Reading through these HN comments, it is amazing to me how many people have already concluded the NY Post story is either obviously true or false.
But I agree with the gist of your point. Social media platforms should stop pretending to be unbiased disinformation watchmen. It's their platform and they don't have to justify squat. If people want free speech, they can go somewhere else.
On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.
The contradictory statements by the so-called shop owner, who provided the emails, and the past behavior of Guiliani all points towards it very likely being false. And them holding this information until 3 weeks before the election points, after having it for over a year, further points it to being false informations.
And the nail in the coffin is the simple fact that they decided to release a PDF-image of the emails instead of simply giving the raw email with its metadata which would allow us to instantaneously confirm it. Literally all they have to do is post the metadata.
> And them holding this information until 3 weeks before the election points, after having it for over a year, further points it to being false informations.
While I'm not arguing whether the allegations are true or not, I don't think timing your most valuable opposition research findings makes things automatically false.
And in my opinion, these huge platforms that are basically monopolies should not be censoring things based on whether they think something is true or false. It's tempting to believe that every issue is either clearly true or clearly false, in most fields that is not the case and I don't want @jack deciding what's "safe" for me to see.
The go somewhere else thing doesnt end well. If half the country has to recreate their own social networks, web hosting, payment processing, banking, and even retail locations you end up with two separate societies competing for the same physical space and thats not going to end well for anyone. This is the very thing we should be trying the hardest to avoid but we are already moving down this road.
Half the country isn't going to out looking for conspiracy theory garbage. They just want to see pictures of their grandkids. But if you expose them to the conspiracies they can get drawn in.
> On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.
I think they could be the future, but any social media platform is only as strong as its underlying social graph. A flawless platform which checks every box will still fail unless you can convince a significant amount of users to join. Or, more to the point, a certain amount of graph edges need to be formed.
How do you do that? That’s the question floating over the graves of dozens of Facebook clones.
Sure, but all we have to do is wait. Once a distributed platform finally takes off, I doubt we'll ever go back to centralized ones. I don't know how long it will take or how many platforms will rise and fall in the mean time, but it's just a matter of time.
But I agree with the gist of your point. Social media platforms should stop pretending to be unbiased disinformation watchmen. It's their platform and they don't have to justify squat. If people want free speech, they can go somewhere else.
On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.