What really bugs me here is, everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc.
Then, fact checking is attempted, and people claim censorship, an imperfect job, and the idea that "How dare they!"
I literally loath, hate, and despise facebook. But come on, they're only doing this because everyone piled on them, claiming they must fact check and validate things.
If I was facebook, twitter, or google seeking this, I'd rightly think that listening to people is dumb, and they should just ignore them.
They should indeed just ignore them, free speech wasn't arrived at as an optimal path by accident. Nothing changed to make it not-optimal.
People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things. The information streams of the world should not be tailored to the critical thinking ability of complete morons.
It blows my mind we went from "trying to censor cop killer is a bridge too far no matter the merits of doing so" to "you can't say things that compromise the interests of powerful individuals, offend the chronically sheltered, or that might confuse the braindead under any circumstances" just in my lifetime. Free speech seemed absolutely unassailable in my youth and has been completely destroyed relative to that in present day.
> People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things.
Sure, free speech is optimal if this happens. But what if it doesn't happen? People are extremely irrational [0], and that certainly won't change anytime soon. What changed is that we got better at exploiting that irrationality at scale.
There's no practical value in stating "in an ideal world, free speech is the solution". We don't live in that world, and we don't get any closer to it by complaining on HN about people not doing enough critical thinking.
This assumes there are no negative externalities to the curtailing of free speech, which is laughably untrue. People now are no less rational than they have been the past few centuries when free speech was allowed to prosper unmolested. And they are no less grasping and unscrupulous when it comes to the reasons unbridled free speech was held up as an exemplar to begin with. The fact that the result of all this censorship and narrative massaging has indisputably been the pushing of harmful agendas is illustrative of the above.
No one is saying "in an ideal world" that's a strawman.
Fact checkers, corporations, the media, the state, and any of the elite are just people and so extremely irrational, Why on earth would you want to give any of them power above and beyond the general public, it's so easy to manipulate the so called "rational" with selective publication of information. Do we just forget that covid human to human spreading was "fake news" for an entire month, and basically changed the course of history because some bureaucracy decided it had more authority on the matter than a doctor treating the patients.
Or what about the "Ricard Spencer is a nice guy in Germany" effect, because people in Europe can't see the hate speech he makes, so they think he's fairly reasonable person.
To me it seems that it's the general public, from Snowden to Li Wenliang that is keeping fake news in check, not the elite, keeping the public in check.
I think a few broad trends reinforced each other in the U.S. But kind of prerequisite, people came to get too much of their notion of free speech as a scholastic doctrine in state schools. Mills's On Liberty argues that a doctrine elevated above criticism comes to be held in an empty way, and gets lost over time even if it's true. It seems like that happened here to the idea of free speech itself.
(I'd quibble at your "completely destroyed". We don't want to see what completely destroyed will look like.)
> everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc.
Well, no, not everyone - the half of the people that wanted to silence the other half accused facebook of spreading propaganda to justify censorship. Now that they've won, the half that's being censored are pointing out that it's as bad as they said it was going to be.
I think one could conceivably both criticize FB for enabling the spread of false info and for their censorship via fact-checking.
The argument would be that FB optimizes sharing false info, and the proper fix is to either get rid of it completely, or fundamentally change it. Not tack on some "fact checking".
Perhaps these walled gardens erected walls because they wanted to become gatekeepers. Those demanding censorship were largely the same partisans who set the tone for the fact check narrative.
I don't see them as victims of demands for truthiness, but as actors participating in a deliberate charade.
Then, fact checking is attempted, and people claim censorship, an imperfect job, and the idea that "How dare they!"
I literally loath, hate, and despise facebook. But come on, they're only doing this because everyone piled on them, claiming they must fact check and validate things.
If I was facebook, twitter, or google seeking this, I'd rightly think that listening to people is dumb, and they should just ignore them.