Item — HN Reader

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?

Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.

Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.

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This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories.

You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.

So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online?

And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.

First, I don't think governments should be banning the speech across the entire internet. But companies with large social platforms can and probably should do so in certain situations, such as a pandemic when conspiracy theories are being spread which make controlling the pandemic more difficult, and can lead to more deaths.

As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.

For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.

Where do you currently draw the line? I'm sure you're pro-censorship for at least some stuff. Direct imminent threats? Child porn? Anything?