a right to know that it is a possibility. But the condition for that would be that people are able to restrain themselves to not act on suspicions. This was not fully the case. But even with that they should have come clean with their suspicions and adapt them as further evidence surfaced.
SilasX 5y ago
Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation. But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it: BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed". Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.
- mc32 5y ago
  I’m not sure about the prevalence but one major peeve of mine is when someone states, X is ten meters high. Fact check: Wrong, X is 9.6 meters high. It takes away credibility.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    I saw fact checkers going to town to discredit someone not going with the "accepted" narrative. For example they would say: - Wrong, X is 9.999999 high. - Misleading. While X is indeed 10 metres high, the author of the claim measured it from top to bottom instead of generally accepted bottom to top way of measuring. etc.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    One of my favorites, they have since been called out on it and had to fix it: This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0] While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1] What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary? [0]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-us-didnt-have-income-taxes-until-191/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/j... [1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-federal-income-tax-rate-was-0-percen/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/r...
ryandrake 5y ago
I’m really uncomfortable with Fact Checking on the Internet, particularly because we don’t know who we are anointing as the checkers. But I have yet to see a better alternative. The status quo of just giving everyone in the world a megaphone is clearly worse and not working. It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth. At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  > I have yet to see a better alternative. I find the notion of allowing an organization with zero reputation to censor a peer reviewed medical journal that has been continuously published since 1840 to be particularly ridiculous.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > zero reputation That may be a charitable assessment. > censor a peer reviewed medical journal Is Facebook's content moderation actually censorship? Certainly the BMJ is still free to publish whatever it wants, as it always has. What obligation (legal or otherwise) does Facebook have to permit content it doesn't approve of (for whatever reason) to be published on its platform?
- EricE 5y ago
  "But I have yet to see a better alternative." Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see. The downside is that takes work; many people seem content to be spoon fed as to what to believe/not believe or can't be bothered to get informed on their own so I get why some people seem to think the solution is "better" fact checkers - when that will NEVER be a solution since everyone has biases. Especially the people screeching the loudest that they don't - ha! They are the worst of all. If they can't even be honest with themselves why should I expect them to be honest with me? The most valuable service these "fact checkers" provide is plausible deniability for their pet censorship decisions. If you think these fact checkers have your interests at heart - I have a really nice bridge in the desert I'll let go for cheap too!
igorkraw 5y ago
I love how people think fact checking is censorship, but banning nipples and other "not advertiser friendly" content is A-O-K. One thing which annoys me about this is that internet corps have gotten with avoiding the framing of "editorial control". Facebook (and others) would like to pick and choose out of the following 1. We have things like the internet, which are utilities and only exist to convey their users intent. They are regulated (at least in europe strongly, in the US to some degree), and your ISP is simply not liable for what you say using them. Facebook doesn't want this because they don't want the commoditization and regulatory control 2. We have media which has editorial control: you have control on what is published on your platform, you can pick and choose for monetization, but you are liable in the end. Of course none of the big corps want this 3. And then there is the sad attempt of a middle ground carved out by the DMCA and similar laws which try to do something in between, but fail to meaningfully specify the amount of legal liability for non-copyrighted material. Who is responsible for publishing this? The platform isn't AFAIK, they only have to worry about brand impact. Let's clear this up, either put some of the legal responsibilities and liabilities that newspapers and publishers face on the platform and see the problem of fake news vanish as facebook shuts down hard on what they allow on their platform OR classify them as something like a utility and demand openness OR something else, but let's stop the doublethink of "spreading propaganda is okay, but anything that hurts us making money is ok to censor". People might even migrate to new platforms based on their editorial style then
- EricE 5y ago
  Yup - this is the real problem with Section 230. Originally it was intended to shelter ISPs that just carried Internet traffic from being responsible for the contents of that traffic. We've allowed sites, especially the big tech sites, to pervert that into some sort of carte blanche excuse to exert editorial control disguised as moderation. With zero transparency into supposed content moderation decisions and blatantly obvious unequal application of their "rules", anyone who thinks big tech isn't exercising editorial control is either naïve or just blind because the "moderation" happens to align with their personal and political beliefs. Personally I think before you get any of the Section 230 safe harbor provisions you should be required to post your content moderation rules, and for any content moderation document the decision on how you got there - and show how the decision is supported by rules that existed at the time you made the content moderation decision. No more hiding biases behind opaque "content moderation" decisions that are far often flat out censorship of opposing views. Want to be able to exercise editorial control and don't want to play it straight? Then fine - open yourself up to get sued like any other sites that have editorial control.
mint2 5y ago
That is a whitewash of what the early wuhan lab leak proponents were doing. At a time when very little was known about the origins, lab leakers latched on to the hypothesis not due to facts, because there were none, but because they acted as if they could absolve themselves of pandemic measures and our own poor preparation.

jakobnissen 5y ago

Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.

logifail 5y ago
When Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet letter which was published in February 2020 it pretty much shut down any open discussion of origins. "It's of natural origin, or you're a conspiracy theorist". It took the Lancet 16 months(!) to publish a conflict of interest statement revealing that Daszak was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance.
- ErrolMusk 5y ago
  Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' and allowed him to REMOVE anything that suggested the virus came from a lab. As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime. Facebook ENABLED this coverup
  - bipson 5y ago
    > As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime. > Facebook ENABLED this coverup. Wat? How is this not considered a conspiracy theory? 5 comments down an article that discusses fact checking... Hm, maybe my sarcasm-meter is off by a notch again. dunno.
    - cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
      It hasn't been considered a conspiracy theory since the CSPAN video from 2016 surfaced showing him talking about paying someone in China to make killer viruses. It's at the following link, at about the 1 hour 17 minute mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y
  - logifail 5y ago
    > Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' [..] Worse, Daszak was also part of WHO-led international mission[0] to investigate the origins of the pandemic(!!) in early 2021, though he eventually recused himself in June 2021[1] [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00295-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/uk-scientist-centre-pandemic-origins-debate-removed-inquiry/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
  - nradov 5y ago
    Did Facebook ever actually hire Peter Daszak? My understanding is that Facebook censored posts which contradicted his infamous Lancet letter (and that's bad enough) but I haven't seen evidence of Facebook paying him or giving him editorial control. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9655057/Facebook-fact-checkers-cited-Lancet-letter-Wuhan-lab-funder-Peter-Daszak-debunk-lab-leak.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9655057/Facebook-fa...
mensetmanusman 5y ago
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-stop-labeling-posts-questioning-covid-19s-1846979092 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-stop-labeling-posts-questi... Arguable whether adding a ‘fake news’ label is censorship.
- apatters 5y ago
  This is an important distinction. Claiming someone else's statements are false in fact is not censorship. What it is though is confirmation that Facebook is a publisher which publishes editorial opinions about things. (It's incidental that they claim their opinions are facts, publishers have been doing that since the beginning of time.) The only real question is why the government exempts this particular corporation from following the usual rules that publishers have to follow.
  - AvocadoPanic 5y ago
    Look over here and watch me wave my hand while I say 'platform' over and over.
  - EricE 5y ago
    >Claiming someone else's statements are false in fact is not censorship. It's worse - it's poisoning the well, which can be far more effective than outright censorship.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  It is more of a soft censorship.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
They not only censored in individual instances, it was literally part of a written policy of Facebook (that was even public) that asking if Covid was man-made was an illegal thought and to be censored and it got some press coverage when they finally got rid of it: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/facebook-covid-man-made-lab-theory/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/facebook-covid-man-made-la...
mandmandam 5y ago
First of all, those warning significantly reduced user interaction. The chilling effect is nothing to write off, when we're talking about hundreds of millions of posts. Second, Facebook has removed, completely memory-holed, twenty million posts relating to Covid "misinformation" without any accountability. I can't find how many of those related to the lab leak theory (a significant fact itself), but I think it's pretty safe to say that many of those 20 million removed posts related to the novel coronavirus lab situated a few miles from the novel coronavirus outbreak. To this day the lab leak theory is seen by many as unscientific or a conspiracy theory, and that's in no small part entirely due to FB and Twitter deciding that they had the right to tag and remove information on a question that was very, very clearly not actually settled by science. [0] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-removes-20m-pieces-of-covid-misinformation-content-1.4650340 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-remo...
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  With main stream organizations stealth editing the past, we almost need new language to describe this or else the argument around ‘that is not censorship!’ instead of the issue at hand. https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994?...
tomp 5y ago
The “lab leak” theory, “gain-of-function” and “manufactured virus” theory were deliberately conflated by mainstream media to suppress the former two.
- nradov 5y ago
  In their defense, most members of the mainstream media are so scientifically ignorant that they probably don't even understand the difference between those theories.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Perhaps they should have somebody on their team who isn't scientifically ignorant explain things to them before they start spewing crap to millions of people?
    - 8note 5y ago
      As long as advertisers will pay to show up between segments, there's no real incentive to. News exists to make money, and a faster but less accurate story is more profitable
  - EricE 5y ago
    lol - you think the mainstream media cares one whit about reporting facts? I guess you are in the 20% that still trust them?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  No, it was preventative to hinder people to jump to false conclusions while there cannot be definite certainty about it. I do condemn this lie and believe people had a right to know that it is a possibility. But the condition for that would be that people are able to restrain themselves to not act on suspicions. This was not fully the case. But even with that they should have come clean with their suspicions and adapt them as further evidence surfaced.

SilasX 5y ago

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation. But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it: BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed". Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.

mc32 5y ago
I’m not sure about the prevalence but one major peeve of mine is when someone states, X is ten meters high. Fact check: Wrong, X is 9.6 meters high. It takes away credibility.
- varispeed 5y ago
  I saw fact checkers going to town to discredit someone not going with the "accepted" narrative. For example they would say: - Wrong, X is 9.999999 high. - Misleading. While X is indeed 10 metres high, the author of the claim measured it from top to bottom instead of generally accepted bottom to top way of measuring. etc.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  One of my favorites, they have since been called out on it and had to fix it: This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0] While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1] What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary? [0]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-us-didnt-have-income-taxes-until-191/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/j... [1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-federal-income-tax-rate-was-0-percen/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/r...

ryandrake 5y ago

I’m really uncomfortable with Fact Checking on the Internet, particularly because we don’t know who we are anointing as the checkers. But I have yet to see a better alternative. The status quo of just giving everyone in the world a megaphone is clearly worse and not working. It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth. At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.

GeekyBear 5y ago
> I have yet to see a better alternative. I find the notion of allowing an organization with zero reputation to censor a peer reviewed medical journal that has been continuously published since 1840 to be particularly ridiculous.
- musicale 5y ago
  > zero reputation That may be a charitable assessment. > censor a peer reviewed medical journal Is Facebook's content moderation actually censorship? Certainly the BMJ is still free to publish whatever it wants, as it always has. What obligation (legal or otherwise) does Facebook have to permit content it doesn't approve of (for whatever reason) to be published on its platform?
EricE 5y ago
"But I have yet to see a better alternative." Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see. The downside is that takes work; many people seem content to be spoon fed as to what to believe/not believe or can't be bothered to get informed on their own so I get why some people seem to think the solution is "better" fact checkers - when that will NEVER be a solution since everyone has biases. Especially the people screeching the loudest that they don't - ha! They are the worst of all. If they can't even be honest with themselves why should I expect them to be honest with me? The most valuable service these "fact checkers" provide is plausible deniability for their pet censorship decisions. If you think these fact checkers have your interests at heart - I have a really nice bridge in the desert I'll let go for cheap too!

igorkraw 5y ago

I love how people think fact checking is censorship, but banning nipples and other "not advertiser friendly" content is A-O-K. One thing which annoys me about this is that internet corps have gotten with avoiding the framing of "editorial control". Facebook (and others) would like to pick and choose out of the following 1. We have things like the internet, which are utilities and only exist to convey their users intent. They are regulated (at least in europe strongly, in the US to some degree), and your ISP is simply not liable for what you say using them. Facebook doesn't want this because they don't want the commoditization and regulatory control 2. We have media which has editorial control: you have control on what is published on your platform, you can pick and choose for monetization, but you are liable in the end. Of course none of the big corps want this 3. And then there is the sad attempt of a middle ground carved out by the DMCA and similar laws which try to do something in between, but fail to meaningfully specify the amount of legal liability for non-copyrighted material. Who is responsible for publishing this? The platform isn't AFAIK, they only have to worry about brand impact. Let's clear this up, either put some of the legal responsibilities and liabilities that newspapers and publishers face on the platform and see the problem of fake news vanish as facebook shuts down hard on what they allow on their platform OR classify them as something like a utility and demand openness OR something else, but let's stop the doublethink of "spreading propaganda is okay, but anything that hurts us making money is ok to censor". People might even migrate to new platforms based on their editorial style then

EricE 5y ago
Yup - this is the real problem with Section 230. Originally it was intended to shelter ISPs that just carried Internet traffic from being responsible for the contents of that traffic. We've allowed sites, especially the big tech sites, to pervert that into some sort of carte blanche excuse to exert editorial control disguised as moderation. With zero transparency into supposed content moderation decisions and blatantly obvious unequal application of their "rules", anyone who thinks big tech isn't exercising editorial control is either naïve or just blind because the "moderation" happens to align with their personal and political beliefs. Personally I think before you get any of the Section 230 safe harbor provisions you should be required to post your content moderation rules, and for any content moderation document the decision on how you got there - and show how the decision is supported by rules that existed at the time you made the content moderation decision. No more hiding biases behind opaque "content moderation" decisions that are far often flat out censorship of opposing views. Want to be able to exercise editorial control and don't want to play it straight? Then fine - open yourself up to get sued like any other sites that have editorial control.

mint2 5y ago

That is a whitewash of what the early wuhan lab leak proponents were doing. At a time when very little was known about the origins, lab leakers latched on to the hypothesis not due to facts, because there were none, but because they acted as if they could absolve themselves of pandemic measures and our own poor preparation.