Item — HN Reader

These kind of articles concern me.

Not because what they expose, but what they incite.

I am very concerned that instead of strengthening legal path for defamation, politicians will take the easy (and favored) path of government control of speech.

Do not misunderstand, I am not even remotely suggesting that somehow we need to protect such behavior. What I am suggesting is that the laymen will demand blood, and the easiest and most vocal way to do it is government, or agents of the government (in this case large internet content controlling organizations) will restrict speech. That is already fraught with political vengeance and revenge.

Find the culprits. Prosecute & punish. Force large internet content companies to scrub.

We can demand to force sites to pop up about cookies. Certainly we can demand that with a single quick request "to be forgotten".

(Mark my words - if this gets legs, it will be the speech control, and the control will be handed to companies or quasi-government agencies, made of companies.)

What _should_ happen is that people should not believe allegations that have no evidence.

Censorship and defamation law are just patches that we're desperately trying to use to make up for the sad fact that critical thinking was never strong in humans at seemingly any point in known history.

Yes, it’s a wonder these idiotic apes somehow created the modern world...

We are wired to live in groups of a couple hundred individuals, at most. We can “default to truth” in that setting because all of our interactions are repeated indefinitely over time, and the stable solution to such an iterated prisoners dilemma is to be honest because cheating will be swiftly punished.

Mass media, and especially the Internet, breaks all of our social brain circuitry, and that is not a trivial problem to address.

Whoa! That is very succinctly stating something that I have been trying to express.

Would you happen to have some research reference on this?